Research

Some surveys say back-to-school spending will be up, another says down — either way, the CE and PC sectors may not be happy.

More than two-thirds (66 PERCENT) of respondents to a MediaPost survey believe Nielsen Media Research is an unregulated monopoly, but most of them don’t believe a law should be created regulating the TV ratings business. Those are some of the key findings of a survey fielded online by InsightExpress for MediaPost leading up to today’s Congressional hearings on a bill designed to regulate the TV ratings business. The findings, based on the responses of 248 subscribers, more than 66 percent of who identified themselves as either advertiser or agency executives, are consistent with the positions taken by top ad industry associations, which oppose Senate bill 1371, or the so-called FAIR Ratings Act.

Agency leaders specializing in multicultural advertising and marketing voiced strong opposition to Senate Bill 1372, authored by U.S. Senator Conrad Burns (R-Mt) and known as the “Fairness, Accuracy, Inclusivity and Responsiveness in Ratings Act of 2005.” Three leading agencies agreed that S. 1372 would mandate a costly and unnecessary accreditation process for private corporations responsible for monitoring the broadcast viewing habits of consumers.

In the latest round of political debate surrounding the TV ratings business, representatives from Madison Avenue, the TV industry and the research business testified on Capitol Hill Wednesday, stripping away much of their partisan rhetoric and reducing their positions to a few simple themes, mainly whether the so-called FAIR TV Ratings bill would stifle or nurture competition and innovation in an industry that now has one self-regulated monopoly.

Is there a point at which we cannot use more data?

Large numbers of internet users do not know the basic definition of some of the hottest new internet innovations and one of the most serious online dangers.

People en Español releases their findings from the fourth wave of its comprehensive research study-the Hispanic Opinion Tracker (HOT).

A study titled: “The Future Use Of The Spanish Language In The USA — Projected to 2015 & 2025” just released by Hispanic U.S.A. Inc. reveals startling results about the dramatic continued growth of Spanish-Speakers in America.

Scarborough Research released an analysis of beer consumers (ages 21+), which indicates that today’s beer drinkers are more likely to be between the ages of 21-34 and affluent.

Advertising Age has just published their second annual Hispanic Fact Pack offers valuable, hard-to-find data about demographic trends, marketer spending by category and company, Hispanic media and an expanded ranking of the top 50 Hispanic ad agencies.

U.S. Hispanics with Internet access at home are rapidly adopting broadband, with half of online Hispanics going online over high-speed connections at home, according to the third annual AOL/Roper U.S. Hispanic Cyberstudy. That’s on par to the share of the general online population with broadband at home, and comes despite the fact that Hispanics are relatively newer to the Internet, the survey found.

Advertising spending for the first quarter 2005 rose 2.4% over the same period last year, due to gains across major media, according to preliminary figures released by Nielsen Monitor-Plus, the advertising intelligence service of Nielsen Media Research.

In what is likely the most radical development in TV audience measurement since the introduction of people meters, Nielsen and a small industry steering committee have decided to change the way Nielsen prompts people to register their viewing, abandoning the concept of channel tuning and moving to a time-based prompt that would interrupt TV viewers every 42-minutes. The move has the potential to impact ratings for TV shows and networks, as well as how Nielsen households watch the medium of television itself.

The U.S. Commerce Department reported 32 cities and 22 states/territories posted double-digit growth in visitation in 2004. Among the top 20 cities visited, New York City , Washington , Las Vegas and Chicago posted the strongest growth for 2004. Among the top 20 states/territories visited, Virginia , New York , Arizona and Utah posted the largest growth rates when comparing annual 2004 to 2003 visitation growth estimates.

Walt Disney is getting into the cellphone business, teaming with Sprint on a Disney-branded wireless service.

In what is shaping up to be an especially vicious campaign to dislodge Nielsen’s TV ratings monopoly, upstart erinMedia Wednesday published an analysis of Nielsen’s own data, which suggests its research methods are “systematically flawed.” The analysis follows an antitrust suit erinMedia filed against Nielsen on June 16, which alleges that Nielsen’s business practices have been anticompetitive and have stymied the development of better methods of TV audience measurement. Nielsen called the analysis a publicity stunt and said the suit is “meritless,” but erinMedia’s actions threaten to drag out some of Nielsen’s dirtiest laundry.