Word: nielsens
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Nielsen, which collects 90% of all dollars spent on national radio and television ratings, knew it was the committee's prime target, and its executives came to the hearings armed with a vanload of statistical charts. But the committeemen were not to be diverted by the long-winded, jargonized explanations of the Nielsen modus operandi. "You gentlemen amuse me," California Republican J. Arthur Younger told the Nielsen men. "I have never yet seen anything that sells confusion before like you people...
Lights & Buzzers. Yet from the confusion, a picture of Nielsen's operation slowly, fuzzily emerged. The company's "sample universe" is peopled with two species of audience: Audimeter families and Audilog-Recordimeter families. In some 1,100 U.S. homes (selected by computer), all radios and television sets are monitored continuously by Audimeters-black boxes about the size and shape of a car battery. Each Audimeter comes equipped with eight weeks' worth of film, which records the family's listening and viewing activity. When a spool of film is replaced (either weekly or every other week, according...
...made. The A-R family is rewarded with $1 a week for allowing itself to be called to work by lights and buzzers. The unanswered question in everyone's mind: Were families that consented to having these electronic watchdogs truly representative of all TV viewers? An ex-Nielsen field man testified that he once had to try 92 homes in Grand Rapids, Mich., before he could place a single Audimeter. On another occasion, in Washington, D.C., he rang 400 doorbells before finding anyone willing to take on the more laborious A-R chores...
...Wasteland. The actions of the small Nielsen sample are extrapolated to determine the habits of the entire tele viewing and radio-listening population. How risky is this? Committee Investigators Robert E. L. Richardson and Rex Sparger had some jolting examples: - In Texarkana, Ark., a woman "didn't like what Jack Paar said on his show . . . concerning the recent Meredith situation in Mississippi, so she turns him off every time he comes on, even though she likes the show." Since each Audimeter represents some 50,000 TV homes in the Nielsen projections, she cost Paar 50,000 "listeners" just...
...Audilog yielded this entry: "Turned TV on this morning so baby could watch it. I had too much to do to day because I had to go away for a while." Nielsen counted the baby's viewing times as valid in its rating equation...