Media Agencies to Nielsen: We Really Want You to Change ... Kidding!

(MoneyWatch)  You have to love the irony of a current debate -- including threatened legal action! -- between Nielsen and some of the media buying agencies with which it does business. Even as the agency world tries to push Nielsen into measurement methods that take into account new technologies, some agencies, including WPP 's Group M and Publicis' SMGX, are upset because Nielsen has decided to change how it will report ratings for local TV stations -- to include time-shifted viewing via DVR. If that doesn't take into account new technologies, I don't know what does.

At the crux of the dispute is the fact that many major buyers of TV time have bought it based on so-called "live" ratings only, in other words, TV viewing that happens at the time the particular program is actually airing. The new Nielsen reporting kicks in in January, when some deals negotiated using the old ratings will still be very much in force. Making the whole story even richer, the Television Bureau of Advertising, a trade group for local stations, sent out a letter congratulating stations for getting Nielsen to change its ratings data, while at the same time the Media Policy Committee of the American Association of Advertising Agencies is said to be coming out with "a position" per Mediapost, about the whole fracas.

The most telling quote in the detailed Mediapost piece I've linked to above is this one from John Muszynski, chief investment officer of SMGX: "They [Nielsen] just raised the price of local TV advertising." He estimates that the new numbers will show a three to four percent increase "initially" growing as time-shifted viewing grows. (It's averaging about 16-17 percent this year in broadcast primetime.) Media buying agencies raise a good point in that, since "live" ratings were the currency their buys earlier this year were based on, changing the metric midstream is, at the very least, confusing. On the other hand, local TV stations -- who've had the roughest time of it in the TV industry -- have the right to monetize every viewer they can. Somebody's gotta pay.

Previous coverage of Nielsen at BNET Media:

• Nielsen: Big Families, Hispanics, Not Good at Pushing Buttons
• Nielsen Confirms We're Still Couch Potato Nation
• Nielsen Data Shows DVRs Are Great, and Awful, for Broadcast TV