Landmines and a Land-Office Business
By Tom Steinert Threlkeld, Editor In Chief -- Multichannel News, 4/15/2007 8:00:00 PM
A landmine or two is being placed in the battlefield over gauging the viewership of ads.
A couple of weeks ago, EchoStar Communications and Google confirmed they are creating an automated system for buying, selling and measuring the impact of television ads that run on its Dish Network.
Then last week, DirecTV was said to be in talks with Google as well, about the sale of television advertising.
This could portend the hastening of the end of the conventional ratings survey and the start, at last, of real — and real-time — measurement of who’s watching what on TV.
Particularly ads.
The two direct-broadcast satellite giants have been digital from the get-go. Every set-top box they put into households across the country is a digital box.
Those boxes can capture every click of a remote control. What time. What channel. What function.
Now, in 28 million households.
Which means, with the right math, you can figure pretty much who’s watching what at any time.
By contrast, the “gold standard” of viewing data is Nielsen Media Research’s system of People Meters. Based on boxes that record viewership in 10,000 homes, Nielsen projects the habits of the entire populace.
In a country of 300 million, that is an amusingly low number. Particularly when it’s not particularly challenging to collect data not from just 10,000 boxes, but from, say, 28 million.
Just work deals with two big satellite operators and you have the makings of a system with more breadth and depth than what Nielsen offers today.
Granted, Nielsen has more experience and expertise in gauging how media gets consumed than any other outfit.
And, in fact, Nielsen is experimenting with set-top box data. It has three tests going, two with cable operators and one with a satellite operator. The largest involves 400,000 boxes.
That in itself promises far better and accurate data than Nielsen’s national People Meter work.
Nielsen’s Jed Meyer, who is in charge of its DigitalPlus program of employing set-top data, says information gathered from remote-control clicks has to be tied back to the national survey to be useful.
Users of digital set-tops, he said, are not representative of the entire population — just a subset. Less than half of American households.
Plus there are tracking problems. When Meyer’s 4-year-old daughter turns on the TV to watch Dora the Explorer on Nickelodeon, she leaves the channel on all day. But there’s no way, Meyer said, of telling whether anyone’s watching.
Similarly, collating data from set-top boxes is difficult. One cable-system operator may keep track of viewership for the first episode of The Sopranos as “Season 9, Episode 1.” Another operator may use “Season 9-1.” Another may use the title of the episode. Another may do the same — and spell it wrong. All that has to be sifted through and aggregated. Automation, Meyer suggests, is not enough.
But Google probably doesn’t buy that. These are the guys who have built a land-office business — $3.0 billion of after-tax profit on revenue of $10.6 billion — in less than a decade on tracking Internet users’ mouse clicks and pushing ads at them. They live and die by the algorithm.
And most of these problems can be solved by math. Someone leave on Nickelodeon for 9.5 hours? Use the rest of the data — from millions of boxes — to determine when people who are inclined to actually use their remotes to turn off TVs do so. Eliminate any overage.
That’s how ErinMedia worked the problem. The Bradenton, Fla., outfit tried to use set-top data to compete with Nielsen. It had to fold up its tent when Nielsen announced DigitalPlus and its financial backers got skittish. Today, it’s spending millions to try and break what it considers a ratings monopoly in court.
In the end, though, ErinMedia isn’t so worried about reporting ratings to cable or satellite operators. Ratings are about the viewing of programs. What chairman Frank Maggio really wanted (and still wants) to do was to track viewership of ads.
Cable and satellite operators keep precise logs of ads that run, he notes. And set-tops can keep precise track of whether any given ad is being watched, sped through or clicked out of.
If so, it wouldn’t be surprising if the Google folks figure that out pretty soon. They can evaluate ErinMedia’s math and see whether it’s really up to snuff and buy it.
Or it can roll its own. And do a pair of deals with EchoStar and DirecTV.
And change the field of play for all distributors — and advertisers — who figure there’s a lot more precise information to be reaped from tens of millions of households, than just 10,000.
Dish Network Adds 2 More HD Markets
08/18/2009TNS To Pull Cable Set-Top Data Through Rovi
08/12/2009Cover Story: Thinking Inside the Box
06/14/2009SHVERA Clears First Hurdle
07/06/2009New Ratings Era May Be Out of the Box
05/05/2007
Featured Company
-
Digital Rapids
Digital Rapids is the leading provider of professional hardware and software tools, technology and expertise for bringing video to wider audiences and new viewing platforms. Continuing to set new standards in quality, productivity and versatility, our solutions span the critical ..more
VIEW ALL GALLERIES
