Ratings, Sweeps and Inflated Numbers

Cord over at Marketing Hipster tackled one of the mysteries of TV advertising today in his blog.

He notes, "The networks are saying to advertisers that the Thursday night 9-10 pm time slot gets on average of 2 million viewers, but for May sweeps when we ran our best programming, we garnered 6 million viewers so that is what we are going to charge you whether it is sweeps or not."

In one of the comments he asks, "...why do advertisers put up with it?"

A statement worth pondering, but i would question whether or not the actual advertisers truly understand it. These "network" systems work GREAT for the media buyers and agencies - each taking their percentage of dollars spent. My experience with media buying houses includes them asking about NUMBERS and NUMBERS alone. The higher the number, the faster they can spend a client's budget and ask for more. When they are told its 6 million viewers versus 2 million, they can suggest to the client they spend 3 times as much to cover the entire year, larger ad budget by client = larger commissions by agency.

Don't be fooled, the system works just fine for those that have been in the system for years, the good old boys and girls of big traditional agency advertising. Note these are the same individuals that are scared to death of new media, scared to death of track-ability in their client's advertising.

Just my thoughts from inside the TV world.

Comments

[Cord]

Randy,

Thank you very much for the mention and I could not agree with you more. I think your point about that the system is setup for the media buyers and not the advertisers is right on. I was going to mention that in my post, but thought it might of gone on too long.

I guess the next question is the way technology is going and how Google is looking to try to bring multiple forms of advertising under their online PPC program, how long do many of these ad buyers have left? With greater transparency comes more knowledge and understanding from the advertisers. Do you think this will make any difference?

Thanks again for the shout-out.