How to value ratings with DVR delay?
Would the opening greeting on "Saturday Night Live" sound as compelling if it began "Live plus 24 hours from New York" or "Live plus seven days from New York"?
That is the multibillion-dollar question being asked on Madison Avenue as agencies and advertisers consider the implications of new data from Nielsen Media Research on television viewing in households with TiVos and other types of digital video recorders.
Late in December, Nielsen, part of VNU, started distributing its ratings information in three versions: live, the traditional way television is watched; live plus 24 hours, counting how many people who own DVR's played back shows within a day of recording them; and live plus seven days, counting playback within a week of recording.
For some prime-time series, like the hit drama "Grey's Anatomy" on ABC, the so-called live-plus ratings show slight but noticeable gains compared with the live-only viewership. But it is estimated that 50 percent to 70 percent of viewers playing back shows zip through the commercials, casting doubt on their worth to advertisers.
Nielsen's adoption of the new methodology was spurred by the growing use of digital video recorders, which are already estimated to be in 7 percent of the nation's 110.2 million TV households. DVR's are among the technologies that are starting to remake the way people watch television, along with video iPods, video-on-demand and broadband connections for personal computers.
"This is all coming at us fairly quickly," said David F. Poltrack, chief research officer at the CBS Corporation in New York and president of its new research unit, CBS Vision, "so measurement of these new devices has to come fairly quickly."
CBS and the other big broadcasters have welcomed the ability to find out how many people are using digital video recorders to shift the time they view programs. By contrast, Nielsen has been unable to provide reliable ratings data to measure the playback of programs that were taped on videocassette recorders.
"For 20-something years, the metric has been live and VCR viewing, but the DVR allows for the measurement of playback that the VCR never did," said Michael Shaw, president for sales at the ABC Television Network in New York, part of the Walt Disney Company.
'Anatomy' of a statistic
Shaw cited a statistic from Nielsen about the Jan. 15 episode of "Grey's Anatomy." The episode drew a rating of 8.5 among 18-to-49-year-old viewers who watched it live, he said, which means that 8.5 percent of television households in that group saw the episode as it was broadcast. When the data was expanded to include live plus seven days, Shaw said, the rating rose to 8.7.
To be sure, that was no huge gain. But when the media landscape is fragmenting as never before, with broadcasters losing viewers to cable TV, the Internet and video games, every tenth of a ratings point — and the advertising revenue it potentially represents — matters.
"You can't fault them for selling everyone their programs reach," said Bill McOwen, executive vice president and managing director at MPG in New York, a media agency that is part of Havas.
And research, he said, "shows there is a very desirable type of person who is prone to this technology — the younger, more affluent individual" who is particularly coveted by networks and marketers...
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