NEWS1 December 2011
US— Rentrak today boasted that it had jumped ahead of rival Nielsen with a new TV metric that can tell advertisers how many viewers were exposed to specific commercials in a national campaign.
The company says its Exact Commercial Ratings Module represents an “advance” on Nielsen’s C3 ratings, which provide a measurement of average viewer numbers for commercial minutes within a programme.
Rentrak senior vice president Evan Goldfarb said: “With Exact Commercial Ratings, every agency and advertiser will have the ability to determine the performance of a specific commercial on their network campaign and be able to plan, buy and place spots much more strategically.”
The company works out viewing figures using set-top box data from 19 million TV sets, whereas Nielsen collects viewing data from a smaller, nationally-representative panel of metered homes.
In recent days Rentrak signed expanded contracts with Schurz Communications and London Broadcasting for the local market TV measurement service, StationView Essentials.
StationView clients will not be offered the Exact Commercial Ratings Module, Rentrak said.
- Click here for a Q&A with chief research officer Bruce Goerlich.
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4 Comments
John Grono
12 years ago
Does this system really report on viewers, or does it actually report on tuned televisions? While the RPD can "see" that a set or sets in a household is tuned during the commercial break, does it really "know" who within that household was actually watching during the ad breaks. Of course you can impute viewership and even likely viewer profiles by monitoring channel-change activity and utilising other third-party sources, is it really measuring viewer exposure to specific ads or providing estimations (which of course are fine)? If anyone 'in the know' could elucidate that would be good.
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Graeme Griffiths
12 years ago
There is a lack of detail here on the how Rentrack calculate this Exact Commercial Ratings Module but from this article it seems to be based on Return Path Data from the 19 million receivers quoted. I could be wrong but if that is the case then they will be modelling the demographic profile of those 19 million homes to say who is watching and I fail to see how this is statistically better or more accurate than a Nat rep Audience panel. I'm not sure you should be able to call the model 'Exact' if this is the case.......
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Brian Tarran
12 years ago
John, Graeme: Thanks for commenting. I've put your questions to Rentrak and hope to run a follow-up article later today. Check back soon. Brian
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Brian Tarran
12 years ago
Rentrak's chief research officer Bruce Goerlich has answered your questions here: http://bit.ly/v2Gq0o
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