Nielsen taps Whiting CEO
DVRs lead new toppers to-do list
Nielsen made Whiting's appointment official on Monday, promoting her from prexy-chief operating officer to succeed John Dimling, who will stay on part-time as nonexecutive chairman of A.C. Nielsen Media Intl.
Nielsen had been grooming Whiting, a 23-year veteran of the company, for the top job since she was appointed prexy-COO last May.
A spokesman for Nielsen said Whiting was the key exec responsible for giving cable networks credibility on Madison Avenue. She helped cable nets ramp up their advertising revenues by allowing them to break out ratings in their own universe.
These cable-universe reports pumped up the numbers of networks like USA, ESPN and TBS, riveting the attention of ad agencies, who began spending more of their clients' money on cable. There are now 53 ad-supported cable networks, and many of them harvest as much as two-thirds of their total revenues from advertising and only one-third from monthly license fees from cable operators -- a reversal of the way the revenues were divvied up in the early days of cable.
Whiting now is faced with the challenge of figuring out how to publish ratings of TiVo viewers who record an episode of "Friends" and don't watch it until a month later. For Nielsen to report the recording rather than the actual viewing would be unfair to, say, a major studio that's advertising one of its movies on "Friends" in hopes that people watching it will go to the movies that weekend.
The Nielsen spokesman said Whiting also is working on a portable meter that would record what people are watching without forcing them to push a button every time they enter and leave the room.
Whiting joined Nielsen in 1978 as a management-development trainee. In 1986, the company made her VP of Nielsen Homevideo Index, the cable TV ratings service. She became senior VP and director of marketing in 1993. Nielsen shifted her to general manager of national services and emerging markets in 1997.
