Tracking Ads: Google & Nielsen

The shortcomings of the rating system as offered by Nielsen Media Research has become a popular target for television fans. And for good reason. However, if there is one thing Nielsen has been doing right, it is listening to consumers.

Recently, they told networks that they would no longer combine two airings of the same show. And, they are allowing longer time periods to count DVR viewers, which has increased some show's ratings as much as five percent. Both moves came out of public outcry.

Today, The New York Times reported that Google will be announcing a partnership today with the Nielsen Company in order to give "advertisers a more vivid and accurate snapshot of how many people are viewing commercials on a second-by-second basis, and who those people are."

“We want to bring all the advantages that we see in online advertising — like more accountability, a better sense of the audience, better tools to optimize a campaign — and bring them to television to make TV advertising more effective,” Michael Steib, director for television ads for Google told The New York Times.

Google has been experimenting with television advertising through a cable operator, the DISH Network, which reaches 13 million subscribers. Several advertising executives predicted that it would be only a matter of time before other cable operators signed up, making the measurement system offered by Google TV Ads more broadly available.

Seems we too were early in connecting the dots, seeing cable operators as both the most obvious answer to better measurements as well as the eventual convergence of television and the Internet. While no old media has ever been replaced by new media to date, it sure seems like all media is undergoing a rapid and dramatic transformation.