The Rating Game
KITMAN, MARVIN
OnTelevision THE RATING GAME BY MARVIN KITMAN A / vicious hate campaign blamed the Nielsen ratings for the Cavett Crisis of April-August, 1972. Undoubtedly, hundreds of thousands of letters...
...They think the whole rating business is a hype...
...Even the staunchest supporter of the ratings has to admit that those Nielsen family units are unusually tight-lipped...
...This thing is becoming an obsession with me, like Captain Ahab's white whale...
...These figures are determined by adding up each public TV viewer's scores on elementary school tests and comparing them to commercial viewers' combined grades...
...As everybody knows by now, the Nielsen Company studies the Audi-meters it has placed in 1,100 American homes and multiplies the results by millions...
...Not that I mean to downgrade the telephone business as a glamor profession...
...The others had the ballgame on...
...Public television often uses this system when it tries to convince corporations in the military-industrial complex to sponsor the Boston Pops, instead of network shows like Julie Andrews...
...Not only does this triple my readership, but it pleases the circulation department of the magazine, too...
...The .4 family represents a broken home...
...This is supposed to be an age of skepticism, I know, and it's easy for individuals to be suspicious...
...Since The New Leader Nielsen Family risks personal financial sacrifice by stepping forward—the Company might fire you—I will pay $26 from my expense account for the pleasure of your company at dinner...
...A Ph.D...
...George Jessel used to offer cigars or candy to anyone who had ever been contacted by a rating service, and he never got a taker...
...The W-equation method, I know for a fact, has only a 36 share of error...
...According to my statistical analysis of the rating system, the readers of this magazine have 1.4 families as their share of the Nielsen national sample...
...Is there a lesson here somewhere...
...For years now, I have been asking everybody I meet who reads this magazine and owns a TV set if they are our Nielsen Family...
...Let the company come right out and say: 238 families saw "Daddy is a Dope" Sunday night, 219 watched "The American Farm Hour" (a public service show starring Billie Sol Estes lecturing on "How to Get to Know Your County Agricultural Agent"), and so on...
...But I disgress...
...Think small, Nielsen, and nobody will argue with your facts...
...For example, when one Nielsen Family goes to mother's house on a Wednesday night, this means that 2,450,000 American families went to visit their mothers that same evening...
...An improvement on this method calls for interviewing three biophysi-cists on Sixth Avenue about their viewing habits...
...The confessions of the father or teenager in an average Nielsen Family (whoops, that's redundant?they're all average) would be an instant best seller...
...Despite all the notoriety and abuse they have received over the years, Nielsen Families never seem to do anything of a public nature, like writing their autobiographies...
...Undoubtedly, hundreds of thousands of letters again calling the rating system a villain will deluge the American Broadcasting Company, the A. C. Nielsen Company of Chicago and this writer during the Cavett Crisis of January-April, 1973...
...You might as well not believe in President Nixon...
...The Gallup Poll, on the other hand, avoids this problem by using percentages...
...You will be aiding TV criticism...
...Only three guys in the bar wanted to watch it," the respondent reports...
...It consists of questioning a typical TV viewer in depth...
...This is utter nonsense, of course, but it is fed by the great numbers of TV viewers who never met a single person with an Audimeter in his house—or someone who has received a phone call or diary from a rating service...
...After a period of peaceful coexistence, one of the two talk-show giants will jump—or fall—from power...
...Or perhaps it's the sense of pride they have in their work...
...In the late 1950s, the first time a large group of Americans seriously questioned the credibility of ratings, critic John Crosby observed that the Nielsen Company "is the closest thing we have in modern times to a witch doctor...
...he second thing the company could do to improve its reputation with the cynics is to publicize one of its families...
...Then there are also the so-called "weighted ratings," which seek to measure not the quantity of the audience but the quality...
...The word-equation approach requires an exceptional thesaurus, whereas Nielsen's projection method requires an honest mathematician...
...Still, during the last heroic one-quarter successful campaign to save the little fellow, it was somewhat disturbing to hear otherwise rational people say time and time again, "I don't believe in the ratings...
...As a further control, the weighted ratings tell how many doctors, lawyers and brain surgeons watch, say, an educational TV channel rather than the commercial opposition...
...During a recent test of the scientific approach, one man said he was rushing home to see The Name of the Game, the second claimed he only watches pro football on television, the third was going to a pornographic bookstore...
...obviously carries more weight than a degree from a vocational high school...
...We could make out very well in the ratings," explained Professor Al Levin, who has been quietly pushing for the adoption of weighted ratings, "if a viewer like Marya Mannes was worth 150 times as much as a telephone operator...
...Don't think of it as selling out, but only as being leased...
...One possibility is the Weatherman Technique—named after the first forecaster to predict the weather by calling home and asking, "Ma, how does your back feel...
...The Nielsen Families may be the last bastion of incorruptibility in the country...
...I guess there will always be those who will fight science...
...Those girls get to talk to people all over the world...
...How can a handful of families speak for millions...
...Nielsen could enhance its credibility overnight, I believe, by dropping the six zeros on its ratings...
...Another rating method," argues Gene Shalit, the star movie critic of WNBC-TV in New York, "would be to use the W-equation?W' standing for 'word.' In this system the program with the most viewers would be rated Sensational, the second most popular would get Very Good, all the way down to the last-place show, identified by the word Average...
...You might as well not believe in the networks knowing what kind of programming the public really wants...
...All of which makes me feel a little embarrassed about the following offer...
...There is nothing immoral about this...
...Or 37...
...None of them had ever heard of Civilisation or Julia Child...
...Both are hard to find...
...The ratings are based on statistics, for heaven's sake, solid numbers that come from a machine called the Audimeter, invented at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1936...
...But not to believe in ratings...
...That is when the total viewing audience for Cavett's new one-week-a-month show will be compared against the number of people watching Jack Paar's one-week-a-month show?probably unfavorably...
...And I'll be out there worrying about our hero's fate along with all the other Cavetteers—albeit only one week a month this time...
...I don't blame the Cavett enthusiasts for protesting this past summer...
...If you don't trust Nielsen's sampling technique, technically known as "the random sample," you are probably the sort of radical person who would also like to repeal the laws of probability...
...Joe," the interviewer asks the Random Sample, "did you see the great public television special on ecology last night...
...That is more than can be said for the networks, where next season's schedules can't be kept secret through the development period—resulting in similar programming on all three of them every year...
...Maybe these families really need the 50 cents they are paid every week...
...The method is very useful elsewhere in the communications industry as well: When I get a letter from a reader, I automatically add six zeroes...
...Ironically, Nielsen makes its projections only because the general public has come to think in terms of vast (and perhaps unrealistic) statistics...
...What alternatives are available to the networks other than the Nielsen system...
...You never see a newspaper story about Gallup revealing that 63 people favor Nixon while 16 said they liked Alfred E. Smith...
...What gets people so suspicious about the Nielsens is the big numbers they throw around...
...Either way, the Nielsen Company manages somehow to maintain strong discipline within its ranks...
...The meek are supposed to inherit the earth, but as a cheerleader for ABC's late-night host put it, "When...
...An amazing number of television viewers who also read this magazine?,650,000, based on a random sample of the audience in Suffolk County, New York, (the 5.6 people who stood up to be counted on Asparagus Beach in East Hampton during August)—don't believe that such an animal as a Nielsen Family exists...
Vol. 55 • October 1972 • No. 19
