Digital set top boxes (DSTBs) offer broadcasters, agencies and advertisers a potential measurement technology and sample size to provide set tuning data, virtually down to the second, for even the most fragmented TV markets based on what eventually may come close to a census of homes in the market. This paper reviews the opportunities that DSTBs provide the industry and reveals the lessons learned from a proprietary test of such technologies executed in Atlanta in 1997 for BellSouth. These include findings regarding commercial retention and program environment. The key issues, principles, guidelines and business issues concerning the collection and dissemination of DSTB data being developed jointly by the AAAA (American Association of Advertising Agencies) and the ARF (the Advertising Research Foundation), via the new Digital TV Open Data Standards Task Force, is also reviewed.
This paper is an update of the Advertising Research Foundation's historic 1961 monograph "Toward Better Media Comparisons". It has been revised to include new levels of paid media performance attentiveness, persuasion and response and to consider new media types, especially online media and Interactive TV. The new model contains eight levels at which media performance can be measured to help marketers plan their advertising campaigns: vehicle distribution; vehicle exposure; advertising exposure; advertising attentiveness; advertising communication; advertising persuasion; advertising response; and sales response. The way advertisers think about media has changed in the last forty years. The Internet, Interactive TV and Direct Response advertising have expanded media's job from simply exposing a message to include encouraging and facilitating a response. The concept of recency has focused marketers on advertisingâs contribution to making the next sale. And more and more, it is on response that media are being judged. Media measurement has no choice but to follow mediaâs newly expanded purpose.
There is increasing interest in the "Digital Superhighwayâ. How will TV audience measurement cope with this radical change in the medium? Many believe that the fast approaching fractionated and mobile television environment will necessitate a radically new measurement system that is at once portable, passive and people based. In an effort to find out what is going on in television audience measurement in other major countries around the world, BBM Bureau of Measurement commissioned New Electronic Media Science of New York to conduct a worldwide survey. The survey was designed to find out the methods currently in use for television audience measurement, levels of satisfaction with these present methods and the extent to which countries other than the U.S., Canada and Australia are moving towards passive people meters, portable or otherwise. This paper presents the results of the worldwide telephone survey. It appears that the push-button people meter is at the zenith of its development cycle, with systems operating in 30 of the 34 countries examined. Most of the systems have been introduced in the last three years, but a third of the people meter countries are already considering a shift to passive measurement -- a move that has strong support in almost all the countries surveyed, especially those with more experience of the conventional push button people meter.