Ratings

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Ratings Management
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What are ratings and shares?

• Ratings are the percentage of people who have
  television sets that are turned in to a
  programs.
  
• Shares are the percentage of people who have
  their television sets turned on and watching a
  program.
  
• Shares are always larger than ratings.
• Ratings and shares are broken into demographics.

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Arbitron

• The major firm in charge of monitoring ratings in
  radio.
  
• Arbitron receives all of its data through
  diaries.
  
• Listeners are measured in quarter-hour people,
  which are the cumulative amount of different
  people that listen to a program during that
  quarter hour.
• Formerly in the television rating business, until
  that market was taken over by

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Nielsen

• They gather and publish television data for
  virtually all television markets.
  
• Network affiliates pay Nielsen for a detailed
  listing of the viewership of the station.
  
• Nielsen measure the viewership of smaller local
  markets during rating periods (sweeps).
  
• The regular daily ratings for the network are
  measured in larger markets by Nielsen Families.

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Collecting Data

• Diaries are the most common way to collect the
  media habits of the audience.
  
• Passive household meters records when a
  television set is turned on and to what channel
  it is tuned.
  
• Peoplemeters provides the research firm with
  demographic information, along with record of
  viewing habits.

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Collecting Data

• Passive peoplemeters use computers to recognize
  who is watching television.
  
• Coincidental telephone interviews ask the
  respondents what they are listening to or
  watching during the phone call.
  
• Telephone recall ask people what they watched or
  listened to during the day.
  
• Personal interviews are rarely used.

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Sources of Error

• Diaries Refusal to accept diaries failure to
  complete accepted diaries unreadable and
  self-contradictory diary entries diary fatigue
  failure to mail diaries back
• Passive Meters refusal to allow installation
  breakdown of receivers, meter and associated
  equipment telephone-line failures

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Sources of Error

• Peoplemeters same drawbacks as passive meters,
  plus failure of some viewers to use buttons to
  check in and check out having succumbed to
  response fatigue
• Telephone calls busy signals no answer
  disconnected telephones refusal to talk
  inability to communicate with respondents who
  speak foreign languages.

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Sampling

• Sampling is the study of some people to represent
  the behavior of the population as a whole.
  
• Neilsen uses a multistage area probabilty
  sampling technique to pick its Neilsen
  Families
  
• Selection of a county
• Selection of a block group
• Selection of a block
• Selection of a house
• All of this is done through random sampling.

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Defining Markets

• Neilsen divides the United States into 210
  designated market area (DMA), which are broken
  along one or more counties lines.
  
• Arbitron uses area of dominant influence (ADI),
  to determine the area of the local markets.
  
• Two to five ADIs may comprise one of the total
  survey area (TSA).

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Use and Abuse of Ratings

• Ratings and shares perform a vital function for
  operators and advertisers which makes them
  subject to misuse.
  
• In response to complaints and investigations
  about ratings in the 1960s, the Broadcast Rating
  Council was established.

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Use and Abuse of Ratings

• Reliability in research refers to the degree to
  which methods yield consistent results over
  time.
  
• Validity of research refers to the degree to
  which findings actually measure what they purport
  to measure.
  
• Hyping refers to deliberate attempts by stations
  or networks to influence ratings by scheduling
  special programs and promotional efforts during
  rating sweeps.

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Broadcast Audiences

• Set penetration (saturation) is the percentage of
  all homes that have broadcast receivers (98.5).
  
• The mediums set use will vary based on the
  medium. (televisions peaks vs. radios flat
  use)
  
• The yearly rating vary much more in television as
  opposed to radio.

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Least Objectionable Program

• Marshall McLuhan, a famous communication
  theorist, once said that the medium matters more
  than the message.
  
• Paul Klein, former CBS programming chief,
  expanding this idea with the LOP.
  
• Remote controls changed the viewing habits from
  tuning inertia to that of restless viewers.

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Cable Audience

• Subscribers numbers may tell the researcher who
  has access to the cable, tell nothing of who is
  actually tuning to the channel.
  
• Local cable audiences are far more difficult to
  measure than national audiences.
  
• By the mid-1980s, research had begun to show
  clear evidence of national cable networks
  influence on audience viewing patterns. (p. 311)

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VCR Audiences

• VCRs are common in American TV homes, with about
  87 of homes having VCRs.
  
• Time shifting enables VCR owners to control when
  they watch broadcasting or cable programming.
  
• Zipping (fast forwarding) zapping (deleting)
  commercials affect the ability of a network to
  collect advertising revenues.
  

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Internet Users

• Internet usage is a hard statistic to measure.
• However, its important to find out how many
  people come on a web site for bandwidth purpose
  and attracting advertisers.
  
• The average internet users uses the internet 30
  hours during a given months. (Graphic,
  Visualization, Usability Center's (GVU) 7th WWW
  User Survey)

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Radio Management
19
Television Management