Page 156 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Notes 144
Demographics have been offered, among others, in Nielsen’s National Audience
Composition (NAC) service. In 1987, Nielsen introduced the ‘people meter’ (NPM), which
offers an integrated measurement service.
6 Other often cited criticisms of ratings from a more or less high culture point of view can be
found in Seldes (1951) and Skornia (1965).
7 For a discussion of these criticisms, see e.g. Beville (1985), Chapters 8 and 9.

6
In search of the audience commodity
1 For a comprehensive analysis of structures, philosophies and practices of advertising in
modern consumer culture, see Leiss et al. (1986). For historical and theoretical perspectives
on the emergence and role of advertising in United States, see e.g. Ewen (1976), Schudson
(1984) and Marchand (1985).
2 The final set-up of this system of mutual dependency and distribution of control between
networks and advertisers came about by the end of the 1950s. Before that, programmes were
generally sponsored and produced by one advertiser, over which the networks had little say.
The situation changed at the instigation of the networks, who wanted to keep control over
scheduling and programming decisions for themselves. This does not mean however that the
advertisers have lost their influence on programming. Overt control has made place for more
subtle and less visible forms of interference. See Barnouw (1978) and Boddy (1987).
3 The conceptualization of audience as commodity being evoked here has been the object of
heated controversy within the political economy of the commercial television. The so-called
‘blind-spot debate’ was launched by Smythe (1977). See also, among others, Murdock
(1978), Livant (1979) and Jhally and Livant (1986). For an epistemological critique of
audience commodity theory, see Allor (1988).
4 Traditionally, it has been conveniently assumed that the audience for a programme is the same
for the audience for the commercials inserted in it—an assumption which is reflected in the
fact that ratings generally only measure the audience for programmes, not for commercials.
Many advertisers now question this assumption; they self-servingly (though often correctly)
insist that many viewers do not watch the commercials so that their reach is smaller than
reported by the ratings. The measurement of audiences for commercials (rather than
programmes) is thus, not surprisingly, a major priority in advertising research circles.
5 For the relation between industry and audience in the early years of American radio and the
place of fan mail in the conceptualization of that relation, See Stamps (1979). Fan mail as a
source of information about the nature of the audience gradually decreased because of its
suspected lack of representativeness. Within the British BBC, too, letters from listeners were
originally used as a means to extract information about the audience. Here too, however, the
value of the ‘post-bag’ as a reflection of public opinion was questioned because it had
become apparent that the overwhelming majority of letters came from middle-class writers.
This perceived lack of representativeness led to demand for more ‘scientific’ research. See
Silvey (1974:28–31).
6 The service, called Co-operative Analysis of Broadcasting (CAB), was operative from 1930
until 1946, when it was terminated because competition of private entrepreneurs C.E.Hooper
and A.C.Nielsen had become too strong.
7 See Hurwitz (1984) for an account of the role of research in the setting up of the infrastructure
of the American broadcasting industry. According to Hurwitz (1984:212), from the late
1920s onwards researchers have become ‘institutional middlemen’ between broadcasting
and advertising managers, and research ‘has come to function as an essential mechanism to
maintain equilibrium among ever more integrated institutions’.