Researchers Examine Holes in Nielsen Ratings Methods
Debate Over Missing Young Males Gives Way to Scrutiny of Out-of-Home Viewing, Other Measurements

By Joe Mandese
Special to TelevisionWeek  (Dec. 2003)

After weeks of finger-pointing and countless news stories about the decline in viewing this season among young adult men, the core issue apparently is not simply the missing men but the notion that they may represent the canaries in the coal mine of TV audience measurement.

That, more or less, was the takeaway from what was billed as yet another industry debate over reasons for the decline in viewing among young men, but which ended up touching on much broader and more profound issues concerning the capability of Nielsen's current-and even its next-generation-TV audience measurement system.

The debate, which took place during last week's Radio and Television Research Council luncheon in New York, featured executives from the broadcast, cable and ad industries jousting with one Nielsen representative.

The panelists didn't achieve a consensus on what is causing the decline in viewing among young men. But the group did agree on one thing: A disproportionate amount of industry attention has been paid to a topic that otherwise would appear to be a fairly narrow methodological discussion. Explanations given by panelists and audience members for why the industry has become so consumed by the topic revealed what's really going on here.

"The concern is that this is the first crack in a dam," one top TV researcher attending the luncheon told TelevisionWeek. "The real story is that people are alarmed that this is part of a bigger problem that has manifested with young men."

Asked just how big an issue it is, the panelists agreed it is somewhat more important than the average TV research issue. But they all qualified that statement, saying the issue is important because it isn't simply about the decline in ratings for young men, but other things as well.

"People have started to create all these theories," said David Poltrack, an RTRC panelist and executive VP of planning and research at CBS. "This became a cause celebre and got out of control of the research industry."

What is also did, said fellow panelists Artie Bulgrin, senior VP of research and sales development at ESPN, and Brad Adgate, senior VP and director of corporate research at Horizon Media, was shine a light on bigger issues, practices and methods surrounding the overall measurement of TV audiences.

Mr. Bulgrin pointed out that Nielsen's current practices lead it to intentionally omit upwards of 5 percent of the households that agree to participate in its TV ratings panel, simply because they are difficult to measure technically, or because the industry has yet to determine how aspects of their viewing should be credited. Some of these households-those equipped with personal video recorders or other new consumer technologies-represent parts of the audience that marketers, agencies and programmers most want to know about.

"Nielsen's sample is incomplete," asserted Mr. Bulgrin. "As much as 5 percent of the U.S. TV universe is bypassed."

Mr. Bulgrin and Mr. Poltrack also said Nielsen's sample is incomplete in another way: It measures only viewing taking place within a sample household. And that, said Mr. Poltrack, may be a key contributor to the drop in ratings among the youngest adult male viewers, who are believed to do much of their TV viewing outside their households, including at college campuses.

"As long as the young-adult audience consists of a large number of dependent young adults living in someone else's home, their television viewing will never be accurately measured by a home-based system such as that utilized by Nielsen," Mr. Poltrack said earlier in the day during a presentation at the UBS Media Week conference in New York.

That remark turned the tables on the whole young men ratings debacle, which so far this season has the networks scrambling to rationalize the fall-off to Madison Avenue. By claiming it is an in-home measurement problem, Mr. Poltrack switched from defense to offense to begin positioning the industry for the next big TV ratings battle: out-of-home measurement.

During his UBS presentation and later that day on the RTRC panel, Mr. Poltrack began laying the foundation for an industry debate on the new extended measurement service Nielsen is creating to measure viewing done in some out-of-home locations, including vacation homes and college dormitories.

Kevin Svenningsen, senior VP of sales and marketing for Nielsen's Agency, Broadcast and Syndicator Service, said Nielsen has installed meters in nine college dorm rooms and is beginning to recruit vacation homes as well. He said cooperation rates initially have been higher among college dorms (65 percent) than among vacation home (50 percent) prospects.

He said the service is being sponsored by six companies, including ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox. He would not disclose the other two. Based on comments from the other RTRC panelists, the list does not include ESPN or Horizon Media.

Mr. Bulgrin said ESPN is not supporting the service because he believes the real measurement issue is the overall measurement of out-of-home viewing, of which he said, "Vacation homes represent very little of the out-of-home pie."

Mr. Adgate, meanwhile, adopted a Madison Avenue position that insights about viewing outside the home are valuable, but advertisers and agencies are loath to factor them into TV ratings that are the basis of ad negotiations.

"College kids have always watched television and they've never been measured before," Mr. Adgate said, adding, "I don't know how much that will affect the currency."

This debate is likely to accelerate as Nielsen's extended measurement service begins yielding data and if a new portable people meter capable of measuring viewing, as well as radio listening, outside the home is deployed by Nielsen and the system's creator, Arbitron.#