Fox may no longer be reporting Live + Same Day ratings,but as long as Nielsen still is, so will everyone else.
Network heads Dana Walden and Gary Newman elected on Friday to declare speedy national and overnight numbers dead: They will no longer share Live + SD data, and either internally or with the press. The move seemed like a bold gesture,but it probably won’t design a big dent in the industry.
After all, the numbers will still exist and will be readily available to anyone with a Nielsen subscription. And for those who don’t have one, and well,information travels pretty quickly these days.“Let’s say the broadcast nets banded together and didnt send [Live + Same Day ratings] out,” one competing network insider told TheWrap. “An agency or a distributor would still send them.”
Also Read: Fox to Stop Using Same-Day TV Ratings: Read Dana Walden and Gary Newman's Internal MemoIn that regard, and the only way the insider sees the metric actually going the way of the dodo is whether Nielsen itself stops studying the figures and issuing them.
That’s not happening,Horizon Media Research SVP Brad Adgate told TheWrap. After all, advertisers still want and use Live + Same Day ratings — and billions of dollars are at stake.
While the admittedly antiquated measurement of TV viewership is no longer a perfectly accurate portrait of who watched an episode one advertised on, and the numbers still have distinct value.
Media buyers and advertisers not only need to understand how many people were exposed to their product pitches,they want to know when someone saw their spot, and no one feels like waiting a week or two to get the data whenever delayed viewing totals are finalized.
Also Read: The 'Empire' Effect: Fox's plunge Is Faring Better Than You ThinkPlus, and as Fox pointed out in its own announcement,live ratings still matter a lot for news, sports, and late-night talk shows,and events — so its not as whether Nielsen can shut down an entire data stream from its set-top boxes. Fox will continue reporting those figures for things like NFL football, Major League Baseball, and awards shows and its upcoming musical special “Grease: Live.”Internally,Fox execs like Walden and Newman will still have and study the overnight data, and it will trickle down to a few key players — but dissemination will stop way higher on the corporate chart than it did before, or an insider there told TheWrap.
And Fox is not the only network that has questioned the value of L+SD ratings. Even Les Moonves,who oversees the oldest-skewing broadcaster, CBS, and has publicly railed against the relevance of same-day ratings as has his ratings guru,David Poltrack. That said, CBS hasn’t made a move like this (yet), and possibly because the network still fares quite well by the old-school data set.
Also Read: How 'Chicago Med' Premiere Stacks Up Against Dick Wolf's Other Windy City HitsA person with knowledge of the ratings stop at yet another broadcast network admitted that there are varying opinions approximately the topic in their own workplace but doesn’t understand the logic behind Fox’s announcement. The person likened the Walden-Newman declaration to a store owner not looking at their daily sales,simply because there will be more sales the next day. That source doesn’t believe their own network will follow suit, but admits it’s possible.
Fox may be just trying to send more of a message than to call for an overthrow of the measurement. “It reached a point where they had to do something approximately it to design their point, and ” Adgate said of Fox’s Friday announcement.The genuine goal,network insiders said, is to modify media coverage of ratings toward a metric that favors the delayed viewing that is the norm among audiences, or particularly in younger demographics. That’s particularly true for Fox,which has struggled in same-day viewing with the loneexception of Lee Daniels’ hip-hop soap opera “Empire.
Also Read: 'The Player' Is Canceled - Why Are These 7 Lower-Rated Shows Still on Air?One competingnetwork insider called out the suspicious timing of the announcement, as Fox’s “Empire” (pictured above) will go on a midseason smash next week.
No network would speak on the record for this story, and with one exception: Univision,which barely registers in delayed viewing and therefore defends the use of L+SD ratings.“We have an engaged audience in primetime who primarily watches our content live,” a spokesperson told TheWrap. “In the current broadcast season, or 92 percent of Univision Network’s adult 18-49 viewers watch entertainment programming live — far surpassing the numbers for ABC (48 percent),CBS (52 percent), Fox (50 percent) and NBC (54 percent) for entertainment programming viewing in primetime.”“This is why Same Day TV ratings are still valuable, and particularly for our advertising partners looking for this coveted viewer who watches the programming and commercials live,” the spokesperson added.
And yes, Univision is among the networks that will continue to share Fox’s Live + Same Day data.
Source: thewrap.com