Media Buying Services, Toronto

Eighty per cent of the advertising dollars spent in television are spent at the local market level or regional network level, as opposed to the national level, and currently we have an appalling measurement system for non-network specialty services, which are basically diaries for a few weeks of the year. That’s the area that must be addressed.

I’m looking for higher quality of audience measurement; in other words, the diary system is not getting the job done by itself. We need an electronic component.

I’m also looking for a longer duration of measurement, because schedules change from week to week, and having only a spring and fall sweep is not adequate to give us quality audience measurement.

By my calculations, if we can get all of the audience measurement funding dollars in one place, we can fund a higher quality service. It’s not an incremental expenditure. The problem we’ve got now is we’ve got two competing services, overlapping.

I’m firmly in the camp, at the local market level, of a set meter diary system of measurement.