Page 57 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

In search of the audience commodity 45
However, ratings are not only products with an economic exchange value. In fact, they
could only become saleable products in the first place, because they contain a certain
productivity, a certain use value. In Meehan’s (ibid., 222) words, what ratings do is
provide the industry with ‘an official description of the audience’, that becomes the
foundation upon which the economic negotiations of the industry are effectuated. The
permanent institutional uncertainty about the audience which is inherent to the
broadcasting situation makes such an official description necessary: in the commercial
context of mutual dependency between networks and advertisers, that uncertainty is a
catastrophic condition—a condition that would be lethal for the industry if it would not
be surmounted. After all, the selling and buying of the audience commodity can only take
place if and when one can define the object of the transaction. Uncertainty about the
audience must therefore be combated at all costs. It must be converted into a situation in
which there is at least agreement among the parties involved about what they are
referring to when they speak about the audience commodity. In other words, an ‘official
description of the audience’ is needed where such a description is not readily at hand,
because the object of that description, the audience, is such an intangible referent.
Audience measurement became the basis for that official description. With its invocation
of the quantifying, objectivist and scientific imagination, audience measurement is a
perfect instrument that could weld together the economic need for a common ground with
the simultaneous provision of a workable definition of the audience. In short, ratings
could become a saleable product precisely because they acquired the status of reliable
and valid supplier of information about the audience.
In the early days of radio, when the economic foundation of broadcasting in the United
States was being established, advertisers were sceptical about the use of radio as a
medium that could enhance sales of consumer products. What needed to be demonstrated
was the very existence of an audience. Clues for radio’s grip on people were available,
for example, in the nationwide nightly suspension of ‘normal life’ during the broadcast of
the comedy series Amos ‘n Andy at 7.00 pm, and in the enormous amount of fan mail for
radio stars and programmes (NBC received one million letters in 1929, and two million
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in 1930). But these impressionistic cultural indications of radio’s popularity were not
satisfactory to the advertisers: they wanted systematic and objective evidence. It is not
surprising then that it was the advertisers who financially supported Archibald Crossley,
head of a market research firm, in setting up the first audience measurement service in
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March 1930. It soon became clear that Crossley had created a lucrative market for a new
business venture when he started experimenting with the idea of assembling factual
information, through telephone interviews, about radio listening behaviour: when were
sets used, who listened, what programmes and stations were heard, and so on. As
Crossley recalls, the new, objectivist emphasis meant a true revolution at the audience
research front:

The thing that gave us the most publicity was the origination of radio
ratings in 1929, which, having never been done before, created quite a stir.
Dan Starch, about the same time, had done a survey, asking people what
kind of programs they liked. But he didn’t ask, ‘What program did you
just listen to or listen to in the past few hours?’ We did that.
(In Bartos 1986:49)