NIELSEN LOCAL METER SERVICE
By Adnews Staff
If you want to know what people around Toronto are watching on television from one minute to the next, Nielsen Canada can tell you. The company's media services division started giving out viewer numbers for the Toronto-Hamilton area last week - marking the first local market people meter service in North America. Until now Nielsen has just done electronic measurement of viewers on a national level, culling its numbers from a broad survey sample of families across Canada. This included 250 in the Toronto area. The new local service measures four hundred and fifty families in the Toronto-Hamilton market. Media planners and buyers can massage the people meter data with Nielsen's Media Advisor software, which will eventually show reach/frequency, duplication, audience flow and quintile analyses. Nielsen launched the local service last week with one of the most entertaining presentations ever seen by media buyers, a take-off on a David Letterman-type talk show. Nielsen hopes to be doing local market measurement eventually in Montreal and Vancouver as well. It has signed a four-year peace pact with long-time competitor BBM Bureau of Measurement, under which Nielsen will continue electronic measurement of national network audiences, but will stop doing written diary research in all markets. Nielsen will leave the diary method to BBM which will cease all national measurement, as well as Ontario and Quebec regional surveys. Also, BBM is to abandon local market measurement in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver as Nielsen sets up its local service in each of these areas. This deal must still be approved by the federal Bureau of Competition, so BBM is still doing local Toronto surveys until at least the fall of 1995.