A showdown is expected on the people meter front in the New Year, and the battle is expected to be a bitter one.
While the Canadian media industry would dearly love to see a resolution to the rivalry between BBM Bureau of Measurement and Nielsen Media Research in 2000, lingering contractual obligations could see the wasteful and costly existence of duplicated audience measurement services drag on for at least another four years.
Nielsen Media Research has been busy locking Canada’s major media management and buying firms into five-year deals in anticipation of the scheduled September 2000 rollout of the rival BBM system in Ontario and Quebec. Currently operating in Vancouver, where it measures more than 500 households, BBM is planning to offer full national service by 2001.
The Association of Canadian Advertisers has its eye on the coming people meter showdown and is planning to get a jump on the issue by holding a summit this week with clients, media buyers and broadcasters.
Bob Reaume, the ACA’s vice-president of media and research, says the question to be addressed is whether the Canadian media industry has the people meter system it needs. The pros and cons of the two competing systems will be discussed at length in the meeting, which Reaume says will be held behind closed doors.
Although Reaume is hopeful that some resolution will come from the meeting, David Stanger, president and CEO of Genesis Media, is less optimistic.
Stanger, who divides his time between Toronto and Vancouver, says media buyers and broadcasters currently have no choice but to use both systems if they want data on Vancouver, Ontario and Quebec audiences. Ultimately, he says, the decision about which system will prevail will not be based on technology, but rather on how the services evolve beyond Vancouver.
‘As long as one has something the other one doesn’t, the industry will be put in a corner where it needs to support both systems,’ he says. ‘The minute they copy each other’s markets, one of them is going to be gone.’
Some media directors believe the deck is stacked against BBM because U.S. parents of agency and client companies will insist their Canadian subsidiaries use Nielsen data because they do.
Stanger, however, doesn’t buy that argument. ‘I don’t think the decision is going to be driven by a north-south accommodation of shared methodology because, at the end of the day, I believe the industry wants BBM to prevail.’
This, says Stanger, is because BBM is a tripartite organization, and therefore represents the interests of all three interested parties – broadcasters, advertisers and agencies.
Stanger says the only way for Nielsen to put BBM in a desperate position would be to meter the top six English markets in addition to Quebec, which would mean Nielsen would need to add Calgary, Edmonton and Ottawa to its system.
In addition to the several five-year contracts it has signed, Nielsen has announced that as of September, it is discontinuing the voluminous paper reports it churns out each year in favour of an electronic file version. The savings will be used to increase the number of Nielsen-metered households.
Nielsen currently provides metered audience measurement for the Vancouver/Victoria and Toronto/Ontario markets, as well as national and regional broadcast networks, specialty cable networks and national syndicators.
BBM, meanwhile, has been preparing for rollout to the Ontario and Quebec markets, and refining its system in the Vancouver market. The company has recently added to its meters a device that monitors when a household VCR is being used, for example, and has made its reports more user-friendly.
