Media News - Friday, September 11, 2009

Media group to research new methods for ratings

Tacitly displaying their frustration with the country’s chief source for television ratings, 14 media companies and advertisers said Thursday that they had formed a research organization to pursue new methods to measure audiences. Members of the new organization, called the Council for Innovative Media Measurement, said they would finance studies and promote innovation in audience measurement. The group will seek answers to a question that has befuddled the industry: how should the buyers and sellers of advertising time take into account the consumers who are increasingly watching shows not on TV sets, but on computers and mobile devices? The members of the council, which is being led by Alan Wurtzel, the president of research for NBC Universal, said that their work was not meant to replace Nielsen Media Research, the dominant supplier of ratings information for television and one of the chief sources for Internet measurement. Instead, the council will seek to identify and study new methods of measurement, they said. The council includes the research chiefs of the owners of ABC, CBS, CNN, ESPN, Fox, MTV, and NBC; their counterparts at advertising companies; and representatives for several of the nation’s largest advertisers. The council said it would start by investigating two issues: the feasibility of compiling ratings from set-top TV boxes and new ways to measure viewership across TV sets, Web sites and mobile devices. (New York Times)

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