Media-Ad Consortium Launches Nielsen Rival
Top media and advertising executives announce new cross-industry measurement effort
By Claire Atkinson -- Broadcasting & Cable, 9/10/2009 9:30:32 AM
A veritable crème de la crème of executives from across the media industry, advertising agencies and the most influential advertisers in the TV market announced Sept. 10 the formation of a consortium called the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement.
CIMM is aimed at seeking out new ways of measuring audiences across traditional and emerging media. The formation of the group is widely seen as an attempt to either bypass Nielsen or to push it towards more speedy progress in the realm of online video and mobile measurement data collection.
According to a statement issued Thursday by NBC Universal, the 14 founding members include:
- Jeff Bewkes, Chairman and CEO, Time Warner
- George Bodenheimer, President of ESPN and ABC Sports, and Co-Chair, Disney Media Networks
- Nick Brien, President & CEO, Interpublic Group's Mediabrands
- Chase Carey, Deputy Chairman, President and COO, News Corporation
- Philippe Dauman, President and Chief Executive Officer, Viacom
- Laura Desmond, CEO, Starcom MediaVest Group Worldwide
- Dina Howell, Vice President, Global Media & Brand Operations, The Procter & Gamble Company
- Laura Klauberg, Senior Vice President, Global Media, Unilever
- Esther Lee, Senior Vice President, Brand Marketing and Advertising, AT&T
- Sir Martin Sorrell, Group Chief Executive, WPP, holding company for GroupM
- Anne Sweeney, President, Disney-ABC Television Group and co-chair, Disney Media Networks
- Nancy Tellem, President, CBS Paramount Network Television Entertainment Group
- Page Thompson, CEO, North America, Omnicom Media Group
- David M. Zaslav, President and CEO, Discovery Communications
- Jeff Zucker, President and CEO, NBC Universal
That so many senior level executives, rather than their research counterparts, have put their name to this effort goes some way to showing how serious the industry is about forming a new vision on how to count and charge for audiences watching TV shows on new platforms. The group intends to hire a managing director to pull that vision together.
The press statement reads: "The group will initiate, fund and evaluate a series of pilot studies with independent measurement companies focusing on two key areas: the current and future potential of television measurement through set-top-box data, and new methods for cross-platform media measurement. CIMM will publish all research findings to its members and make them publicly available as well."
The news is likely to thrill companies which have an eye on monetizing set-top-box data and the myriad research outfits looking to crunch or merge it with other data sets. Whether it spells the beginning of the end of Nielsen's weighted national TV panel is hard to say at this stage since virtually the entire $70 billion TV advertising business is built around Nielsen produced C3 commercial ratings currency.
The formation of the consortium coincides with another cross-industry call to action dubbed "TV Everywhere," which aims to rally the industry toward new methods of making their content available online. TV Everywhere, touted by Jeff Bewkes at Time Warner, aims to institute a core set of principles for participants to avoid the fate of cable's video on-demand platform, wherein so many different technical standards are in force that advertisers are put off by the difficulty of running campaigns. The key principle, of course, is authenticating or identifying consumers who already subscribe to pay-TV platforms.
Nielsen has not yet officially responded to news of the group, but since reports emerged about the consortium a few weeks ago, it has been steadily highlighting its efforts on three-screen media measurement. The company said Sept. 9 that viewers who watch shows online can be counted to overall TV ratings but that full implementation of the system to track online services won't be available until early 2011.
Sara Erichson, president of Nielsen's Media Client Services for North America, in a Sept. 8 letter to clients, wrote that such authentication services "could provide the best way for video content providers to monetize TV programs online" and that online audiences viewing these programs could be included in Nielsen's TV ratings.
"Given that more than $70 billion of television advertising is bought and sold using Nielsen ratings, we are careful not to take any actions that would dilute the reliability of the core television ratings data," Erichson wrote. "Consequently, we are undertaking an extensive evaluation program before fully integrating television and Internet measurement."
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