Page 158 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Notes 146
8
The streamlined audience disrupted: impact of the new technologies
1 CBS researcher David Poltrack predicts, quite optimistically, that the figure will stablilize at
around 63 per cent by 1995. See Broadcasting (12 December 1988:49). Other prognoses
mention the figures of about 62 per cent in 1990 and 55 per cent in 2000 (Krugman and Rust
1987).
2 As a yardstick for the real size of the audience the results of a large-scale telephone
coincidental interview survey were used, in which viewers were asked to which channel they
were watching at the moment of the telephone call. The telephone coincidental is a classic
measurement technique generally considered to be very accurate and ‘realistic’ as a
consequence of its immediacy, but it is also a very expensive method. It is therefore only
used as a validation standard. The method was first developed by C.E.Hooper for radio
audience measurement in the 1930s.
3 In the early 1980s the cable industry sponsored a study known as CAMS (Cable Audience
Methodological Study) which tested a number of methods to measure cable audiences. The
results of this study substantiated the cable companies’ concern about the ‘unfairness’ of
Nielsen’s diary method, and increased the pressure on Nielsen to do something about it.
Similar objections were raised by local independent stations, who also complained that they
were shortchanged by the diary. It is doubtful however whether the cable companies and
independent stations would have displayed the same concern and frustration about ratings
‘misrepresentations’ had these been in their favour (i.e. if their share of audience would have
been over-estimated). See Beville (1985), Chapter 6.
4 Mehling’s rhetorical strategy is rather transparent here: his ‘Nielsen family’ is a high culture-
minded one being humbly tolerant to ‘mass taste’—a conversion of the usual attitude
towards the mass television audience.
5 See Beville (1985:111). Other possible sources of bias are, among others, the relatively low
response rate (40 to 50 per cent), while those who respond tend to watch slightly more than
those who do not respond. Furthermore, ‘response fatigue’ may affect reporting accuracy,
especially during the latter part of the week.
6 Incidentally, the willingness of people to co-operate with consumer marketing surveys, of
which audience measurement is an instance, seems to drop consistently over time. In
reaction, the market research industry recently launched a campaign called ‘Your Opinion
Counts Public Education Program’, partly funded by the Advertising Research Foundation.
See Jaffe (1986).
7 By the mid-1980s, Nielsen reported that 7 per cent of the time people spend watching
television is done by playing videotapes, while other data indicated that 20 per cent of all
VCR owners rent as many as four or more tapes a month. Lardner (1987) offers a fascinating
account of the institutional history of the VCR, including the development of the video rental
concept.
8 We should not underestimate the creativity of the industry, however. For example, advertisers
have found a way to reach the video audience by packaging their ads with the videocassettes
people rent. As a result, measurement of video rental audiences became important for
advertisers. So, in 1988 Nielsen introduced its experimental Home Video Index, which is
able to tell who is watching which videocassettes and how (e.g., fastforwarding through
credits, how many times a tape is watched, and so on). Only specially-coded cassettes can be
measured by the new technology (USA Today 1988; R.Katz 1989). The video market has
also provided a huge new source of revenue for the Hollywood film studios, especially from
the sales of film copies to video stores. See Gomery (1988).
9 The opportunity to time shift was Sony’s major marketing phrase, coined by chairman Akio
Morita himself, by which the Japanese electronics company introduced its Betamax VCR in
the American market in the mid-1970s. Sony’s advertising campaign triggered a hotly