Question

Nielsen is the famous TV ratings company. Write a report about how they go about calculating the audience share statistics that TV advertisers rely on to place cost effective advertisements.

Answer 1

1.

• Nielson measures the number of people watching television shows and makes its data available to the television and cable networks, advertisers and the media.
• Nielsen uses a technique called statistical sampling to rate the shows -- the same technique that pollsters use to predict the outcome of elections. Nielsen creates a "sample audience" and then counts how many in that audience view each program. Nielsen then extrapolates from the sample and estimates the number of viewers in the entire population watching the show.
• Nielsen relies mainly on information collected from TV set meters that it installs, and then combines this information with huge databases of the programs that appear on each TV station and cable channel.

2.

• During the 1960s and 1970s, Nielsen introduced the Storage Instantaneous Audimeter, a device that daily sent viewing information to the company's computers using phone lines and made national daily ratings available by 1973. It allow Nielsen to establish diary reports that presented some insight on the audience.
• According to Lotz, the Nielsen sample included approximately 1,700 audimeter homes and a rotating panel of approximately 850 diary respondents. Nielsen was the controlling factor of audience measurement for national network television.
• In the mid-2000s, networks cried foul, blaming Nielsen for inaccurate rating measurements. This public attention was just the beginning, as Nielsen implemented its automated Local People Meter (LPM) technology.The LPM marked the shift from active, diary based local measurement to more passive, meter-monitored measurement of local markets. The key advancement was that the LPM provided accurate measurements of particular local markets.