Industry looks for better TV audience measurement

Advertisers are constantly looking for better ways to reach their specific target audiences. With today’s technology and web outlets, there are numerous niche magazines and TV channels which help advertisers target a specific group of people. Along with this idea comes smaller more concentrated audiences. This can have a great effect when companies pay TV networks for a measured number of people who watch a particular program. This is why more time has been devoted to providing a more detailed picture of the average viewer.

Deals between ad agencies, media buyers, TV networks and cable operators are geared toward collecting data on audience behavior. Companies want a strong grasp on how potential viewers of commercials watch TV. “It’s moving beyond the pure impression,” said Michael Kelley, of PricewaterhouseCoopers. This new idea wants to capture what the audience is doing second-by-second, whether they are actually engaging in the ads, and what makes consumers stick to one program. This week, CBS signed on with TiVo to use this new second-by-second technology of TV ratings. Also, TNS Media Research and DirecTV unleashed the formation of a panel of 100,000 satellite carrier subscribers whose viewing patterns will be measured in the same way.

This whole idea is to help advertisers better target their audiences. They will be able to create ads that will be more relevant to their audience’s lives. As technology continues to advance and consumers start to have the ability to interact more and more with their TVs, creating new strategies like this becomes necessary. This second-by-second data provides much more detail about viewer behavior than Nielsen’s average minute-by-minute data.
Tracey Scheppach, video innovations director at Starcom, said that this new technology is “more accountable and it should morph what we use as a currency because it is unacceptable to use a 14,000 sample (as the Nielsen Television Index does) to tell us how to spend $70 billion” on TV ads.