With just one month left until what will no doubt be the most complicated upfront in the advertising world: commercial ratings, major players on each side of the table assembled and showed where they stand on this topic.
"I like commercial ratings. They make us look good," said ABC's sales chief, Mike Shaw.
"Commercial ratings are the beginning of a major overhaul in how we measure television content," said David Marans, exec VP of IAG Research.
"Let's build this brand called the upfront... there are things you can get in the upfront that you can't get anywhere else," said Home Depot CEO Roger Adams.
It seems like everybody is excited about the final arrival of this belated rating metric, because apparently the resources, know-how, technology and advertiser interest have been available for years.
"Program ratings are a dinosaur," Kellogg ad exec Andy Jung said, “they were useful for networks to determine what shows are hits but didn't help advertisers determine whether their commercials were working.” Group M Chief Investment Officer Rino Scanzoni, agreed that commercial ratings will become a big force this year and said an average of the commercial ratings, which as opposed to the traditional program ratings that have been the basis of media negotiations for decades, would be a sensible first step; after that, a gradual move to minute-by-minute and eventually second-by-second ratings will allow an advertiser to find out exactly how their spot did.
People who are concerned about the (lacking of) creativity of current TV ads, also believe the system the industry will get is a measurement that could “breathe life into the stagnating business of TV advertising”.
Proper commercial ratings -- the type that rate each individual spot, have the potential to reinvigorate creativity. Just as the TV buyer can call the seller after he or she receives the overnight ratings to discuss why a program isn't pulling the promised numbers, commercial ratings will give marketers a real insight into whether people actually want to watch their commercials. Marketers and their agencies will be able to see the exact drop off in viewers and compare that across different types of creative.
Commercial ratings are also seen as something beneficial the outsiders of TV ad sales and measurement, say ordinary audiences. We all would agree that nowadays there’re way too many commercials messages spewing forth and the most overt polluter causing the clutter is net work TV.
However, regardless of how well technology lets people avoid ads, consumers don't necessarily avoid ads they like -- and, as proved by YouTube and the Super Bowl, they'll actually seek them out. The problem is, consumers have been seeing far too many ads they don't like for far too long. Much like environmental pollution, commercial pollution proliferates because the economic incentives are flawed. The ugly truth is that the networks will gladly take the money and that unlikable ads can still sell product, especially if given sufficiently heavy weights.
Some say the new TV commercial ratings system may finally offer a partial solution.
It'll give networks a much stronger incentive to fix their business model and start charging variable rates to advertisers based on how much people like their ads. Better still, as a consumer-engagement tactic, consumers could vote on how well they like ads, "American Idol" style, knowing their votes will reward ads they like and punish the ones they find annoying.
Nevertheless, one major flaw in any theory about providing incentives for more likable ads is that even the most engaging ads may not overcome consumers' basic displeasure with ads interrupting what they're watching, said Charles Rutman, CEO of Havas' MPG. On one hand, the fact that Super Bowl ads were among the most-watched online videos the week after the game this year indicates that conventional TV ads can still find an audience, even when the audience can flee. On the other, TiVo data suggest most people fast-forward through whole commercial pods when they can, without discriminating much among the commercials.
In all, let's looking forward to the debut of the new commercial rating system and possible changes it may bring to the net-work TV programming as well as the advertising productions. Hopefully one day commercials will no longer be seen as "pollution", every day becomes Super Bowl.
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