Page 50 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

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Commercial knowledge: measuring the

audience

The phone rings on the bedside table in a richly furnished
Beverly Hills home. The clock on the table registers 5.05
as a man’s arm reaches the phone at the instant the second
ring starts. Obviously he has anticipated the call, because
he is immediately wide awake and has a pen and
preprinted sheet of paper at hand. After a curt ‘Good
morning’, he begins furiously writing numbers on a sheet.
These are Nielsen rating numbers for the preceding Friday,
Saturday, and Sunday nights being read to him by a
research department employee in New York. The man in
Beverly Hills is the network’s program vice president
preparing himself for today’s possible repercussions from
those rating figures. In somewhat different conditions,
perhaps, two other network program heads are also getting
numbers at about the same time.
(Beville 1985:186)

This scene, with its efficient evocation of rising suspense and mystery, may remind the
regular television viewer of the opening sequence of a run-of-the-mill television
adventure show. In fact, it is a fictionalized description of the extremely pronounced
place that ‘ratings’ take in the professional activities of American network executives—a
place that, certainly to the sceptical outsider, has a mysterious edge indeed. Hugh
Malcolm (Mal) Beville, writer of the scene, is one of the founding fathers of the
American ratings industry and he assures his readers that the scene he has summoned up
does not give an exaggerated picture at all. So, ratings are said to dominate the lives of
the typical, and obviously typically workaholic, network president. As the New York
Times once wrote about Robert Daly, then president of CBS Entertainment: ‘[Ratings]
are the first thing he thinks about in the morning, …and one of the last things he thinks
about at night’ (quoted in ibid.: 187).
Ratings are the most conspicuous products of a large-scale enterprise called ‘audience
measurement’. They are generally produced by independent, commercially organized
research firms, of which the A.C. Nielsen Company is the dominant one in the United
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States. The production and selling of ratings is big business! Ratings reports are offered
as a regular service to the television industry and whoever else is interested enough to
pay for it. The networks and stations, who are responsible for the scheduling and