TV Ratings System Essay Research Paper How

T.V. Ratings System Essay, Research Paper

How was the rating industry started and how does entertainment-rating work. Since the beginning of radio and television, advertisers have been spending billions yearly in order to promote sales and gain business, so it just makes sense that they want to know if there advertising money is being put on the stations that are actually being listened to or watched. Because of this high demand of user information, companies began to come up with ways to monitor these activities without actually going to each household throughout the country. For this to happen devices had to be made that are compatible for everyday household use and could be used by anyone at that location. However the solution was conceived on finding this information about who listened or watched what and for how long it didn t matter, just as long as the advertisers knew where to put their advertisements when it came to the popularity of a station.

The beginning of this ongoing process of audience surveying began in the 1920s with radio when radio station owners grew curious about how many people actually listened to their stations. The broadcasters of these stations urged that listeners of their station filled out a post card verifying that they actually heard this request and also to state whether their stations signal was clear or not. This type of survey continued on for a while until advertising companies began to demand the estimated size of their listening audience in order to decide what stations that they would air their product advertising on. Nevertheless the American Association of Advertising and the Association of National Advertisers coincided to form the Cooperative Analysis of Broadcasting, or the CAB in 1930. From this came the first recorded method of audience recording called the telephone recall method. With this method 35 cities were chosen across the United States to have calls placed to random homes picked from a phone directory. From there they asked the residents to recall what programs they had been listening to. This was a start, but also a rough one due to the problem of forgetfulness. Even though this is more accurate than asking a person what they had listened to the night before, the human memory is not always correct or reliable. These methods of the CAB operated until 1946 when another company saw the opportunity at hand and seized the chance to begin a more accurate and more productive way to measure the audience. This new company called the C. E. Hooper introduced the telephone coincidental method, which is very similar to the telephone recall method in that household residents were asked if they were currently listening to the radio and what station or program they were tuned in to. This method was more accurate in that the questioned would not have to rely on their not so dependable memory. The results of this survey called Hooperatings were then sold to advertising agencies and broadcasters. This is as far as person-to-person telephone surveying went. From here on most if not all audience surveying was done mechanically through at home devices used to record the same data.

In 1942, a new company was unveiled called the A. C. Nielson Company. This new company was different from other rating companies in that the Nielson industry did not rely on only house-to-house telephone calls, but instead came up with a mechanical device called the audimeter. This audimeter was distributed to random households, this new device consisted of a sharp needle that marked a small sheet of paper each time the tuning knob was moved displaying what station was being listened to and how long the set was in use for, and after a certain period of time this device was to be sent in for analysis. This new contraption measured set use as opposed to actual listening time; nevertheless advertisers preferred the Nielson ratings to Hooperatings so Nielson bought out Hooperatings in 1950.

In the 1950s TV began to grow rapidly so Nielson moved its audimeter to television sets and each household set was equipped with one. The same principal was used with the TV sets in that at each chosen time period the household resident was to open up the device and mail the material recorded inside, and for each households compliance and cooperation they received a big 50 cents a week. The data taken from the audimeter was then analyzed to form two separate reports for both network programs and local television markets. Nielson was doing fairly well in the business, but it lacked one major source of information that many broadcasters and advertisers were looking for and that was demographics. In 1949 Nielson received a competitor in the TV rating business and that was the American Research Bureau, later known as Arbitron. The Arbitron solved this problem of lack of demographic information by coming up with the diary. This was a specially prepared book used for listing all of the information about who is viewing what and for how long. Because of this Nielson also came up with its own diary, and then soon after Arbitron came out with its own version of the audimeter. Soon after all this rivalry chaos Nielson dropped its radio rating service in 1963 and solely devoted its attention to television ratings. Through thick and thin it ended up that Nielson would be the prime rating service for television and Arbitron radio. Throughout the years the technology steadily