Television Ratings

In the discussion raised by my presentation we talked about privacy and a little about how advertisers were going to need to change. Privacy is not an issue because all participating Nielsen families know that they are participating. There is no involuntary participation and Nielsen doesn’t plan on that in the future. We also discussed how it was interesting that we are moving away from the current multiple sponsor model and back towards the single sponsorship model and product placement. I discussed how I hardly ever watch commercials anymore and I know a lot of people who do the same thing. As DVR and TiVo become more popular, advertisers will need to think of ways to advertise during your favorite show, not in between segments with commercial spots. I didn’t bring this up in class but thought about it later, the show Extreme Makeover Home Edition has embraced product placement like no other, while still having your typical commercial spots. I wonder if they will eventually move completely away from commercials and be the first show to do so. What role will ratings play then? It think the same role it plays now but the ratings will be used to calculate the cost of X amount of product placement spots within a program instead of used to calculate CPM. This will be very interesting to see.

Television is one of the most important of today’s media. It is porthole for the world to see news, entertainment, human-interest stories, movies and anything else they want. Today, TV has become a personalized vessel where you can record what you want and watch it when you want. Ratings have played an important role in the progress TV has made. Ratings define which shows stay and which ones go. It is because of ratings that we see a trend towards reality TV today and it is also the reason comedies and game shows were popular in the 1950’s and 60’s.