Adweek reports that Nielsen will start providing same day ratings for DVR playback starting wih the dataset scheduled out on December 28th to be followed by the addition of seven day playback ratings starting on January 17th.
The catch is that they will only have equipment to track DVR in 60 of it’s 9,000 households. I’ll save you reaching out for your calculator, that represents .6% of Nielsen households though they claim they will be adding households at the rate of 100 a month through July to better represent the current official 7% DVR penetration (many peg that penetration as high as 11%). Though NBC is planning to start using at some point in the future the Live+7 data, it is non-commital about it’s timing. The lines still remain drawn in the sand in the same place they have been. Advertisers feel that they should not continue to pay escalating network costs while viewers are increasingly zapping their ads with DVRs while the networks look at the same data the advertisers are looking at and in a classical glass half-empty/glass half-full fashion and say, it’s not so bad, not everyone fast forwards or skips past ads. I think everybody needs to buck up and realize that they need to either make the ad so compeling, even outside of Superbowl Sunday, that viewers will not be likely to skip it, and/or, diversify their media portfolio and reduce their reliance on Network ads.
You can also read more at Reuters…
