By Dave Lindorff

    Media buyers and researchers have long complained about Nielsen Media Research's monopoly in the ratings business. 
     Hard to imagine, but that monopoly may at last be coming to an end. Or so's the promise.
   An upstart venture called Cableclik says it has developed a competing ratings system that it believes will vie directly with Nielsen on a national level within two years.
    Between now and then it says it will begin offering local cable ratings in markets across the country, for the first time providing cable operators the opportunity to offer detailed viewer data to local advertisers.
    Cableclik is a joint venture of a software called Next Century Media and a technology integration company called Millennium Networks.
    It says it has the technology that will allow it use existing set-top boxes in cable subscribers' homes to collect extensive and accurate data on what individual households are watching.
    "We'll be able to provide second-by-second viewing information, as well as commercial ratings," says New Century Media president Bill Harvey.
    "We'll even be able to tell you when people switch out of a commercial, which is very important. Of course we'll also have the demographic breakdowns by household."
     Cableclik, which is still in the process of being incorporated, has already run a test in Atlanta, in cooperation with cabler SBC and a number of major advertisers, including Coca-Cola, General Motors, Nissan, Visa, Delta Airlines and Sony.
    "We have software that can be electronically downloaded potentially into any of the 8 million digital set-top boxes and the 20 million high-end analog set-top boxes out there," says Harvey.
     "That's a pretty decent sample, about a third of the cable population and a fourth of the television households in the country."
    But he readily concedes getting to that point will take time and marketing savvy.
    For now, Cableclik has its sights on a smaller goal: the local cable providers who, even in major markets like New York and Los Angeles, don't get ratings reported by Nielsen because they are too low to measure reliably in the Nielsen local market samples.
    "Some of these companies pay a million dollars to Nielsen and then get mostly hash marks in the ratings book, saying 'below minimum reporting standards,'" says Harvey.
    Cableclik plans to change all that.
    "The cable companies have the data," he explains. "They just can't provide it to advertisers, though. They need someone with research capability to put it together, and it has to be someone who is a third party without an axe to grind."
    Jim Dennison, chief operating officer of Millennium Networks, the other half of the joint venture operation, says the new company's goal is to go from the one contract it has with a cable operator (which he declined to identify beyond saying it is in a major market), to a total of four local market contracts this year. 
   He says the company is currently in talks with MediaOne, one of the country's largest cable providers.
    "In two years, after we've added enough local markets," he says, "we should be able to start providing national cable ratings."
    The company has funding for the next two years of operations, he claims, and is using a partnership model in recruiting customers.
     "We invite cable operators to invest in the business as partners," he says.
    Does that raise the risk that advertisers will doubt the objectivity of Cableclik's results? "I don't think so," argues Dennison, who worked for Arbitron in the operations department.
    "The cable operators will not have day-to-day control over the operation of Cableclik."
    A big advantage for Cableclik is that it doesn't require the huge staff that Nielsen needs to select, manage and maintain its 5000-household sample. Nor does it have the $1,000 per household cost of a special household TV monitor or a people meter.
    "All we have to do is call the household to get permission to download our software," says Harvey. "Once it's loaded, the viewer doesn't have to think about it. It's a completely passive system."
    That said, the system cannot provide the detailed individual viewer information of a Nielsen people meter or a diary.
    "The idea of using the set-top boxes to get data is very useful," says Lyle Schwartz, Young & Rubicam's senior vice president for electronic media research.
    "There is a nice base of local advertising that will want this kind of ratings data. And it could prove to be an excellent research tool for giving information about how people are using TV. But how good it will be will depend on Cableclik's execution."
    In the past, efforts to compete with Nielsen have led to improvements at the big ratings agency. Indeed, people involved with the last effort to seriously challenge Nielsen's monopoly, called SMART TV, claim that Nielsen's aggressive response to the challenge led to SMART's demise last year.
    So can Cableclik expect the same kind of devastating response to its challenge?
    "I don't think so," says Harvey. "We actually signed a contract with Nielsen a year ago because they wanted to work with us, but we let it lapse after nine months because we found having links with them was more of a burden than a help."
       He adds that if Nielsen were to start collecting data the way Cableclik does "they'd have a hard time charging as much as they do for their other data."
  Nielsen, for its part, says it's not about to surrender the local cable rating business to Cablelink. Says a spokesman, "We're looking at going into the local cable markets. The question is how?  I don't see us paying for the data. It might be that we'd construct a sample and combine that with set-top box data."
    As to Cablelink's longer term threat as a competing provider of national ratings, the spokesman says, "Cablelink is what it is.  Customers will have to evaluate them accordingly.  Are they going to use their data to do business with. Will it be usable as a currency for anything?"

-Dave Lindorff covers television and research for Media Life.

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