I am an Emory University graduate who spent four years with Procter & Gamble before going out on my own. I entered the real estate development business in the late 1980s. I went on to develop a new type of TV rating service that focuses on commercials. I received a patent on the process in the fall of 2003. The premise of ReacTV is to charge advertisers only based on the viewers of their commercials, which requires second-by-second TV ratings. ErinMedia can provide those ratings. 


Explain briefly how your rating system works. What sort of data is it pulling?

  ErinMedia receives “scrubbed,” privacy-compliant digital set-top-box data from up to 25 million or more advanced boxes. We receive no personal information, so we don't know anything about the viewers themselves. 
   We then use intense mathematics to overlay census-type data from companies like Claritas and also gain insight from the types of programs represented by the data, to derive demographic, second-by-second ratings and behavioral analysis. The larger the sample, the higher the accuracy.


How does this differ from what Nielsen is offering?

    Nielsen is a business built around the premise of sampling. Their “innovations” seem to be centered on finding better ways of figuring out what their extremely small sample is doing.
  ErinMedia is premised on getting better information from thousands of times more sample points. ErinMedia believes we should count everybody, not just Nielsen’s 7,800 households. 
   Right now we could measure 25 percent of all American households. Our margins of error are many times smaller than Nielsen’s.


What sort of additional data does your system gather that Nielsen does not, if any?

   Nielsen has a lot of data on its 7,800 households but virtually no data on the 109.6 million other U.S. households.
    They also do not offer second-by-second viewing behavior, or national ratings for actual ads viewed. We can offer this.
   Their whole model is based on the supposition that their 7,800 households match the rest of the country. We think this is preposterous. Our data provides insight on the broader population, the 99.99 percent of America that Nielsen ignores. 
  

When did you begin developing your measurement system and how extensively has it been tested?

   ErinMedia began experimenting the data analysis in the late 1990s, ironically enough after some interest was expressed by Nielsen. It has been tested and refined in three markets over the last three years and is now ready for deployment. 
  

What is the legal substance of your case? Briefly, what is your legal argument that Nielsen violates antitrust laws? In what way?

   Our suit initially addresses two potentially illegal antitrust behaviors by Nielsen: the use of long-term staggered contracts to ensure competition cannot get a toehold and the acquisition of competitors. As we dig deeper we expect that we may find other antitrust behavior. 
   The use of long-term staggered contracts is an insidious and extremely devious way that monopolies can entrench themselves. They do so by taking the biggest customers out of the market for long periods of time, and the effect is to keep the industry as a whole from moving away from the monopoly without vast penalties and disruption.


Others have challenged Nielsen in the past. Why do you think you will prevail in court?

     There hasn’t been an antitrust suit filed against Nielsen in the TV ratings industry that I know of.
    This is an entirely new, much more direct way of slaying the dragon, and is quite frankly the only way that anyone will ever be able to compete with or replace them. All Americans are afforded the right to use the courts to stop monopolistic business practices that stifle innovation and to level the playing field for competitors. We believe we will prevail because the truth is on our side. 


You contend that Nielsen contracts discourage competition, but Nielsen notes that the contracts allow for competitors. What is your response?

   Their response is a diversion tactic. Just because a company can offer a superior product does not mean that the market is open. The market is completely closed. You cannot fight a monopoly local market by local market.  You need to replace Nielsen or to restructure the ratings industry. 
  Both options need the implicit approval of the top customers, who now have staggered contracts spread all over five-year periods, making it impossible to gain any momentum or consensus. 


Have you approached the networks and the advertisers and media buyers with your technology? What has been their reaction?

  Advertisers and media buyers absolutely love our technology. However, without the entire industry adopting our products they have their hands tied. 
  

What is your timeframe for being operational as a direct challenger to Nielsen?

   To directly challenge Nielsen, the most lucrative national ratings system, first requires a fair playing field. They must be stopped from buying competitors and from signing our potential customers to long-term staggered contracts.
   This suit should help accomplish this. Once this happens, we believe the industry will embrace a “system-specific” ratings method, and ErinMedia, or its competitors, should quickly grab over 50 percent of the national ratings dollars.
    If we fail in our suit, it will unfortunately be more of the same. Without the help of the government,  ErinMedia will likely join the numerous failed companies that couldn’t compete against Nielsen’s monopoly.