David Poltrack Quotations

Last year was a very strong network television year. 'Desperate Housewives' was the next show in a succession of hot, talked-about, pervasive network television programs.

Historically, I think we basically just sold time to you, and you just bought time from us. And because of this new nonlinear world of television with all these new options, that's no longer the way we do business.

We don't like to say the advertisers are wrong. But we think they're getting a lot of wrong advice.

There is nothing in that mix that will devalue the value of network television. In fact, I think it will be exactly the opposite.

It was an unfortunate situation. And after the dust settled, she did a very good job of building bridges back to the clients.

The bottom line is people came back to television in a very normal way.

This basically challenges the perception out there that people are abandoning television or going to the Internet or doing other things and taking away from television viewing activity, ... The pervasiveness of the medium is not being eroded.

The average regular viewer watches about half the episodes of series, but with serialized dramas, it can be as high as 70%. When you get one that's successful, you're going to get people there every week.

In an industry that is accustomed to a daily diet of ratings, it becomes a little traumatic for everyone when you don't get them on time,

For the first week, viewing levels were up on a weekly basis from last year and the year before, about 3 percent from comparable weeks. And these are the highest viewing levels for overall television since 1993.

The long-term question for Nielsen to answer is: Where is the redundancy? To operate on a real-time basis, doesn't a system have to have a backup redundancy built in?