Dueling Ratings Firms Good For Stations

TV stations stand to benefit from the competition that has suddenly erupted between the two hard-charging research companies that are battling to bring 21st century electronic audience measurement to even the smallest television markets, research and media executives said at the TVB Forward conference Thursday in New York.

The competition between Nielsen and ComScore was brought into sharp relief at the conference as executives from both companies traded barbs in a panel session moderated by David Poltrack, chief research officer for CBS.

“The lack of consistent measurement does hurt the local marketplace and will [hurt it] until it is corrected,” said the one panelist not representing a research company, Lyle Schwartz, managing partner and director of implementation research and marketplace analysis for Group M.

The two research companies are working on that, said their representatives on the panel, Bill Livek, executive vice chairman and president of ComScore, and Jeff Wender, managing director of local media for Nielsen.

Both research companies have identified local TV measurement as a growth area ripe with opportunity. “Eight years ago, we did look at that disparity [between the accuracy of national and local measurement] and we think we took the right road of addressing local first,” Livek said.  

“The biggest unmet need was the under-measurement in all 210 markets from New York City all the way down to the smallest local market,” he said. “The biggest challenge, and we think the biggest opportunity, is with you all in the room, local stations.”

For its part, Nielsen has adopted some methods and technologies that bear similarities to those being used by ComScore, as part of Nielsen’s effort to eliminate paper diaries as the basis for measurement in smaller markets. Both companies are applying so-called “return path data” — viewing information that can be obtained from set-top boxes already installed in homes by MVPDs and satellite TV companies — to measuring local TV viewership.

Apparently, Livek thinks Nielsen got the return-path data idea from ComScore. “You know, it’s funny,” he said, addressing Wenders sitting two chairs away. “Roger Enrico, the late, great CEO of Pepsi, wrote a book, The Other Guy Blinked, and it was about Coke changing the formula to be more like Pepsi. And we appreciate that you blinked, that you’re adopting methods that we have invented over the last eight years. We’re excited about that.”

Wender said Nielsen has been working on these data-collection methods for more than seven years. “It’s not necessarily ‘follow the leader’ by any stretch of the imagination,” Wender said. “We appreciate your hard work,” he added.

“And we appreciate that you’re riding along with it,” Livek shot back.

To both Poltrack and Schwartz, the competition between the two companies is good for the industry. “What you see here is what this industry needs, which is competition,” Schwartz said.

Poltrack concluded the session with remarks on that same subject. “I will leave you with a word that I believe will be welcomed by our panelists,” he told the conference audience. “You now have two companies up here that are expanding and investing a lot of money in measuring the medium more effectively. We’ve never enjoyed that before. We have two really strong companies, as you can see, and we have clients that need that information to help them sell our product.

“So the message I have for you is: Research and measurement is not a place where you should be looking to save money. It’s a place where you should be looking to invest money because we have the best product. Let’s support it and not let Facebook and Google outmaneuver us with tons of meaningless statistics.”

See all of TVNewsCheck’s TVB forward coverage here.