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Trusted Subscriber
Trusted
This topic has indirectly come up several times, but the reality is that the ratings system (statistically wise at least) is very flawed.
With newer interconnected TV's and devices available now, the potential for more accurate ratings is there, assuming people are prepared to sign up for anonymous monitoring.
We were approached many years ago to contribute, but declined due to a variety of factors. We channel hopped at the time, and you had to break your viewing down into 15 minute windows.
Nowadays we watch TV from a variety of sources, and delayed with the use of PVRs or online streaming catchup options. The current system (at least was) is not particularly well set up to monitor the modern viewer habbits and possible delivery mechanisms. They have included time shifting, but it's still a particularly manual process with 600 households only.
The data is often used to justify advertising costs, but there is a strong correlation between ad breaks and water and electricity use. Nowadays with PVR's many viewers fast forward through the ads, or are viewing shows obtained/streamed from elsewhere.
Just not entirely sure how valid the results are is all, especially extrapolated out to cover the whole country from 600 households.
Jaxson:
This topic has indirectly come up several times, but the reality is that the ratings system (statistically wise at least) is very flawed.
With newer interconnected TV's and devices available now, the potential for more accurate ratings is there, assuming people are prepared to sign up for anonymous monitoring.
We were approached many years ago to contribute, but declined due to a variety of factors. We channel hopped at the time, and you had to break your viewing down into 15 minute windows.
Nowadays we watch TV from a variety of sources, and delayed with the use of PVRs or online streaming catchup options. The current system (at least was) is not particularly well set up to monitor the modern viewer habbits and possible delivery mechanisms. They have included time shifting, but it's still a particularly manual process with 600 households only.
The data is often used to justify advertising costs, but there is a strong correlation between ad breaks and water and electricity use. Nowadays with PVR's many viewers fast forward through the ads, or are viewing shows obtained/streamed from elsewhere.
Just not entirely sure how valid the results are is all, especially extrapolated out to cover the whole country from 600 households.
Absolutely right. And the $600m question, given thats the amount spent on TV advertising, is whether adbuyers and their clients should be demanding more. Or do they accept the flaws given the relative cost effectiveness of advertising on tv vis a vis other media? Do they allocate more spend to newspapers that no-one reads, to radio or online (with its adblockers, expectation of free content and even less ability to measure outcomes?)?
PVR's are in 50% of homes (slightly more in Sky homes than not), 90% of homes still have and watch television so there is still a wedge of non-PVR homes that watch TV and get reached by advertising. Thats all the adbuyers care about. Everyone else thats got a passing interest in media - noone cares about cos they have no contribution to make other than observation.
At least Sky has the ability to collect and measure usage in homes with 800k boxes in circulation - whether they do or not remains to be seen, whether they know how to use the data even less clear.
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