Page 129 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Repairing the loss: the desire for audience information 117
But why research—and particularly, why did the expensive, large-scale, continuous,
quantitative, survey-style research eventually become so all-important? Why give priority
to measuring the audience? There seem to have been no clearcut reasons for this, at least
not in the consciousness of the institutions themselves, although there was enormous
confusion and discussion within the BBC in the 1930s about the kinds of things (listening
habits, listener preferences, efficiency of different broadcasting techniques, the role of the
wireless in family life) research could investigate (Briggs 1965). As Silvey recalled:

Curiously, perhaps, this role [of audience research within the BBC] was
never specifically defined by my superiors. I had to work it out for myself
and, whenever necessary, make it explicit. I can only assume that my
conception of audience research’s role coincide with the Corporation’s for
I was never called upon to amend my formulation of it.
(Silvey 1974:33)

There were no natural reasons why BBC audience research should have been modelled,
conceptually speaking, after commercial market research; why, in short, public service
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research has become so similar to commercial audience measurement. But from the very
start Silvey’s ideas went in the direction of measuring the size of audiences, thus
providing broadcasting with a substitute for the ‘box office’ (ibid.: 61), and in an early
talk he clarified the aims of audience research by utilizing an analogy between the BBC
and a department store with the audience members being seen as equivalent to customers:
the purpose of research then would be to effectively anticipate consumer demand (Briggs
1965:278; Chaney 1986). While the market metaphor was first considered ‘indecent’ by
some, Silvey’s work has gained increasing endorsement at all levels of the corporation,
particularly since the war. In 1939, Silvey set up a continuous service of audience
measurement which would later become known as the Survey of Listening and Viewing.
For this service, a representative sample of 4000 people were individually interviewed
each day about the broadcasts of the preceding day, a huge operation for which no less
than 300 trained interviewers a day were needed (BBC 1961). It is interesting to note at
this point that the BBC did not make use of the meter technology to measure audience
size, at least not until 1981, when the hand-held people meter device entered the British
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audience measurement scene.
In 1964, the Dutch researcher who visited London, Lo Bakker, was impressed by the
quantity of research material produced by Silvey’s department, but he was less impressed
by its quality: ‘There is too little scientifically based reflection upon exactly what is being
done’. And he concluded: ‘Although the BBC will always be our big brother, also in the
field of research, it must be possible to at least equal the quality of continuous registration
in the Netherlands/(Bakker 1964:5) He specifically referred to the danger of
routinization: ‘The whole thing makes the impression that the work…has fallen into a
daily rut’ (ibid., 3). This should have been a warning. Twenty-five years later, however,
audience measurement in the Netherlands has become as much a routine as its British
example. In 1965, the Dutch carefully started with measuring the audience through the
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diary method; two years later, the set meter was introduced as measurement technology.
The large-scale, institutionalized, day-to-day repetition of data production tends to
suppress a questioning of the purposes of research; instead, continuous audience