LONDON: To globe-trotting television viewers, the proliferation of international channels like CNBC and Eurosport may seem like a powerful demonstration of how the world is shrinking. But for anyone who wants to know how many people actually tune in to these channels, different countries can seem as far apart as ever.
National TV ratings agencies like Nielsen Media Research in the United States, BARB in Britain and GfK in Germany are geared toward gauging the mass audiences of market-leading national channels. But channels with a broader reach complain that they are poorly served by this patchwork, leaving them at a disadvantage in the pitch for advertising.
"Pan-regional has been kind of like the Wild West of media," said Nick Bauer, a Stockholm- based account director at MediaCom, an agency that buys media space and time on behalf of advertisers. "It has always been a bit of a leap of faith." Pan-regional is the industry term for international TV channels, newspapers and other media.
In an effort to address that problem, Eurosport recently introduced a new measurement system that, the channel says, makes it the first to provide an accurate Europewide picture of its audience on a daily basis. Eurosport, which is owned by the French broadcaster TF1, compiles viewership data from seven European national ratings agencies, extrapolates it to cover the entire region and can report it as soon as the next day.
"If you've used pan-European TV before and you've said, 'Liked the campaign but not so sure about the metrics,' now we can prove that it worked," said Ben Money, research and marketing manager at Eurosport in Britain.
Advertisers increasingly have been demanding that kind of accountability from television and other "old" media now that the Internet offers them the ability to track exactly how many people clicked on a certain ad. Yet measuring television audiences remains an inexact science, burdened by the limitations of technology, viewers' behavior and ratings organizations' budgets.
European TV measurement agencies use viewer panels, typically a few thousand or more in each market, to provide an estimate of overall viewership of a certain show or channel. These people agree to have their viewing habits recorded by a metering device installed in their homes. In other countries, written "diaries" are still used to track viewing.
Advertisers are not the only ones who have criticized the imprecision of such systems. Ethnic minority groups in the United States recently complained about Nielsen's methodology, saying that they were underrepresented in the tallies, which prompted Nielsen to take steps to address their concerns.
Pan-European channels similarly contend that they are discriminated against, despite the fact that their audiences are disproportionately affluent, making them potentially attractive to advertisers. Because measurement is done market by market, these audiences may barely register in the system of national audience panels, even though their collective viewership can be considerable.
Eurosport's new system, developed with a data- crunching firm called Telmar Peaktime, aims to solve that problem by providing overall audience figures for the channel, even though its broadcasts are tailored for different markets with commentary in the local language. Such a system might be less useful for cross-border channels that broadcast in English only, experts say, given their limited reach.
Cost could be a stumbling block. Money, the Eurosport research and marketing manager, said that national ratings agencies sometimes charged six-figure sums to provide overnight data, meaning that a pan-European system like the one Eurosport uses could involve a multimillion-euro investment.
Another problem, some channels say, is that viewer panels count only people who watch TV in their own homes. The globe-trotting executives claimed as loyal viewers by 24-hour international news channels, for instance, are likely to watch in hotels or airports. Many sports fans, meanwhile, gather in pubs and bars, where they also go uncounted.
"The meter panels are set up to measure national mass audiences," said Nick Mawditt, head of research at CNBC Europe and chairman of International Television Research Group. "The CNBC audience sort of flies above the meter panels."
For these reasons, some cross-border channels forgo meter-based measurement systems and rely instead on periodic telephone and questionnaire consumer surveys to gauge their viewership. One of these, the European Media & Marketing Survey, asks affluent Europeans which of the international television channels they may have watched at any point in the preceding month.
But such surveys, which are also used by print publications and other media, are typically published only once a year, or even less frequently. Mawditt acknowledged that it in an era when advertisers want rapid, precise feedback, they provided only a "dipstick measure" of television audiences.
To supplement these surveys, CNBC and other channels conduct their own research. But advertising strategists and TV channel executives express frustration about the lack of independent information.
Mawditt said some members of the television research group, which includes many of the leading international channels, had discussed ways to rectify this shortcoming, but found it difficult to agree.
One possibility, he said, might be to use portable "people meters," clipped to panelists' belts or strapped around their wrists like watches, to measure out-of-home viewing. Radio ratings agencies in the United States, Britain and elsewhere have experimented with such devices, which pick up signals beamed from radios and record the programming that an on-the-go panelist is exposed to during a given period.
But any such system could be years away, Mawditt said. That means that international television channels may have to come up with their own solutions, as Eurosport has done, or they and their advertisers may simply have to live with the current, sketchy data.
"You have to live with the currencies that exist, while understanding their limitations," said Jason Hayford, international account director at Initiative, a media-buying agency, in London.
