The Nielsen Company (Nielsen) embeds audio digital watermarks into the US TV broadcast workflow. These watermarks are detected by Nielsen households and aggregated into a rating for a particular program and market.

Advertisers have been seeking a similar system, a system that would provide a rating by commerical, for quite some time. At a recent conference Nielsen endorsed the Ad-ID standard, and announced plans to incorporate Ad-ID within its watermarking system to provide commercial ratings.

Read more at the NY Times blog

Ad-ID enables individual commercials to be tracked from the beginning to the end of their life. The Ad-ID standard, created in 2003, is managed by the ANA and the 4A's (formerly the American Association of Advertising Agencies).