My remarks today will focus on two core principles for guiding the industry discussion about the commercial occurrence component.
   Choice
   Accuracy

But first, I want to acknowledge all of you attending today’s session. It’s great to have so many people here. A quick survey. How many of you are from ad agencies? Please raise your hands.

   From media companies?
   How about research companies and consultancies?
   And how about the advertisers?

Wow. Don’t you find it odd that we’re here discussing a radical transformation of the currency used to transact over $40 billion of national TV advertising and there is not even one advertiser present? After all, it’s the advertiser’s demand for accountability and better measures of brand ROI that should be front and center in the development of a commercial rating system.

So let’s face a hard and uncomfortable truth. We’re currently engaged in a deception. Average commercial ratings will not move us to brand ROI because individual brand performance is not reflected in the rating statistic. Second-by-second audience data would get us there. Even commercial minute ratings would get us to close proximity. For the benefit of our advertiser partners who butter all our bread, we need to move beyond average commercial ratings as quickly as possible and get to more granular detail about individual brand spots.

Regardless of whether you like your commercial ratings at full strength or watered down, we all recognize that commercial ratings will only be as accurate and useful as the underlying advertising occurrence data.

However, there hasn’t been much discussion about alternative choices and how the industry should identify and select the best source of occurrence information.

And make no mistake about it. You do have an alternative in the form of TNS Media Intelligence, the service of choice to more than 80 percent of media companies and 60 percent of ad agencies. We’re not a TV ratings provider. Our core competency is advertising monitoring.

Meanwhile, Nielsen – a company who’s core competency is audience measurement - is moving forward with it’s in-house occurrence data as a fait accompli, thereby depriving the industry at large of choice. If there’s one lesson to be learned from our historical experience with audience measurement systems here and abroad, it’s that choice and competition in the marketplace drive innovation, improved quality and higher value data for users.

While you don’t have a choice of providers with respect to the people meter component, you do have a choice for commercial activity data. As the customers and end users of ratings data it’s in your best interests to proactively take control of this decision.

The industry needs to be thinking today about accuracy at four integrated levels of commercial classification. Each of these levels has a direct bearing on the use of commercial ratings data to fulfill advertiser’s needs for more accurate and relevant measures of brand performance.

The first level is correct identification of a content segment as a commercial, as opposed to a piece of programming. The second level is correct identification of that commercial as national versus local in origin.

It’s been suggested that for purposes of average commercial ratings, this is as far as we need to go. But remember, the ultimate end game is the more granular detail of an occurrence-specific, brand-specific rating. This is the next transformation that a majority of the industry wants and expects to happen. It’s just a question of when. If we don’t put the proper infrastructure in place at the outset, it will be that much more difficult, costly and disruptive to retrofit in later years.

So when we move to commercial minute or commercial-specific ratings, accurate identification of the advertised brand as well as its creative execution become of utmost importance. Brand and creative identification are therefore the third and fourth levels of accuracy.

A requirement for brand and creative-level accuracy should be embraced in this current phase. Hard-to-measure things are a good barometer of total, overall quality. Furthermore, there’s already a marketplace need for deeper understanding of how specific advertising executions affect viewer retention. CONCAM and the CAB, among others, have articulated this to Nielsen. These deeper levels of analysis require accurate identification of the creative execution. And TNS Media Intelligence has this capability through our proprietary MediaWatch technology.

1. Higher system reliability
2. An increase in raw commercial detections which parallels the evolution of new types of advertising units and creative executions; and
3. Superior accuracy at each of the four levels I listed earlier, all the way down to brand and creative.

MediaWatch is now deployed in 101 DMAs. A capital expenditure plan is in place that will expand its scale to 150 DMAs by the end of 2007 and to all 210 DMAs by the end of 2008. All markets will use full-discovery technology, not a hybrid of full and partial discovery detection.

Extending our current techniques for cross-market matching of advertising units to 210 DMAs will enable even more accurate identification of national spots and provide the most granular detail for correctly determining regional clearance patterns of national ads within multi-segment programming, such as NFL or NCAA football games.

TNS Media Intelligence recognizes that the requirements for a commercial monitoring system are more stringent and demanding when the data are being used for audience ratings. We understand which parts of our system need to be enhanced in support of commercial ratings and we’re already working against these needs.

For example, we’re finalizing a plan to expand cable network monitoring to cover all of the networks for which daily ratings are reported.

We’re investigating two solutions to identify local ad insertions on the cable nets. One revolves around cue tone detection. The other approach is expansion of the local cable system monitoring that we already perform in Boston and San Francisco. Cross-matching of spots clearing on local head ends against the spots contained in the cable network satellite feed is another way to verify local ad positions and remove them from national reporting. We’re also looking at how the Boston-San Francisco combination can help improve collection and reporting accuracy for dual feed cable networks.

These are just some of the technical challenges that commercial monitoring must successfully overcome to enable more accurate ratings estimates. My point is that TNS Media Intelligence is committed to do whatever is necessary to deliver industrial-strength ad occurrence data for integration with people meter ratings to produce the highest quality commercial audience estimates.

Given the need for accurate identification of commercials at multiple levels, all the way down to the brand and the creative, how can the industry move forward to measure and compare accuracy of TNS Media Intelligence and Nielsen Monitor-Plus?

Well, let’s start by agreeing that relying upon and accepting claims at face value from either company about our respective accuracy is NOT the best way to proceed. Nor should you give credence to anyone who invokes the 4As commercial occurrence analysis that was done in the mid 1990’s as proof of accuracy in 2006. I would hope that we’re all smarter than this.

An issue of such paramount importance as accurate identification of commercial occurrences, the backbone of any commercial ratings system now or in the future, deserves more respect. It deserves a transparent and independent analysis to measure and evaluate accuracy at all critical levels. An analysis in which both TNS Media Intelligence and Nielsen participate. An analysis that is conducted while average commercial ratings still carry the “evaluation” label and there is still time to improve the methodology for producing these data before conferring upon them the status of currency.

Remember, it’s all about those $40+ billion dollars of national TV time that our advertising partners are purchasing. And if they’re demanding improved accountability, how can we as the research professionals accept anything less than a fully accountable and transparent system for the commercial activity that will be used to build the commercial ratings estimates?

TNS Media Intelligence is committed to moving the industry forward and providing advertisers, agencies and media companies with the highest quality information to make smart, informed business decisions. Towards that end we encourage and will participate in an independent, public and comparative assessment of commercial monitoring accuracy at all of the relevant levels that commercial ratings demand.

It goes without saying that all parts of a TV rating system need to be audited and accredited by the Media Ratings Council. This certainly applies to the advertising occurrence source data that is the underpinning of these new commercial audience measurements.

I’m pleased to tell you that TNS Media Intelligence has formally entered into the MRC accreditation process for our MediaWatch monitoring system. Details regarding the scope of the audit still need to be worked out but it will obviously focus on the parts of our occurrence capture and reporting that are integral to the production of commercial ratings. This is what the marketplace demands and requires.

In the era of program-based TV ratings, it wasn’t essential for MediaWatch to go through the formal MRC process. However, we still recognized our obligation to provide customers with high quality data and towards that end we invested heavily in our monitoring technology to more accurately capture and classify TV commercial activity. That investment is now ready to go to work on behalf of commercial audience measurement.

In closing, let me circle back to where I started and ask for a show of hands on a few more questions.

First question: to Sara Erichson, Brian Lane and the rest of the Nielsen team – will Monitor-Plus participate with TNS Media Intelligence in a transparent, open and comparative analysis of commercial occurrence accuracy?

Second question, to the room: Do you agree that choice of provider and accuracy of commercial occurrence data are important principles in the development of commercial ratings? May I see a show of hands from those who agree?

Final question, to the room: Do you agree that choice and accuracy are issues that need to be actively addressed and resolved while we’re working through the upcoming evaluation phase? Again, a show of hands from those who agree?

From the vote in the room to the last two questions, I think it’s fair to say there is broad cross-sectional support for moving ahead with open choice based on competency rather than incumbency.

Colleagues, you know what needs to be done to advance the future of our industry and you know that you don’t have to accept what has been offered to you over the past few months as fait accompli. While many of you have known TNS Media Intelligence under other names over the years, the company has been a trusted source of advertising intelligence for more than 80 years. This is our core competency. We continue lead by innovation. And we’re excited to be on board to help the industry move into this exciting new phase.

Thank you.