TV ratings shake-up challenges Nielsen

Top US media companies and marketers have created a consortium to challenge the dominant force in TV audience measurement. Nielsen controls the measurement of US audiences through the polling of 18,000 homes, where viewer habits are measured by clicks of a special remote control. Media participants in the consortium - including networks owned by NBC Universal, Time Warner, News Corp, Viacom, CBS, Discovery and Walt Disney - expect it to be operational by September. They have pulled in Procter & Gamble and AT&T, the top and third-biggest US advertisers, and Unilever. The involvement of such big names highlights how urgently advertisers feel the need for better information to justify ads that run across multiple media platforms. Audience measurement is considered the lifeblood of the media industry. The $70 billion spent on US TV advertising each year is allocated according to viewer numbers. The explosion of online viewing has made the measuring of total audiences across all media platforms more difficult.