[Josh] Nielsen announced today that it will not enter into a joint venture with Aribitron around TV measurement with Portable People Meters. (Nielsen had an option to do so, and has declined that option.)
What's a Portable People Meter (PPM)? It's a passive media measurement device. Members of a panel carry it around, and it measures every bit of audio they are exposed to -- radio, television, even music in retail stores. It can report on time shifted audio, too. As long as the broadcaster of the audio includes the Arbitron codes, the PPM can meaure it -- and report back every night.
If you think about this, you'll see it has the potential to change media measurement forever. We did a study for the Radio Advertising Bureau -- an extensive survey of advertisers -- that determined that advertisers would spend hundreds of millions of dollars more if radio ratings were more accurate. But this goes beyond radio measurement. It can measure all forms of TV, including time-shifted and VOD, and out of home viewing, which Nielsen doesn't measure. And for the first time the media measurement of all these media is for the same individual.There's even a project with Procter & Gamble-- Project Apollo -- to determine how media changes buying and consumption behaviors.
Arbitron is not a huge company, and rolling out new ratings is a big job. Its CEO famously pointed out that every company that has ever gone up against Nielsen in TV ratings has gone out of business. This rollout will take time -- quite a few years to go from today's trials in Houston to a nationwide rollout, even of radio ratings. But the more multichannel media and marketing gets, the better Arbitron's PPM looks -- and the greater the challenge for Nielsen.
What do you think media and marketers. Do you agree? What's the next step in measurement? Submit a comment -- we'd love to hear from you.
Just left a london conference where the CEO of BARB ( the UK equiv to neilsen) was dismissive of the pvr threat and generally complacent. All these guys enjoy the status quo - and its only when census based models kick in as iptv etc launch that we'll get good data.
There is an interesting UK research initiative called touchpoint which has some promise - its not perfect but its a start
http://www.ipa.co.uk/touchpoints/?menulink=true
Posted by: big picture | March 02, 2006 at 01:54 PM