Friday, October 13, 2006

Nielson Mania

Unlike my generic yet slick Nielson refernce in my last posting, Nielson has a more direct part in this rant.

We're mere weeks away from November, arguably the most important TV month of the year because it's the bar by which ad rates are set for the following 12 months.

And lookee here...Nielson want's to measure MY habits. Too bad they can't because I work for a TV Station.

Nielson 2

You'd think that with all their carefully orchestrated, calibrated and pontificated reasearch that they'd realize or have something on a database, somewhere that tracks TV Employees that aren't eligible to be metered. Heck, I've already told them at least once before that I can't play their game. Sorry.

Nielson 1

And by the looks of things this isn't your standard TV Diary, Black Box Household type of survey. It's for a week. Interesting.

Personally I'm not so sure I like these types of surveys. Their website says they only use 9000 households that is about 18,000 people to measure the viewing habits of the entire nation. That's a sample of .0235 percent of the 76,775,560 people that live in the states.

(Yes that's just a little more than 2-hundreths of a percent, NOT 2 percent. I already moved the decimal.)

And that .0235 percent would only be 307 people of the 1,304,040 metered individuals in this 652,020 metered household Greensboro DMA. (Although I think the local number of metered households is consideralby higher but I couldn't pin down a number on the Nielson Website)

At least with the web I know precisely how many people read this stuff, when, for how long, linked from where....etc...

BTW - As a TV Station employee you must wait patiently for Nielson to call you and then tell them your employment status. That quickly ends the call.

Thanks for looking. :)

UPDATE- I went to see the new Robin Williams movie "Man of the Year" tonight and there was a great Nielson reference in the movie along this same thought process. It was as if they had taken it right from this blog.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Neilsen badgered the weather guy at my former station for a couple years. Finally he filled it out...bad idea.

The competition contested some of the numbers and went to look at all the diaries from BR. Guess what they found.

Weather guy kept his job...not even suspended! If a lowly photog had done he'd have been on the pavement before the start of the AM newscast.

Anonymous said...

What I want to know is, Did you really sit down and do all the math to figure out what percent/fraction/ratio of people in the US that survey was filled out by??? I thought I did some strange math...that takes the cake.

Kel

AMO said...

You never hear anybody say "Hey, did you watch Jag last night". :)

ewink said...

Yeah, TP. If you just tell them 'no', they will harass you to no end. It makes for a more 'correct' sampling, I guess.

I want to be called so I can say 'I work for the media, but I don't like my job. Can I have one anyway?'