"100 million francs invested blindly"
The advertising industry's anger about Mediapulse's missing figures is growing. As Tagesanzeiger.ch/Newsnet writes, the first customers of Mediapulse are said to be taking legal action against the quota meter.
Since the beginning of 2013, TV ratings have been measured using the new "5000 Series Peoplemeter" system (Werbewoche.ch reported). Due to an error in the audiomatching process, Mediapulse was unable to deliver the ratings and in mid-January put off the waiting advertising and media world until the end of the month (Werbewoche.ch reported). The program managers and the advertising customers have no idea how often the sports they have switched on have been watched. If the data were not available at the end of January as promised, Mediacom boss Axel Beckmann told Tagesanzeiger.ch/Newsnetthe situation is becoming "very critical". In January, 100 million francs had been invested "flying blind" - either the clients had paid too much or too little. Both are tricky and problematic. Beckmann also criticizes Mediapulse for not running the two systems in parallel during a test and start-up phase.
The TV broadcasters are not faring any better. 3+ boss Dominik Kaiser tells Tagesanzeiger.ch/Newsnet that the situation is "pretty much a disaster," and Ringier is also suffering from the current situation in its marketing of TF1 in Switzerland. Media consultant Andy Lehmann would even withhold payments as an advertising customer - although he estimates the new figures to be rather higher than before due to Internet usage.
Mediapulse's managing director replies that they have corrected the errors and are checking whether the data is now being collected correctly. The January data will be recalculated as soon as everything is working. Nevertheless, Tagesanzeiger.ch/Newsnet wants to know that first customers want to take legal action against Mediapulse. However, the company did not want to go into detail about this.
