Carat Publicly Endorses C3; Accreditation Delayed until Jan.

Media agency Carat today issued an official paper explaining why the C3 ratings are the best ratings currently available for use as currency in TV buying and selling. At the same time, it has come to light that an industry audit of Nielsen’s commercial minute ratings will not be completed until January - five months after the audit was expected to be completed.

Carat’s senior vp and director of programming Shari Anne Brill wrote in the position paper that, while Nielsen’s C3 ratings are not pure commercial ratings - because they are an average of all commercial minutes within a show and because they contain some seconds of program ratings mixed in - they are currently the best option available, writes Mediaweek.

The metric gives the TV networks credit for both live and time-shifted viewing, something which the networks were fighting for, yet it also “holds the networks accountable for prior malfeasance in formatting commercials, particularly outside of network prime time,” she wrote. She pointed to the Late Show with David Letterman and Jimmy Kimmel Live as two shows that were guilty of commercial placement no-nos that hindered optimum viewing of the commercials.

Meanwhile, at a TV industry research meeting at the Advertising Research Foundation’s offices in New York on Thursday, a representative of the Media Rating Council said that audits of the TV ratings and commercial monitoring data that Nielsen is using to come up with the C3 ratings will not be completed until the new year, writes MediaPost. The MRC said the postponement was due to delays caused by Nielsen.

During the same meeting, several cable network executives said that they routinely find errors in Nielsen’s logs. One third-party processor of Nielsen’s data which services the cable TV industry said that 30 percent of the data files his firm receives from Nielsen is ratings data that has been corrected.