It’s certainly not our personal mission to make Google a cause célèbre, but we have a special place in our hearts for any company that challenges Nielsen Media Research, the bumbling audience analytics firm headed toward further catastrophe by David Calhoun, the former General Electric vice chairman. Google recently unveiled Google Ad Planner, a new framework that combines website metrics with media buying, which is supposed to replace the guesswork employed by companies like Nielsen and comScore, which use a complicated and mostly flawed mixture of audience panels and computer logging to tell clients how many people visit a website, and what type of people they are. Google, which collects metrics data itself, directly from websites that carry its tracking code, wants to challenge these industry leaders in a market they’ve long owned, and which media buyers have always had to rely on to know where best to spend their millions in ad buys. Except now that the service has debuted and the biggest media agencies have had a look, it appears Nielsen isn’t in much danger of no longer holding clients hostage.

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Nielsen continues its strategy of “buy the competition, don’t make a better product” by completing the $225 million purchase of IAG Research, the “consumer-engagement” firm. [B&C]

“In the weeks leading up to this prelude to the upfront advertising marketplace, the Media Rating Council quietly met, reviewed a crucial audit of Nielsen’s so-called C3 ratings system, and opted to withhold accreditation for what will be the currency for billions of dollars in TV advertising buys.”

Confused? Allow us to explain. You know those upfront presentations all the networks are hosting to solicit ad buys for the upcoming television season? Those billion dollar deals are based on Nielsen data that hasn’t passed muster for the second year in a row.

And then it gets worse.

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TNS, the London-based audience measurement firm that, along with TiVo, has provided the only real competition for giant Nielsen, just rejected a $1.87 billion buyout offer from WPP Group, owner of, among other things, the media and advertising agencies MindShare, Mediaedge:cia, MediaCom, Maxus, JWT, Ogilvy & Mather, and Y&R. TNS’s decision to refuse the buyout, because they viewed it as a lowball offer, quickly prompted rumors that Nielsen was preparing its own offer, which would take yet another competitive player off the market. Sound familiar?

Nielsen plans on measuring out-of-home television watchers, like those who catch The Biggest Loser at the gym, a college basketball game at a sports bar, or The Office while working late at, um, the office. It’s not clear how they’re having their samples record the data, since the plausibility of accurately recording what you watched while you’re sweating during a 5-mile treadmill run or getting hammered with your old frat buddies is, um, slim. Hopefully like your waistline is about to be.

Any article that speculates about the possibility of Nielsen’s downfall – in headline-ending-with-a-question-mark form – is a friend of ours. After all, we waste no fewer than 1,000 words a week on the subject. So there goes AdAge’s Brian Steinberg with “Can Nielsen Still Reign Supreme?” It’s a storied look at Nielsen’s 1950s beginnings to where it stands today: Trying to get its hands in every audience measurement medium possible, going beyond TV ratings and into video game and YouTube consumption. Providing this data to advertisers is big business, mostly because the P&Gs of the world spend billions without any absolute, concrete evidence its campaign messages turn into sales. It’s Nielsen’s job to convince them they’re doing the right thing.

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Nielsen is finally taking a cue from TiVo and TNS, securing deals with cable operators to leech data from their customers’ set-top boxes to collect data. Among the major deals is Charter, which actually made another deal with TNS in ‘06, providing 300,000 Los Angeles households’ privacy. [Adweek]

BWAHAHAHAHA. Nielsen’s clients continue to rebel against the company’s incompetence. Steamrolling ahead with new audience measurement tactics that it’s clearly not ready for, Nielsen yesterday announced to customers it would use its “live” national sample of TV audiences to test its online viewership initiative, which hopes to measure how many people are watching TV shows on their computers. It’s all apart of their ambitious (and DOA) A2/M2, or “anytime/anywhere,” initiative.

Nielsen has only signed up 375 households, within their 14,000 national sample, to participate in both panels; privacy concerns have kept most households from allowing the company to monitor both mediums. And Nielsen’s big bucks clients don’t like where this is headed.

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Nielsen is making a big push to reshape not just its service offerings, but the way you see their brand. Chief David Calhoun has his minions launching a “global brand awareness campaign” (i.e. they’re the exclusive advertiser for an issue of the NYT sports mag Play) to show off “the new Nielsen,” which, having dropped the name VNU last year, wants to be known for more than issuing faulty reports on TV audiences. They want to issue faulty reports on all media consumption.

Launching today is PreView, an initially free offering that takes Nielsen’s measurement data, pastes it into an Excel spreadsheet, and plugs lots of fancy formulas to reveal stats like: Of 400 hundred recent films, “titles grossing at least $100 million in sales are likely to have received elevated levels of attention on blogs.” For realzies? At least they’re not asking you to pay for this crap.

And that’s just the beginning. As we’ve previously reported, Nielsen wants to track all of your media consumption, twenty-four hours a day. That means whether you’re watching YouTube clips or TV shows on your computer or if you’re watching a romantic dramedy on your iPod. And how will they accomplish this? Says SAI: “The company wants to hand out gadgets to Nielsen panelists that attach to cell phones and portable devices and record what gets played.” Which we make for a totally authentic environment to collect accurate statistics. Another brilliant business move, N.

Guess what, Hispanics? Nielsen is so juiced about your soaring spending power and population, chief David Calhoun is creating an independent Hispanic/Latino Advisory Council, made up of business and community leaders, “established to help inform and enhance the Company’s efforts to recruit, measure and accurately report on Hispanic television households in the U.S.,” according to the press release.

Also in the press release, this quote from HLAC member Ernest Bromley, chief of Bromley Communications: “Nielsen should be commended for establishing this Council, which will be an important forum for representatives of the Hispanic community to share their thoughts on the issues that are most important to our businesses and our communities.”

And we totally believe it! Nielsen, which has often been criticized for ignoring huge segments of the population like college students and, um, Hispanics (SEEN HERE!), is finally trying to get its act together, and not just pretend like it cares by creating some glorified yet powerless focus group of influentials. And we have full faith in them, based on their enviable track record of identifying core problems and screwing up every effort to fix them.

Analytics and publishing powerhouse Nielsen continues to find new ways to charge clients more money for services that do little but make for a good press release. (Note to self: AWESOME BUSINESS MODEL!!)

In this doozy of a round, beginning next month, perpetually flailing Nielsen will “shadow” a group of 450 consumers, in separate phases throughout the year, and record any media they consume through each 24-hour day, whether magazines, books, DVDs, or YouTube videos.

If it sounds ambitious, it is, which is why they’re teaming with Ball State University and Sequent Partners (”on behalf of the Committee for Research Excellence”). Recruiting participants will be part of Nielsen’s job, and they’ll pull from the same pool they use to deliver flawed television ratings.

So why does this sound like it’s going to go horribly wrong?

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