Two questions about TV ratings

Factual Questions
1

Here are two questions regarding TV ratings:

First of all, why do Nielsen ratings still exist? Given the widespread usage of digital cable boxes, it seems like it would be far easier for cable companies to gather what their viewers are *actually *watching and the resulting ratings would be more accurate than sampling. Or is this still not possible given digital cable boxes?

Second, could a struggling TV show that’s truly desperate for ratings just pay off a bunch of Nielsen families to watch their show, therefore artificially boosting their ratings? Given the amount of money that goes into some modern shows, it seems like this could make some sense financially instead of letting all the money used to build a show from the ground up go to waste when it gets cancelled after an episode or two. Are there laws against doing this?

2

Nielson does still collect data through Nielson families.

But they also buy data from your cable company regarding your cable box usage and DVR usage.

They then compile all kinds of statistics with that data. The Nielson ratings you see are just one example and do include your cable box usage.

3

Not so familiar with US TV ratings as I am with those in the UK, but I’ll give this a go.
[ul]
[li]Recording viewers from the cable boxes (assuming they’re capable of doing it) would only give raw numbers. Broadcasters and advertisers need to know the demographics – age, income, lifestyle etc.[/li][li]Even in the US, digital cable isn’t universal. Only recording those viewers that have it would leave out a substantial number of people – probably mostly lower income and rural. Programme makers and advertisers want to reach those people too.[/li][li]If the ratings in the US work similarly to the UK system, they gather data on what people record while watching another show and watch later, within a certain period. Something else the digiboxes might not be able to cope with.[/li][li]There’s a privacy and consent issue. Not everyone wants someone monitoring their viewing habits.[/li][/ul]

Regarding the second question, whether it’s actually illegal or not, I’m guessing any company caught fixing the ratings would be out of business very quickly.

4

We were a Nielson family one month. A royal pain. We kept logs faithfully for a day, then tried to recall accurately for two days, then filled the rest with what we wanted on the air.
We signed something to the effect that nobody had swayed our votes and they would be secret.

By the way, we just got a 50 page survey from American Institute of Consumer Studies, used by most publishers of magazines. A lady came out with the booklet and asked us the questions in person, about all sorts of magazines and all sorts of products advertised in them. We were paid $25 before and $50 after. I told her we wouldn’t do it again, as it just took too long.

5

there are regular families. there are also totally random families picked for one time sampling every month.

6

The Internet generation always overestimates how universal new technology is.

Digital cable has less than a 50% penetration.

7

What people aren’t understanding is Nielsen isn’t a scientifc poll of who watches what on TV and it never was.

More to the point, Nielsen never has claimed to be a scientific poll.

So when Nielsen says “American Idol” Is #1 are they right? Who knows? We don’t now in regards to total numbers we know in regards to marketing that it is accurate.

Here’s an example, back in the 50s I Love Lucy was the number #1 show. It got HUGE and I mean HUGE ratings. Nielsen and other rating agencies used to conduct polls back then much differently. For instance, they’d stop people on the street and phone people random and ask “What are you watching.”

This made for accurate numbers but an odd thing happened. The I Love Lucy Show was sponsored by Phillip Morris (cigarette makers) and because the ratings were so high for I Love Lucy, Phillip Morris paid through the nose, but it noticed something, no one was buying cigarettes. Desi Arnaz best illistrated this when the bosses from Phillip Morris complained to him. Desi replied: “We’re delivering the numbers, it’s your marketing people that can’t sell the product.”

Then it was figured out, people who watched *I Love Lucy, * simply didn’t smoke. Only around 1/4 of the viewers were smokers. People who don’t smoke aren’t likely to say “Wow an ad on TV, I’ll start smoking.” Smoking ads on TV usually targeted people to get them to switch brands

Eventually Phillip Morris dropped I Love Lucy

So this is why Nielsen exists. The raw numbers don’t matter. If the public isn’t going to buy your product, who cares if they watch or not.

Nielsen measures a small percentage (sources say between 2,500 and 10,000 people). How does Nielsen choose? It goes to the people that BUY its service. Mainly TV Stations and ad agencies, TV stations and other PAY for Nieslen for its data

Nielsen says “What kind of people are likely to buy your products and watch TV”?

After they get said info, THEN they go and get their representative families.

So a Nielsen rating isn’t a measure of the TOTAL number of viewers (raw) it is a measure of those likely to buy products. REMEMBER TV exists to sell things. Networks aren’t putting on programs to entertain you. They are putting it there so you’ll watch ads.

There have been lots and lots of attempts to make other agencies to compete with Nielsen. After all no one knows how accurate Nieslen is? They have all fallen flat on their face. Similar to the way when people try to start a search engine to compete with Google or an auction site to compete with eBay.

Could a show pay people to watch? It’s very unlikely because no one knows who is a Nielsen family. This is part of the agreement Nielsen families sign, when they agree. If you found out who was a Nielsen family you could bribe them. But Nielsen changes it’s families often so even if you found out, a few months later, that family could no longer be a Nielsen family (the term expired) and they could just take your money and claim they were.

Again remember if you’re not a Nielsen family what you watch is TOTALLY without meaning.

This is a reason why TV sucks now. People have an idea go to the network and the network says “Will this show appeal to those who buy our products?” If not, no matter how good a show is, it won’t fly.

An odd example of this was the Golden Girls. This show had huge numbers among those over 50. Of course no one cares much about them :slight_smile: Now here’s the kicker, the Golden Girls, was also one of the biggest show of the under 21 set. People under 21 loved that show and they watched in huge numbers. And people under 21 are good for advertisers.

So even a show that skews old like the Golden Girls can be huge if it also appeals to another segment.

My last example is UPN. Until 2003 UPN brought in higher ratings than the WB. But it’s ad revenue was less than a third of the WB. Why? Simple UPN was huge among African Americans, but as a group African Americans do not buy things they see on TV. This example best shows that. To oversimplify a bit for every 1 person that watched the WB you needed to get THREE people to watch UPN to get the same ad revenue.

So when you think Nielsen think:

[ul]
[li]Not scientifc but doesn’t claim to be[/li][li]The only game in town[/li][li]An 800 pound gorilla[/li][li]Targets people likely to buy things off TV, NOT the raw number of viewers[/li][/ul]

8

If you want to know who watches a show just look at the ads. The 6:30 news has lots of ads for prescription drugs. So it’s not a surprise a lot of older people are a big part of their audience.

9

I’m curious; how long did it take?

10

Umm - cite?

I was a Nielsen filler-outer for a month, and no one asked me what I bought.
The I Love Lucy story you gave just demonstrates that it is important to know who is watching a particular show. It does not imply that Nielsen goes out and biases its sample. For one thing, different advertisers are going to want to appeal to different demographics, and Nielsen would not be able to sell its surveys to those who it just doesn’t bother to count. It does need to be sure that its sample is demographically accurate, that is, does not under-represent any given viewer subpopulation.

I suspect they are well aware that response from people filling out the survey are less accurate than they get from attached boxes which record actual choices. Even they aren’t accurate, since they don’t know who is in the room while the TV is playing, if anyone. I think they have some procedures to measure this. None of this means the poll is not scientific, unless by scientific you mean 100% accurate, which is nonsense.

When I did the survey I did try to only report on stuff I actually watched (though I did start a thread asking about what I should be watching - none of the suggestions appealed.) I do admit turning on some stuff I thought needed support, kind of a Hawthorne Effect in a way.

11

Clearly the identify of the families is a deep dark secret. I suspect anyone with the list has signed a nondisclosure agreement, and the list is considered a trade secret, and there are plenty of rules about violating that. Anyhow, there are enough families so the odds of trying to pay them off without any of them squawking are pretty low.

12

Oh, please, where did you get this ridiculous fairy tale?

Nielsen offical history:

The enitre reason for Nielsen’s existence was that they didn’t just stop people on the streets. Never did.

What, ratings are about advertising? And nobody figured this out until I Love Lucy?

Ratings have always been about advertising. Here’s another secret. Magazine circulation is also about advertising. Newspapers are also about advertising. Not about readers or viewers or hearers. About advertising. Nielsen didn’t invent that in the 1950s. Any medium supported by advertising is about advertising. If you don’t understand that, look at how poorly newspapers and magazines are doing in these days when the advertisers are deserting them.

Are ratings scientific in the sense that laboratory experiments are? Of course not. But the firms have spent millions to try to get the best possible representative samples of a national audience in all the demographics. Is it less than perfect? Certainly, and people have been saying so since 1936. Are there better methods? Not yet, which is why Nielsen’s competitors keep failing. Do the results go to the public which pays nothing for them? Of course not, the results go to the people who need this information, the stations and the advertisers. The tiny shred of most watched shows that gets released is for publicity purposes only. This has never been any secret.

You can’t bribe people to boost ratings to sell advertising at a higher rate. Any decent DA could prosecute you on a half dozen changes, probably starting with fraud. But that’s only because ratings are for advertising. You can fool the public as much as you want. Some of them will even believe stories about I Love Lucy and ratings. :smack:

13

It’s definitely technologically possible for a digital cable box to report what channels it was tuned to at a given time, what shows were dvr’d, etc, There are a couple of problems with using this data for ratings though. The first is privacy - if it became widely known that that cable companies were tracking what you were watching all the time, there would be a huge backlash against them. Second, many/most people just leave the cable box on all the time, and turn the TV on or off. The cable box has no way of knowing whether the TV is actually on, or if anyone is actually in front of it, so you’d have lots of false data. Third is the demographic info - knowing who in a household is actually watching a show is valuable info as well.

14

There is no privacy issue involved if the data they track is not directly connected with your personal information. But just to be sure, check the contract you signed with your cable compay. But, they definitely know what is being watched, they just might not track by whom.

A modern DVR/Cable box can tell if the signal sent out through the cable to the TV is being actively recieved. It uses a little more electricity when the TV is on. So the cablebox knows if the TV is on. My cable issued DVR will not record the current channel unless the TV is on. If my TV is on, its always recording so that I can rewind, etc. When I just turn my TV on, there is no rewind ability, but a few seconds later, I can rewind back to the point I turned the TV on.

If the cable box is on and the TV is on and no one is watching…The cable box can’t tell that, but some will turn themselves off after a couple hours with a warning on the screen “press any button to stop auto-shutdown”.

15

I’m not saying the cablecos couldn’t defend themselves in court, I’m saying it would cause bad blood and bad press.

Are you sure you aren’t turning off the cable box and TV? Mine won’t write live TV data to disk if the STB is off, even though it’s still doing DVR recordings. IIRC, you can only tell if the TV is on if you’re going through the HDMI connector. If its component, S-video, or composite, you can’t. It’s not a current draw thing, it’s a clock sync thing. Whose STB do you have? I didn’t think anyone was doing TV on/off detection.

16

I have satellite, not cable, and since we don’t plug the satellite box into a phone line there is no way they know what we are watching. It works fine with the TV off also. Forcing the TV to be on defeats the whole purpose of a DVR and wastes tons of energy.

I’ve seen detailed statistics about Tivo users habits (like the number of times the Janet Jackson incident was watched in slow motion) so I suspect they gather lots of data, one way or another.

17

Cite? I did Nielsen diaries twice, and never had to sign such an agreement.

18

i think he was speaking about the full time families. what you did is a one time (or 2 or 3) sampling.

19

i think he was speaking about the full time families. what you did is a one time (or 2 or 3) sampling.

20

Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t **everyone **who has cable in the US now have digital cable? You know, the whole DTV switch we went through this year?