Nielsen looks beyond TV, hits roadblocks

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: Being part of a “Nielsen household” has long been a point of pride for people whose television habits are monitored by the Nielsen Co. In exchange for token compensation, these viewers know that their personal taste influences Hollywood and Madison Avenue. But now that Nielsen wants households to let it eavesdrop on many more activities—from web surfing to cell phone use—how far will people open their doors?

As television-watching has waned as a component of media consumption, Nielsen has been trying to retool the way it collects ratings, to keep the figures relevant to the media companies and advertisers. Instead of tracking the TV habits of one set of people, the purchases made by a second set, and the web-surfing of a third, Nielsen would like to track multiple activities of the same people, allowing it to determine when someone saw an ad and then bought the product.

“I’m going to go to a home and say, ‘I want your TV, I want your Internet, here’s a cell phone you’re going to use and, by the way, I want to measure your grocery purchases’,” said James M O’Hara, president of media product leadership at Nielsen. “That’s a lot.”

Nielsen faces competition in the ratings business, but its advantage is the strength of its brand name, which opens the doors to many households.

In one potential setback to its ambitious modernisation plan, Nielsen last year ran tests to determine the willingness of its television-monitoring households to allow electronic tracking of a second behaviour, web usage. So many people said “no” because of privacy concerns that Nielsen said this month it would scale back the plan—for now.

Recently it announced a second blow: the cancellation of a three-year-old effort, Project Apollo, that has been monitoring the purchases and radio and TV habits of 5,000 households. The initiative, a joint venture of Nielsen and Arbitron, was shuttered because too few clients wanted to pay for the results.

If there is a silver lining, it is that Nielsen can now pursue multimedia ratings projects on its own without treading on the exclusive agreement it had with Arbitron, which specialises in radio tracking.