Despite media clutter and the 100,000 marketing message every American encounters every day, television ads are still effective! This, according to a research company with a huge interest in making sure people believe television ads are still effective.

And that company would be, of course, Nielsen, the audience measurement firm notorious for not doing anything right. And caving to client interests. Glad to hear the business model is still working. Reports AdAge:

A seven-figure ethnographic study due to be released next month by the Nielsen Co.-funded Council for Research Excellence from research firm Sequent and the Center for Media Design at Ball State University appears set to punctuate that point, finding that TV remains the dominant medium even for reaching youth, despite the inroads of digital and social media, according to a person familiar with the research.

If time shifting, ad skipping or clutter really were rendering TV less effective, then it should show up in marketing-mix analyses that have been done since the early 1990s as a lower average sales lift per gross rating point over time.

It doesn't, according to Media Marketing Assessment (MMA), a unit of Aegis Group's Synovate. "We haven't seen a significant trend in the erosion of effectiveness of TV," said Douglas Brooks, senior VP of MMA. In fact, MMA, which reports to clients each year on its findings regarding aggregate TV effectiveness, has seen a slight uptick in effectiveness in recent years.