Word: nielsens
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Last week, while executives tensed like the knots in their pine paneling, the latest chapter flashed through the industry. Nielsen's top ten network TV shows for early December were...
...these were the ten best shows on TV; indeed, they were by no means a roster of merit. It simply meant that, by one of the systems in TV's way of counting the house, they drew the biggest audiences. By this alone, rating systems such as the Nielsen work the most ruthless tyranny in a nervous industry that looks to its audience for leadership instead of providing its own. As big-time TV enters its second decade, the ratings are more powerful, feared, hated-and needed-than ever before. The sponsor has always demanded omens that his money...
...most eloquent, hard-hitting critics of the ratings are the services themselves-when speaking of their competitors. Nielsen, for example, argues that human error, bias and forgetfulness work against the accuracy of the others' methods. He says also that their samples are usually unreliable. In special surveys, he has tested the accuracy of the other methods by the yardstick of his own and says that all three fall wide of the mark. Nielsen's rivals-who also rap each other's techniques-seize on the fact that Nielsen's national system measures the tuning of sets...
What Ratings Can't Do. The ideal system, according to CBS President Frank Stanton, would be "to get a Nielsen rating the morning after." The industry now waits almost a month for the reports. Nielsen has devised an Audimeter that can transmit readings instantly to Nielsen offices by leased lines and, at the request of TV brass, is preparing an estimate of what his service would cost on an instantaneous or overnight basis. He holds hope that it may be economically feasible...
After five weeks of exhaustive TV pulse-taking, Nielsen reported last week on viewers' reaction to the 1956 political conventions. Items...