评估的新方法
定性分析方法
作者：BRIAN STELTER
来源：The New York Times
Tacitly displaying their frustration with the country’s chief source for television ratings, 14 media companies and advertisers said Thursday that they had formed a research organization to pursue new methods to measure audiences.
Members of the new organization, called the Council for Innovative Media Measurement, said they would finance studies and promote innovation in audience measurement.
The group will seek answers to a question that has befuddled the industry: how should the buyers and sellers of advertising time take into account the consumers who are increasingly watching shows not on TV sets, but on computers and mobile devices?
The members of the council, which is being led by Alan Wurtzel, the president of research for NBC Universal, said that their work was not meant to replace Nielsen Media Research, the dominant supplier of ratings information for television and one of the chief sources for Internet measurement. Instead, the council will seek to identify and study new methods of measurement, they said.
“The industry recognizes that the current measurement isn’t good enough,” Mr. Wurtzel said in a telephone interview. “It’s not an indictment against Nielsen, it’s just that no one — no one — is measuring cross-platform the way we need it to be measured.”
What the council members will do with the information they gather is unclear. When the consortium was initially described in media reports last month, it was evident that some television operators and advertisers were keenly interested in creating a rival source of ratings.
The council includes the research chiefs of the owners of ABC, CBS, CNN, ESPN, Fox, MTV, and NBC; their counterparts at advertising companies; and representatives for several of the nation’s largest advertisers.
“It’s a new media ecosystem, yet the industry relies on old media metrics. This simply can’t continue,” Laura Desmond, the global chief executive of the Starcom MediaVest Group, which is a member of the council, said in a statement.
The council said it would start by investigating two issues: the feasibility of compiling ratings from set-top TV boxes and new ways to measure viewership across TV sets, Web sites and mobile devices.
Nielsen is already testing measurement systems on both fronts. “We have always worked closely with our clients on innovation,” the company said in a statement. “We look forward to working with them, along with other clients, on ways to define the future of media measurement across more screens.”
