Out at TV Today

By Will Waugh

We will be hosting our annual precursor to the Upfront today we call the TV Forum. I will attempt to post from there but am not 100% sure on the hotspots at the Marriott Marquis. So that being said, I will report back on what our friends at Allstate, Nissan, NBC Universal, et al. have to say as soon as possible. Also on the slate is Andy Jung from Kelloggs delivering the ANA's commercial ratings stance. This is the area I hope to see some debate on. Most of the chatter about this subject states that our advertisers are fighting a losing cause. Sorry, it's a fight that needs to be fought. Vietnam can do it, why can't we? My favorite quote comes from Chris at Open the Dialogue:

Nielsen's system isn't actually going to be able to track commercial viewing because it only tracks viewer numbers every 2.5 seconds, a time gap that's too wide for accurate measurement. That's just fine with most parties involved in this discussion, though, since ad agencies seem to be paranoid about their commercials actually being judged with hard numbers. They like those fuzzy numbers, but their media-buying counterparts are wanting the same accountability for TV that they're finding online.

Another call from the ANA's paper is that some of the bigger brand names want "brand-specific" ratings, but it's hard for me to fathom the extent to which this won't happen.

Technorati tags: commercial ratings television