ACA COMES TO AGREEMENT WITH BBM
By Adnews Staff
The Association of Canadian Advertisers will be evaluating BBM Bureau of Meaurement's TV audience measurement system when it is set up in Vancouver this fall. The move developed from the association's criticism of how BBM was handling the people meter program. Almost halfway through an agreement with Nielsen Media Research Canada of Markham, Ont., BBM opted out of the deal and now plans to compete with Nielsen using a measurement system developed by Taylor Nelson AGB of the U.K. The ACA took issue with BBM ending the agreement because ACA members helped to fund the agreement, which was for both BBM and Nielsen to work jointly on rationalizing Canada's TV measurement services. ACA contributed $500,000 to the move. The deal was supposed to be in effect until Sept. 30, 1999. After BBM's announcement in March that it was ending its agreement with Nielsen, ACA wanted the company to refund half of the association's investment. BBM has agreed to refund ACA if a validation test in Vancouver fails. It also agreed to invite direct ACA involvement in the validation test, have a third party audit the validation test in Vancouver, with BBM and the ACA each paying half the cost of the audit, explore expanding advertiser representation on BBM's Television Executive Committee and/or Board and explore other ways of involving ACA members in other testing BBM may undertake. ACA says it still has concerns surrounding BBM's termination of its agreement with Nielsen. It wants one cost-effective measurement and believes two separate systems in place at the same time will "have a confusing and destabilizing effect on the industry." Nielsen's audience measurement technology uses a probe that identifies the specific channel to which a television set is tuned, as well as a simulcast meter which recognizes audio and video patterns. Nielsen claims the combination of these two devices gives credit to the appropriate station. BBM's picture-matching technology matches the video picture recorded at the household with a BBM-monitored reference set of video pictures comprising all the TV signals received in a given market. The meter can measure both analog and digital signals.