by Dave Zornow

Published in the Cynopsis:Weekender,  5/22/06 

The advertising industry has never had a research supplier quite like Frank Maggio.

The Chairman & CEO of ReacTV and erinMedia opened his presentation yesterday to the Advertising Research Foundation’s Audience Measurement Symposium in New York offering $100 to anyone who knew what percent of the popular vote George Washington received in the first presidential election. True to his word, Maggio handed the audience member with the winning answer a crisp Ben Franklin right on the spot. *

Maggio has a history as an attention getter. Last year his company sued Nielsen Media Research for anti-trust. Earlier this year he offered to buy NMR as part of the sale of VNU, Nielsen’s corporate parent.

erinMedia is challenging Nielsen’s TV ratings monopoly with an alternative system which uses a census of digital cable set top boxes as a data source offering far more sample to measure one  cable system than Nielsen provides for the country. But critics point out that bigger isn’t always better – especially if bigger means omitting viewing from satellite, broadcast-only and analog cable households.

Where most ARF presentations are heavy on numbers and leave little to the imagination, Maggio’s pitch sounded more like political campaign rhetoric. He implored the industry to “set America free” from the Nielsen monopoly urging advertisers to “place your advertising dollars with those who will get the truth out,” namely, his gaming convergence network, ReacTV.  After attendees were reminded that Nielsen was a Dutch owned “propaganda machine” that picked the sample and processed the data without any oversight, attendees could have been forgiven for wondering if they had wandered into a taping of The O’Reilly Factor.

Despite the media industry’s historical mistrust of Nielsen, Maggio’s decision to offer incendiary rhetoric instead of convincing research didn’t win a lot of friends. "Most of his talk was an anti-Nielsen diatribe,” says Josh Chasin, a conference attendee and Principal at Warp Speed Marketing in New York. Chasin says the strategy backfired because researchers were put in the awkward position of feeling sorry for Nielsen. "When you combine righteous indignation with gross naiveté, there is a fine line between charming and troubling,” Chasin says.

Industry veteran Gale Metzger knows first hand how difficult it is to launch a Nielsen competitor, having tried and failed to launch a network TV measurement service while president of SRI in the early 90’s. Although sympathetic, he was unimpressed by erinMedia’s approach. “The data are dirty – produced as a by product of other systems.”  Metzger says that despite erinMedia’s large sample sizes, a ratings service which measures only set top boxes wouldn’t be an improvement over Nielsen’s methodology because digital cable covers less than a third of all US TV households.

* FYI, our first president to be elected without winning a majority of the popular vote was George Washington. That’s because prior to the ratification of the 12th Amendment in 1804, there wasn’t any popular vote to win.  ## 

Dave Zornow is President/TNG Research, a media research consultancy and applications development company that works with media sellers and research providers.

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