Licking their wounds over advertising agencies saying they wouldn't pay for DVR watching, and with a drop in ad revenue for the quarter, CBS Corp. (CBS-A) CEO Leslie Moonves stated that next year it would be different.
What he's referring to is that Nielsen Media Research will have a new commercial ratings system in place to measure who is specifically watching the ads. With this in place, media companies are going to push to include it in the ratings mix.
This year the agencies said that with the time delay connected to DVRs and the ability to fast forward through their ad clips, made the commercials irrelevant.
CBS is especially pushing this inclusion as their ad sales for the quarter dropped by a huge $30 million.
"In terms of DVRs, we think it is inevitable that they're going to have to start counting DVR usage as part of ratings, and I think everybody in the world - even the advertising community - is acknowledging that this year they were able to exclude it," Moonves told analysts on a conference call. "But next year there is no way that's going to happen. So once again, we think as technology advances, as Nielsen advances, as recording advances, the strong broadcast networks are going to be even stronger."
With net profits dropping by more than half from last year's third quarter, CBS is looking for anything to get them back up. I've talked about this before at the bizofshowbiz that big media companies are on the ropes. They are looking for temporary fixes until they can figure out what to do. That's what the bottom line of all of this is about. Change the focus away from their failures and blame it on something else. That can only work for so long.
For the 3rd quarter, CBS had net profits of $317 million, dropping from $708.5 million they made last year. Revenue also dropped from $3.378 billion to $3.372 billion in comparison to last years third quarter.
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