On TV, New Ways To Gauge the Ads

The race for new ways to measure the impact of television commercials is heating up.

TiVo Inc. is expanding its service that allows advertisers to see how many and what kind of users are viewing their commercials. The company this week released a website that allows brands to compare viewership of their commercials with rivals. The free site, tivo.com/ad-scorecard, allows anyone to enter three brands and see a chart plotting how much of their audience they retained during their commercials relative to other brands in their industry over the past several weeks. It shows that in a recent week, Verizon had slightly better-than-average audience retention for its commercials, while Sprint and AT&T were just below the average for similar advertisers. TiVo is one of many companies ramping up their efforts to compete with television-measurement juggernaut Nielsen Co., arguing that as consumers' TV-watching habits change, the way companies measure and plan their commercials must, as well. Nielsen grew to dominate the television-ratings industry by reporting the size of TV-show audiences based on electronic meters hooked up to television sets, as well as surveys. But the growing penetration of digital set-top boxes that record viewership data directly is creating other opportunities that smaller companies are trying to seize.