On other days, I flipped to another station to ride out a commercial break. I justified my behavior by deciding that most of the other Arbitron raters probably were doing the same thing on behalf of their own favorite stations. But it did make me wonder about the credibility of the numbers used by traditional media outlets to set advertising rates. Radio stations have no choice but to rely on lying cheats like myself for their ratings. And while Nielsen is now using set-top boxes to record actual television viewing, I've read several accounts of Nielsen families who leave their television on to log a program they feel they should be watching when they're in fact somewhere else.
Web sites can record exactly how many times an ad was viewed and by how many people.
They can say how long viewers lingered and whether they clicked on the ad for more information. And with a cookie or two, they can learn even more. It's a level of accountability no traditional media can match. And once advertisers get a taste of it, they won't like settling for less. The push for interactive digital television has little to do with programming and everything to do with cutting through the mythology of Nielsen ratings.