Money down the drain - with under-inclusive audience sampling | SMLXL - Business and Communication Innovation from Alan Moore

Money down the drain – with under-inclusive audience sampling

June 24th, 2005

I know this is stateside. But it interests me and it should interest you.
Let me set the scene for you, Nilesen are being faced with a suit by erinMedia and ReacTV filed against Nielsen last week.
As Mediapost explains

On its face, the suit is about the anticompetitive barriers Nielsen has created, which allegedly prevent new players like digital set-top ratings developer erinMedia from entering the market. No doubt the Nielsen legal team is confident they can fend off those antitrust claims. Why not? They've managed to do so for half a century – a half century which saw the coming and going of a number of reputable players (AGB, Arbitron, Statistical Research Inc., R.D. Percy, Television Audience Assessment), which all tried and failed to crack the U.S. TV ratings marketplace.

But the bit that really gets me is this

But the most interesting part of their testimony likely would have less to do with how Nielsen negotiates its contracts than it would with how they feel about the actual methods and procedures Nielsen uses to make sure everyone's TV viewing counts. Needless to say, it would also be interesting to see how Nielsen executives answer those very same questions, especially when erinMedia's suit alleges: Nielsen's "conduct allowed its faulty and vastly under-inclusive audience sampling methodology to influence the misspending of billions of dollars in advertising and other commercial activities in the television industry each year."

I mean if this is true, then someone is in big trouble. Boy are they big trouble. The fallout from this, if it gets to court, and if those claims were proven to be true – will turn the world of mass media and mass marketing inside out.

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