Nielsen just can't seem to do anything right.
Just days after Manish Bhatia, president of global services and U.S. sales for Nielsen Online, made the argument to Editor & Publisher that its panel-based Internet measurement services are tops (we're not convinced), its television ratings unit suffered a huge blow, with backlash spewing over its delayed "fast affiliate ratings" national numbers.
Television networks subscribing to the service pay a premium for the quicker reports, which are supposed to deliver primetime stats faster than Nielsen's "final" analysis. Except to Nielsen, "faster" often means delivery just a single hour before the final reports are available.
Nielsen usually blames "processing delays" for the snail's pace delivery. But what's really at the heart of Nielsen screwing over clients?
According to a conference call with Catherine Herkovic, senior VP and managing director of national television client services, the delays are caused by:
- More challenges than expected collecting data from the Active/Passive Meters, which were developed over the course of more than a decade to measure digital viewing. The installation of A/P Meters began rolling out in 2005.
- Inadequate hardware and software for the increased volume and complexity of data being collected this TV season, including digital recorder playback data. Fast nationals include live viewing plus same-day playback data. Nielsen also began offering data on playback up to seven days after recording and commercial ratings. Nielsen said it is adding more servers, which it indicated could address about 25% of the problem within perhaps a couple of weeks.
- Higher than historical levels of human error, which was not defined.
All of which got customers thinking: Is Nielsen, which has no real competition, too ill-equipped to handle its monopoly?
Quite simply: Yes. Which is why most are eager for competing services like DirecTView, from TNS, and Stop||Watch, from DVR provider TiVo.
Nielsen told the conference call participants that it would take steps to try to reduce the “points of human intervention” in the process, one research executive said.
Clients wonder if the delays also could be due to too few personnel—or too many less-trained personnel—handling increasingly complicated core tasks as Nielsen rolls out ever-more-sophisticated products and services—such as its national TV/Internet Fusion database that would allow clients to focus on the relationship between consumers’ usage of both platforms.
Clients also wonder if the problems with the fast nationals delivery hint at other hidden problems in the final nationals or other data.
Editorial Director
They always eliminated the majority of listener/viewers because they have a limited number of boxes and the same damn people reporting. Have you ever been contacted the phone, mail or viewerbox by any rating agency???? I didn't think so. I used to be, 43 years as a radio broadcaster, on the air and in all those years I was sent diaries ONCE by Arbitron and called ONCE by Hooper Radio Rating Service. So most of the advertisers are misled with incorrect information or just plain Bullshit.
What's really at the heart of Nielsen's screwups has nothing to do with inadequate hardware and software. The delays have been going on for 20 weeks and if you count backwards 20 weeks from when your article was written that would take you to the last week of September of 2007. The last week of September 2007 is when Nielsen gave pink slips to a large number of employees and at the same time announced its partnership with TCS. Nielsen lost a large amount of subject matter experts due to the layoffs. Mitchell Habib was too focused on appeasing his cronies in India rather than delivering on-time, accurate data.
"Higher than historical levels of human error, which was not defined."
That's a hoot. I'll define it for you. You have TCS consultants trying to do the job of key subject matter experts. These subject matter experts have been on the job for years before Habib came in and let them go in favor of Indian consultants. Nielsen's clients did not complain about delays prior to the mass layoffs.