It looks like the battle between Canada’s competing ratings sources is coming to an end.

On July 12, BBM Canada and Nielsen Media Research announced an agreement to merge the portion of their operations that measure television audiences using electronic meters. The merger, subject to regulatory approval, will result in a single source of television ratings information.

BBM is a not-for-profit organization owned and governed by its advertiser, agency and broadcaster members, while Nielsen is an independent company. Currently, broadcasters, agencies and advertisers are forced to incur the cost of subscribing to both services, which often provide confusing and conflicting information.

Neil Senior, broadcast manager for Toronto-based Media Buying Services, says Nielsen and BBM clients have been pushing for this for a while.

‘As an agency, we buy based on the Nielsen People Meter, then we have a station like Global wanting to sell BBM. It’s like buying your apples from the guy who sells the oranges,’ he explains.

A single ratings source should help avoid this type of confusion and cut subscriber costs, according to Karin Macpherson, managing partner of The Media Company in Toronto. However, she says she still has some questions and concerns regarding how the new venture will play out and who exactly will decide how to collect, interpret and disseminate ratings information.

‘We don’t want the broadcasters to have all the control,’ she says. ‘As long as they do, it’s not really a fair playing field.’

It is proposed that the new venture will collect a single set of ratings data, but the data will be released by BBM, rather than by the proposed new company. Macpherson says she is concerned that this setup will give broadcasters, who pay the bulk of BBM’s membership fees, too much control over the process.

While he confirms that broadcasters pay the bulk of fees, BBM president Jim MacLeod says the new company will continue to be not-for-profit and stresses that it will equally represent broadcasters, advertisers and agencies.

‘We’re very sensitive to this, and I know there’s some comment about the governance of BBM, but we’re an open organization, and if the members of BBM want to look at the governance and how it’s set up, I think we should,’ he says, explaining that the new single fee paid for ratings information will basically cover the costs of running the new business.

‘For several years the industry has been concerned about there being two currencies,’ he says. ‘It’s not a normal situation anywhere in the world, and it’s difficult because the numbers are bound to be different.’

The June federal election illustrates just how troublesome two sets of data can be. Having different sets of ratings numbers available created a confusing battle between CBC and CTV over who took the night.

Using only BBM data, CTV’s average per-minute audience for the duration of its broadcast, starting at 6:30 p.m. and ending at 1:13 a.m., was 1.13 million, whereas CBC’s average per-minute audience for the duration of its broadcast, starting at 7 p.m. and ending at 1:17 a.m., was 1.04 million. However, Nielsen numbers provided a very different picture. Nielsen data shows the broadcasters in a tight race early in the evening, followed by a clear victory for CBC mid-evening. In fact, both BBM and Nielsen report CBC in a clear lead between 9:30 p.m. and 11 p.m.

Just to add to the confusion, looking at all the data from both Nielsen and BBM, Dennis Dinga, a media buyer for M2 Universal, says the numbers clearly indicate that CBC took the night.

‘These numbers are a guide that tells me a large portion of Canadians are watching CBC on election night,’ he says. ‘Because audience measurement is done on such a small scale then is blown up, there are always some anomalies when you start dissecting the information; that’s why everyone can always claim they’re number one in something.’

And the numbers often contradict each other. For example, at 7 p.m., Nielsen 2+ numbers show CTV’s audience slightly higher than CBC’s with 698,000 Canadians watching CTV and 675,000 tuned in to CBC. By contrast, 2+ numbers from BBM state that at 7 p.m., CBC had 795,000 viewers and CTV had a whopping 1.6 million.

‘[Ratings numbers] are our currency; they’re what we live and die by,’ says Dinga, which makes this 864,000-viewer discrepancy all the more troubling.

Having a single source will clear up such inconsistencies, if only by presenting data from one source. But media buyers generally agree a single source is still the lesser of two evils.

After the new company is formed, which MacLeod says he hopes will happen by October, Nielsen People Meters will be used to collect data in Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary and Ontario Regional as well as nationally, while BBM meters will be used in Quebec.

In addition, a new audience measurement technology may soon hit the scene. The new Portable People Meter, developed by Arbitron and licensed by BBM, determines audience numbers by detecting inaudible codes embedded in the audio portion of television programming and has been tested in Quebec.

-www.nielsenmedia.ca

-www.bbm.ca