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Nielsen’s C3 ratings, which will be used as currency during the upfront (taking place as we speak) for the second year in a row, have failed to achieve accreditation from the Media Rating Council.
The reasons for the lack of accreditation have not been disclosed; Nielsen reportedly plans to approach the MRC with a plan for addressing the problems raised by the MRC’s audit of the ratings, according to MediaPost.
Once Nielsen manages to prove to the MRC the validity of its TV commercial data, it must then go through a separate audit - one which will look at the steps Nielsen uses to process the TV commercial data with its TV audience estimates in order to turn them into C3 ratings.
Executives familiar with the process say it is unlikely the new ratings system will be accredited by the start of the new TV season next fall.
The C3 ratings are a combination of average commercial minute ratings for the live broadcast of a program, plus three days of playback via DVRs. They became the currency during last year’s upfront.
Media buyers point out that it is not MRC accreditation that makes ratings advertising currency but simply an agreement between buyers and sellers to use them as a basis for their deals.
“Does it matter that the MRC hasn’t accredited it? No,” one buyer is quoted as saying. “There are lots of tools people use that are not accredited by the MRC. The MRC is just there to kind of bring pressure to bear on Nielsen to get it right, to get it better, to have it be the best research it can be.”
C3 ratings are considered by some as a stopgap measure, while the industry moves toward exact commercial minute ratings (C3 is an average rather than exact number) or second-by-second data. Groups like TNS Research, Google and TiVo all provide second-by-second TV audience estimates, and Publicis’s Starcom group plans to use TNS’s set-top data ratings as the currency for buying advertising time on networks not rated by Nielsen.
Steve Sternberg, a researcher for Magna Global, has publicly called for Nielsen to offer “pod” ratings - or ratings of each commercial pod within a show - by the 2009-10 television season.
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