I bring this to our readers attention because our comments occasionally include folks who believe "if only the viewers in bars/airports/houses of ill repute/etc. were counted, this show would have a squinty-jillion more viewers!". It seems that while that may or may not be the case, not enough people are willing to pay Nielsen to do the counting.
Nielsen Co. and IMMI Friday shut down their recently launched out-of-home TV viewing measurement service. The service, which was launched with much fanfare earlier this year, was created to fill a long-standing void in the TV marketplace for accurate measurement of viewing that takes place outside of Nielsen's traditional in-home TV measurement panels. Despite demand from some high-profile networks, especially sports-oriented programmers like ESPN and Turner Sports, and a commitment from Publicis' Zenith Media unit to use the new service, Nielsen and IMMI said they were suspending the service due to economic concerns.
Like many announcements recently, this leans heavily on "the current economic situation made us do this", so it's really not clear what happened here, particularly since, as the article mentions, Nielsen has other out-of-home counting initiatives underway. I am waiting for the cry of "Beer drinkers must be counted!" to ring from the barstools.
We had a discussion in class about what could possibly be a perfect ratings meter. (It needs to fulfill the four P’s: People meter, Personal, Passive, Portable.) So far, there is none, but shutting down a division that was working on coming up with one certainly doesn’t help.
They were able to find a few (but probably no more) companies to buy data and sponsor research (I think for example, that either Fox or MLB, can’t remember which) commissioned a study on MLB viewing out of home for the playoffs. But they were not able to find any advertisers who were convinced they ought to care about the results.
I think it’s a somewhat expensive marketing prospect to change the landscape of how advertising is bought and sold. And those marketing $$ need to be funded by the networks themselves.
It’s a chicken/egg thing and my guess is because the networks don’t see any near-term ROI, they abandoned it.
Its just like when Project Apollo (Nielsen-Arbitron venture) failed due to lack of people willing to pay for data from sources other than TV.
Yet fans of cancelled shows will continue insisting Nielsen is evil and blah, blah, blah, yadda, yadda, yadda…. Im still laughing at how some Jericho fans actually though sending 1,000 pounds of peanuts to Nielsen in Florida lead by some guy on the CBS forums who looks like skinhead.