Last week the NY Times reported in its Media Decoder blog that Nielsen is rejiggering the way it tabulates ratings to include Internet connected TVs. Of course media executives are in favor of any upwards pointing tweak to the algorithm, but how much closer to reality is this making the ever dubious ratings game?
I think not much. Nielsen still isn’t counting laptops, tablets, and phones. Just big, old flat screen TVs.
The new definition “will include those households who are receiving broadband Internet and putting it onto a television set,” said Pat McDonough, the senior vice president for insights and analysis at Nielsen. Currently a “television set” is the flat-screen kind…
…just 0.6 percent of households in the United States meet the new description.
It’s a start, but for how long are advertisers going to care about the aggregate? If everyone isn’t seeing the same ads, what good is the data? And don’t we already have good numbers on ads that reach viewers via IP?
To an advertiser a ratings point equals 1.1 million or so households viewing its ad. Advertisers don’t really care about who viewing the surrounding content. In the age of the DVR, VOD, and TV over IP, that’s not just semantics. The discrepancy between eyes on the content and eyes on the ad can be significant.
According to Wikipedia, the number of homes with televisions dropped by 500,000 form the previous year. A cynic might argue that a mere 0.6% upwards adjustment was concocted to maintain the value of a rating point, not the value of the data. It’s time for a fundamental overhaul of the ratings system. Television might be the first case in the modern media era where the IP-delivered ad has greater value than the traditionally delivered ad due to targeting and mandatory viewing through technologies like fast forward disabling in VOD.