Page 56 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

6
In search of the audience commodity

A short consideration of the corporate structure of American commercial broadcasting
will make us comprehend more fully why the practice of audience measurement has
acquired the central role it has been occupying almost from its inception. In economic
terms, production for profit is the sole objective of the commercial broadcasting industry,
which has for decades been dominated by the three national networks, NBC, CBS and
ABC. To finance the whole system, the networks are dependent on advertisers as
sponsors. The idea of advertising is principally based upon the assumption that it is
1
possible to enlarge sales of products through communication. It is the prospect of fusing
selling and communicating that induces interest on the part of advertisers to make use of
television or radio to disseminate their promotional messages. Therefore, a system has
emerged in which advertisers buy air time from the broadcasters, either fifteen- or thirty-
2
or sixty-second spots, to be inserted in programmes that are furnished by the networks.
Important in this transaction is the need advertisers feel to have some kind of
guarantee that they haven’t spent their money for nothing. They need to be reassured that
their messages actually reach those for whom they are intended: the potential consumers
of the products advertised. Here, the audience enters the story. Advertisers see the
audience as potential consumers, and thus it is the audience’s attention that advertisers
want to attract. From this perspective, then, what advertisers buy from the networks is not
time but audience: commercial television is based on the principle that the networks
3
‘deliver audiences to advertisers’, as the slogan goes. But how does one know that the
exchange is a fair one? If ‘chunks of audience’ are the commodities that the networks sell
to the advertisers, some measure has to be set to determine the price the latter must pay to
the former.
At this point the idea of audience measurement acquires its relevance. Audience
measurement bears an economical meaning in so far as it produces the necessary standard
through which advertising rates can be set. That standard is fixed according to the
4
number of people who watch the programmes in which the commercials appear,
resulting in the so-called ‘cost-per-thousand’ that the networks could demand and the
advertisers would pay. The ratings firms occupy a key position in this corporate
transaction, because it is their product, the ratings information, that forms the basis for
the agreed-upon standard by which advertisers and networks buy and sell the audience
commodity. Against this background, it is also only logical that the production of ratings
should be carried out by an independent third party, because, as Eileen Meehan
(1984:222) has remarked, neither the networks nor the advertisers could trust the other
for supplying the measure, even though some measure is needed to enable the transaction
in the first place: ‘While continuity [of interests] rests in the need for an official
description of the audience, discontinuity arises from the connection between that
description and pricing.’ This analysis of the political economy of ratings production
leads Meehan (ibid., 221) to conclude that ‘ratings per se must no longer be treated as
reports of human behavior, but rather as products—as commodities shaped by business
exigencies and corporate strategies’.