Ratings - from Winning with the News Media

It is an industry constantly in metamorphosis, looking for some new game or gimmick that will entice a few more people away from the competition. If the audience wants a little more sex, a little more violence, that's what it gets.

Every producer of TV programming is constantly trying to guess next season's fad or fashion, hoping to invent a show or character or situation that will play to the appetite of that fleeting, fickle audience.

Spin-offs

Once a show becomes a success, there is a stampede to copy and clone it, hoping to squeeze every penny of profit out of the idea before it gets stale and the audience moves on to whatever turns them on.

All in the Family begat Archie Bunker's Place, until the audience eventually became weary of the characters and dwindled away. Happy Days bred Laverne and Shirley. The Cosby Show became A Different World. Cheers led to Frasier. The CBS hit Survivor was immediately copied by envious competitors. Sometimes the spin-offs work. Sometimes they don't.

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Ratings & Demos Set the Price

As a general rule, the cost of commercial time on television is based on how many people will see the advertising. But who is in the audience also has a powerful influence on price. TV advertisers will pay more to reach fewer people, if that smaller audience has the right "demos" demographics.

An audience with a lot of 18 to 49-year-olds is more desirable to advertisers because they spend more. Advertisers use ratings to target a specific audience.

Gillette, advertising a new razor, wants to know how many men of shaving age are watching. Revlon wants a show with a lot of women. Lexus and Lincoln will place their commercials in shows that appeal to a mature, affluent, status-conscious audience.

What the Market Will Bear

There are no hard and fast rules. The price is based on what the market will bear. It has to be competitive with other forms of advertising. The price keeps going up.

In early 1983, the last installment of M*A*S*H set a new record -- $450,000 for each half-minute of commercial time.

Seinfeld's Farewell

The next all-time high was the final Seinfeld episode in May, 1998, where commercials cost $2 million per 30-second spot.

Unless there is an unusual show like the M*A*S*H* and Seinfeld finales, telecasts of Super Bowl games usually contain the most expensive commercial time on the tube because they have the largest audience of the year.

Super Bowl Commercials

Thirty-second spots during the 2004 Super Bowl went for about $2.25 million, according to AdAge Magazine.

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Ratings Are Estimates

The entire economic foundation of television and radio in this country is built on audience estimates. Broadcast rating services use several techniques to calculate how many people are listening or watching at any given time.

They sell their results to broadcasters and advertising agencies. Advertising prices are based on those numbers.

The process has always been mysterious to outsiders. Polling techniques are very complicated, and few people who don't have Ph.D.s in statistics understand how a small sample, properly drawn, can accurately tell you what millions of people are doing or thinking.

The entire system is constantly under attack. Periodically, powerful network executives say they're unhappy with the system and would support a new company if it could make ratings more accurate. They only complain if their numbers go down.

Nielsen and Arbitron

Two firms -- Nielsen Media Research and Arbitron -- have historically been the major ratings services. In 1993, Arbitron abandoned national television ratings, leaving Nielsen with a monopoly.

Arbitron continues to be the dominant ratings service for radio. It also specializes in telephone surveys and those that track buying patterns of audiences exposed to specific commercials.

Internet Ratings

In late 1995, Nielsen launched a new service to measure how many people are logged onto the Internet; their demographics, and which sites they visit. The information is valuable to broadcast networks who are trying to figure out where their audience is going and to future Internet advertisers, who want to know how to target their message.

Internet users are extremely attractive to advertisers. They're young, affluent, highly educated. Internet advertising hit $7.3 billion in 2003, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau. The money spent on Internet ads quadrupled in five years.

Rating Techniques

Rating services use four basic techniques:

	Telephone surveys
	Viewer/listener diaries
	Electronic meters that show when a TV set is turned on
	People Meters that show WHO is watching what, and when

Choosing a Sample

For all four methods, the rating services develop small, random samples that are designed to accurately reflect the local or national audience. Age, gender, ethnicity, education, income, neighborhood, family status, are all factors. Results can be very different, depending on how the data is collected.

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The chapter continues with detailed explanations and data on each sampling technique; people who "vote" their favorite shows whether they watch them or not; other inaccuracies and contradictions in the system; and new technology being developed to improve accuracy.

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Translating the Numbers

Radio and TV programs are measured in two ways:

Rating -- The percentage of homes watching or listening to a specific show. This figure is technically the percentage of homes who have radio or TV that watched. In most communities, more than 99 per cent of the homes have at least one radio and TV set. So the rating number is really the percentage of total households.

Ratings are tabulated for local market areas as well as nationwide.

Share -- The percentage of households with their sets on who were tuned to a particular program. It is that station's share of the audience which is watching or listening at any given time.

HUT Levels

The TV industry has another shorthand term in its jargon -- HUT. Households Using Television. A HUT-level of 10 means your show was being watched by 10 percent of the households using television in that particular time slot.

If a town has 100 households and five are watching television -- but all are watching the same show -- then that show will have a 5 Rating/100 Share. Only five per cent of the homes are watching television. But 100 per cent of the people watching TV at the time are all watching the same show.

A program with a 12 Rating/26 Share was seen by 12 percent of the households who own TV sets and by 26 percent of the households who were using TV during its time slot.

Prime and Drive Time

Rating numbers go up during evening prime time hours when more people watch television. Share numbers in any market total 100, no matter how many people are watching.

Radio audiences are generally highest during "drive time" -- rush-hour traffic periods -- when large numbers of people listen as they commute between home and work.

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The chapter continues with an explanation of how ratings affect the salaries of broadcast "talent" -- anchors, sports and weathercasters. It lists the top 20 TV markets in the U.S., the number of households in each, and the percent of the national audience that represents. It explains the "sweeps" -- four months each year that are critical in setting commercial rates, and why stations wait until sweeps periods to broadcast certain types of sensational stories they can promote to increase their audiences. It concludes with an account of how consultants and research techniques are used to measure and find new ways to attract and hold bigger audiences.

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