Turner Broadcasting Sales Inc. said Wednesday that it's about to hit the
street with research pitches to agency planners and clients based on its latest
reach-and-frequency study, "Media at the Millennium III."
Turner executive vice president Barry Fischer said at a briefing that its
research tool was developed in conjunction with Nielsen Media Research and
Multimedia Solutions.
The goal is to persuade clients that fully distributed cable networks can
substitute for any broadcast network, he said.
The updated PC-based tool can show them in a faster, easy-to-use way than
before the point in a client's schedule at which network commercials 'bring
little or no incremental reach,' he said.
"If you don't reach new people," he added, "it becomes real expensive."
Turner in the past two weeks gave some research executives a preview of the
tool just to double-check their premises. Those included media-research veterans
Erwin Ephron, Ed Papazian and Knowledge Networks Inc.'s Gale Metzger, Fischer
said.
A couple of years ago, Fischer indicated that the first two Millennium
studies (in 1997 and 1998) led to a shift of "perhaps $500 million" from TV to
cable within the first year.
For now, this tool is available only via Turner, but Fischer said that
eventually, Nielsen will be selling it to interested ad
agencies.
