MB Civic

For many years, the Nielsen family has been essential to television programming, unelected representatives in television-land who ultimately define what the rest of us get to watch between commercial breaks. Soon, those Nielsen families are going to provide ratings for the advertising itself.

The purpose behind the Nielsen ratings is, of course, to provide a basis for the price of commercials. Once, it was enough to know how popular a show was to set those prices. But the world of advertising has changed with the rise of the Internet. On the Internet, advertisers don’t just know how big an audience sees their ads; the audience can respond to an ad immediately, often by making a direct purchase.

That’s because the Internet is, to use the familiar word, interactive. Most of television’s interactivity, so far, has been summed up in the Nielsen families’ diligently taking notes on what they watch. But measuring the impact of television is not what it used to be. The handwritten diaries are steadily being replaced by devices that record what’s on (and who’s watching) every few seconds, whether it’s live or TiVo.

This fall, for the first time, those boxes will help Nielsen measure ratings for commercial breaks, though not yet for individual commercials. This is likely to bring a sea change in television advertising, though no one is sure which direction the tide will be flowing. Some analysts predict that we’ll see a major shift in prices — probably downward — as well as changes in the structuring of commercials.

The one certainty is that we’ll get a glimpse into viewer behavior of a kind we’ve never had before. That is because we are almost certainly entering an era in which television will begin to watch us nearly as much as we watch it. Advertisers now demand the most popular programs. As we refine the ratings of commercials, can it be very long until the networks are demanding the most popular ads?