Don’t Miss TV Rating Points Owed You By Not Removing the Skew

Don’t Miss TV Rating Points Owed You By Not Removing the Skew

Nielsen Ratings has released 2014 Winter Olympic Exclusion Data that takes the market survey and removes all of the Olympic programming from all stations where the Olympics were shown. Where there was Olympics programming, the time slots will be blank and reported as 0 ratings/imps. This data should be used to Post (comparing the rating points you bought versus what was actually delivered) to remove the skew that comes from the Olympic broadcasts on 4-week averages (the Olympics ran about 2 weeks out of 4 in the February 2013 seatings sweep). Exclusion Data should be used for posting non-LPM markets (these are metered markets that have 4 surveys per year— Feb, May, Jul, Nov), for posting January and/or March against the 4-week February average ratings. If you are posting for the exact day/date/time in LPM markets (these are markets with 12 rating books per year), the general market data should be used instead of Olympic Exclusion Data. Using the general market survey, ratings/imps would be reported for the Olympics which would be important particularly if you have spots that aired during Olympic programming. So, for a first quarter 2014 flight, you would use the Winer14 Olympics survey for posting date ranges of January (12/30-1/29) and March (2/27-3/30). Then you would use the regular Feb14 survey for the Feb sweeps date range: 1/30-2/26.  This way, specific ratings/imps by day/time will be reported for the spots that fall in the survey period / sweeps (FEB14), and the 4-week average without the Olympics averaged in will be used for the spots that ran outside of the survey period / sweeps.