Commercial Ratings Loom as New Upfront Currency

Shaw

The television networks seemed primed to move from using program ratings to using commercial ratings as the currency for selling ad space beginning in the fall. Nielsen Media Research will begin offering syndicated data on commercial ratings to the industry at the beginning of the new TV season, and it is likely that the commercial ratings will be the currency media buyers use when making their upfront decisions next May, Adweek writes.

ABC’s sales president Mike Shaw says he is ready to begin selling based on commercial ratings immediately. “We can sell show by show, daypart by daypart, whatever the client wants,” he is quoted as saying. Shaw believes the commercial ratings will end the debate over which program rating - live, live plus same day, live plus seven day - is the best and most fair way to measure audiences. The debate stalled this season’s upfront market as buyers and sellers argued over whether live plus seven day ratings should be used during negotiations.

The commercial ratings are based on the average calculated on the basis of every ad break that runs during a specific show, writes AdAge. In other words, marketers won’t be paying for who actually watches their own commercials but for who watches commercials in general, at a specific time.

NBC remains more hesitant than ABC, saying the network would welcome meetings about the new ratings come the fall, and that hopefully the “industry can come to an agreement in the winter.”

Chris Thilk at AdJab writes that he doesn’t believe the new ratings system will be all that helpful for media buyers. Looking at commercial ratings will only tell advertisers that “someone else’s ad didn’t do very well in a particular time slot.” The ratings only become useful, he writes, if the entire commercial buying model is reversed and “agencies pay based on how their ad performed according to the Nielsen numbers,” kind of like the way Google AdWords works.