Nielsen Commercial Ratings Released

Most people are familiar with the Nielsen ratings. After all, they pretty much determine which tv shows get to stay on the air and which are banished after a mere pilot episode. Unfortunately, this sometimes means that beloved Emmy winning programs like Arrested Development get cast to the side for reality tv shlock. But that's a different story for a different day.

The reason I'm writing about the Nielsen commercial ratings is because of some interesting information they produced. According to the TV Decoder Blog at the NY Times website, the ratings for commercials during popular television shows did not greatly decline from the show ratings and, in some cases, actually increased. This occurred despite the increase of digital video recording which allows viewers to fast-forward through commercials.

So what does this mean for television advertising? Well, perhaps it means that despite all of the sweaty palm wringing done by ad execs, commercials are just too ingrained into our viewing experience to ever really go away. As the poster "William Taylor Design" put it in the comments of the article, "Commercials are alive and well for the same reason they have always been – because they are part of the ultimate passive entertainment." In other words, when we plop down in front of the tube we're probably just going to sit and watch no matter what we see.