Will Peoplemeters Ruin The Boston TV Party?

by Dave Zornow
CSP Magazine, June 2001

For more than twenty years, cable networks have been receiving daily demographic numbers from Nielsen. But in spot cable it's a different story because demo data are only reported during months when Nielsen collects persons viewing via paper diaries. All that changes this year, as Boston becomes the first of ten DMAs to get local market people meters.

It's been a long time coming, and for many apprehensive TV station reps in the Boston market, it is still too soon. Known flaws in the diary which produce "zero cells" in Nielsen reporting will likely change the ratings of all programming, almost certainly lifting the viewing to late night shows and programs with lower ratings.

"There is going to be a shift - it will definitely effect the ratings and the buy/sell process," says Adrienne Lotoski, Research Director at WCVB in Boston. Broadcasters are fearful of the effect of a triple witching which could destabilize the Boston DMA: a new ratings methodology, new 2000 census data and a looming economic recession.

A Cable Opportunity
Cable salespeople hope local market people meters will level the playing field, providing continuous measurement instead of only delivering demo data when their competitors are in a sweep period. Diaries historically under report cable viewing because diary keepers are required to remember and write down everything they viewed for a seven day period. It's not too bad for those who still watch TV with rabbit ears, but in an environment when even basic cable households receive an average of over 50 channels, keeping track can be quite a challenge. Boston is one of about 50 DMAs that currently use household meters to collect set tuning information. Later this year, it will become the first local market to discard the diary and go all electronic for TV ratings.

This sounds like a slam dunk for buyers, who will get more data more often, but Sally Stitt, president of Boston-based Star Media, isn't so sure. "You can only slice and dice so far - will we have sufficient sample size to properly analyze the data?" Stitt is concerned that in Nielsen's rush to roll out the new service, agencies won't have time to make sense of the new information. "In our attempt to learn more about the media, we get piggy and push the data further than its statistical reliability allows," she says. Nielsen responds saying stations, systems and agencies will have a six month period of parallel data, but Stitt wants a year of side-by-side data to better understand how seasonality will be affected by the new methodology.

For network cable veterans, the fear and loathing that Boston is going through is a flashback to the late 80's when network cable first received their peoplemeter numbers. "The change from meters and diaries to people meters varied from network to network," says Howard Shimmel, president of Symmetrical Resources and former Nielsen employee and VP research at MTV Networks. "Nationally, the change had very different impact, depending upon the target demographic and program type," he says.

Hold On One Minute (by Minute)
In addition to being a poor instrument to collect hundreds of channels of potential viewing, diaries only measure viewing in quarter-hour increments, hardly helpful when trying to study the minutiae of audience flow and commercial ratings. Because Boston will be using the same technology as the national peoplemeter panel - in fact, Boston homes will be part of the national panel Nielsen uses to deliver network ratings - it's an opportunity to use the same minute-by-minute methodology for both network and spot ratings. Starcom is among the national shops on record as preferring this unified methodological approach to TV audience measurement.

But Beantown beancounters aren't bullish on the idea. That's because a change to an average minute methodology is likely to reduce ratings (when Nielsen counts by the quarter hour, a station gets 15 minutes of credit when only a five minute minimum is viewed). Media buyer Stitt and station researcher Lotoski agree that adding the minute methodology is too much for one market to take at one time. "Let's start with quarter-hour data," says Lotoski. "I don't want Boston to be at any disadvantage. We should wait until a certain percentage of the country has converted to people meters and the industry has had a chance to review the data." Star Media's Stitt thinks the woes will further compound the cons of this idea. "It's better to keep Boston consistent with the other DMAs. There are specific reasons why we buy spot TV and there are a different set of reasons why we buy network. It's more important to sync Boston with the other markets than with network TV," she says.

Stitt sees the potential for big changes with new data. "We'll need to decide which version of reality is real," says Stitt. "New people meter data will challenge the previous version of reality. The level of uproar it causes will be directly related to how much the new reality disagrees with the old."

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