Could the era of Thursday night "Must-See TV" be over?

Once the premier night for advertisers to shill their high-profile products and the weekend's movies, fewer and fewer people are turning on their TVs on Thursday nights. During the first four weeks of the fall television season, only 48.5 million people have tuned in on Thursdays -- 2.2 million people and 4.3 percent fewer than last year, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Among the coveted 18- to 49-year-old demographic, Thursday is the fifth-most-watched night of television every week -- a far cry from the 1990s "Must-See TV" heyday.

Everyone is always up in arms about the Nielsen ratings, saying they don't accurately represent the shows that a lot of people like or aren't measured correctly or simply don't matter in this age of DVRs, iTunes, network web sites, and DVDs.

Now it looks like the networks are giving a thought to providing an alternative. CBS, NBC, Disney, News Corp, Discovery, Time Warner, and Viacom are getting together and hope to have some sort of plan on what the "consortium" will do by the end of September. A VP at Starcom MediaVest, one of the companies involved, says that they don't necessarily want to replace Nielsen but there's no reason why another company can't "come in and do both [TV measurement and digital measurement]"

[via TV Tattle]

Advertisers are starting to bail on the controversial CBS drama Swingtown.

This is predictable, if a little confusing. What exactly did the advertisers think they were sponsoring? (In the case of Dannon Yogurt, actually no - they just bought rotating advertising on CBS and didn't know when their ads would appear.) When they were told the show was about swapping, did they think it was recipes? And isn't the show on at 10 PM and come with a warning at the beginning? Proctor & Gamble won't advertise on the show at all.

Amid controversy and the threat of certain world leaders boycotting the upcoming Beijing Olympics, the word came out yesterday that President George W. Bush would attend the opening ceremonies. According to the Hollywood Reporter, this is good news for NBC, and the companies that have bought advertising for the Games.

While I can see how a boycott based on human rights abuses in China and Tibet would be a serious problem for the network -- and it still may lose viewers who choose to individually tune out rather than give positive sanction to China's misdeeds by watching -- I don't see how NBC can think a Bush appearance will bolster ratings.

If you look at the Nielsen ratings each week, where you see shows like Survivor, NCIS, all of the CSIs, Two and a Half Men, 60 Minutes, Without A Trace, and Criminal Minds consistently in the top 20, this probably won't come as a surprise: CBS has won this year's May sweeps period.

This is the sixth year in a row that the network has won the period. It also helped that CBS had some big specials this year, including the Academy of Country Music Awards. And here's an interesting little factoid: CBS has the number one scripted show on five different nights: CSI: Miami on Mondays, NCIS on Tuesdays, Criminal Minds on Wednesdays, CSI on Thursdays, and Numb3rs on Fridays. The number one scripted show on Sundays is Desperate Housewives. As for Saturday, who the hell knows what's going on that night.

Is it really a big surprise that television advertising isn't as effective as it used to be? As TV watchers -- okay, we're uber-watchers -- we know that with DVRs and TiVos we're zooming through ads, or we're channel surfing in between segments of our favorite shows, or renting/buying content in formats that allow us to avoid commercials altogether. Now, according to the Association of National Advertisers and Forrester Research's TV & Technology Survey, we learn that six out of 10 marketers believe that TV advertising has become less effective in the past two years. And it's getting worse.

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