Antony Young, the president of Optimedia U.S., a media strategy firm, had this article in today’s Ad Age about reconsidering the effectiveness of the traditional television ratings such as those measured by Nielsen and Arbitron and the need to consider the exposure of media consumers across media platforms. Television ratings have gone down as an actual percentage in the last two decades or so as a series of new media began to chip away at the dominance of the three major networks: first, cable, then the birth of new broadcast networks, and then, of course, the Internet. But because the content offered by the networks now reaches across more than one of these platforms, it’s useful to measure them and index their performance in all of these media.
Optimedia has developed a system they call “Content Power Rating” that looks at the overall audience of a television program on TV, online video (such as Hulu or Joost), web sites, and even mobile devices. Their index of these audiences comes up with a very different list of which shows score highest with viewers across media than traditional television ratings, as the graphic above shows. Programs that fall far back in the pack for television viewership can be big hits when viewed through the multi-platform perspective: notice that of the top ten in Omnimedia’s rankings, four of them are below the top ten in Nielsen’s ratings, and one (“The Office”) isn’t even in the top fifty.
Young says that in the U.S., media buyers are more interested in placing their ads in specific series, whereas in Europe it’s strictly about the stats (reach, CPM, and ratings), so a ratings system that pays closer attention to the varied audience a television series can now expect to garner, is a much better indicator of how well that program might perform for advertisers looking to reach highly-targeted demographics.
Optimedia uses this index in helping its own clients decide how to strategically target media buys, but this sort of rating system should turn out to be very generally applicable, if not outright critical, to media metrics while the so-called “new media” are still shaking up the overall media landscape.
