Page 58 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 46
The ‘Crossley ratings’ rapidly caused severe ‘ratingitis’ among industry people, and soon
it was commonly accepted that ratings should be considered as the measure of
performance which the radio stations previously lacked—a measure of performance that
was able to create confidence among advertisers in the ‘audience delivery’ of radio.
Finally a method was found, so it was thought, to supply tangible evidence for radio’s
viability as an advertising medium. A very ingenious method indeed: one that could
command authority at a time when the emerging field of scientific, survey-based social
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research was gaining much prestige. The broadcasting media needed such a method, not
only to be able to convince advertisers, but also in a more elementary sense because, as
Beville (1985:234) claims, ‘broadcasters have to make greater effort to “count the
house”…because of the intangible character of the audience’. This reasoning makes it
understandable why eventually it was the broadcasters and not the advertisers who would
pay for most of the costs of the ratings services: in the commercial supply-and-demand
logic of the market, it is the former’s responsibility to furnish the evidence of existence
and value of the audience commodity they offer for sale.
Ratings then deliver the very currency of the industry’s economic transactions. But
that currency does not exist in material form: the audience commodity is not a material
object that can be readily exchanged such as a car or a pack of cigarettes. Therefore, an
instrument is needed to object-ify the audience, as it were, and this is exactly the specific
productivity of audience measurement. And while this practice originated in the
commercial necessities of radio broadcasting, it is in the area of television that the
production of ratings has become a truly prominent industry in itself. It is the specific
achievement of audience measurement that it converts an elusive occurrence—the real
occurrence of people actually using television in their everyday lives—into a hard
substance, a calculable object, an object suitable for transaction.
This process of object-ification is established and maintained through the procedures
of audience measurement as a discursive practice. Audience measurement is not just an
innocent way of quantifying television’s reach. The very act of ‘head counting’, which is
the most basic operation of ratings production, is a very specific discursive intervention
that results in moulding ‘television audience’ into a quantifiable aggregate object. Ratings
discourse transforms the audience from a notion that loosely represents an unknown and
unseen reality, a terra incognita, into a known and knowable taxonomic category, a
discrete entity that can be empirically described in numerical terms. The audience
commodity is thus a symbolic object which is constructed by, and is not pre-existent to
the discursive procedures of audience measurement. It is this symbolic object—
‘television audience’ as it is constructed in and through ratings discourse—that is the
target of the television industry’s practices, advertisers and broadcasters alike.
The strategic role of ratings, then, is not fully described by pointing at their
intermediary function in the business negotiations between advertisers and broadcasters.
It is the manner in which they perform that function that should be emphasized. Ratings
are neither simply an exemplar of scientifically-produced information and as such, a
neutral tool for feedback, as is claimed by their official proponents and assumed by their
main users. Nor should they be considered merely as a product of the economic and
institutional exigencies of commercial industry arrangements, as is put forward by radical
political economists. The latter are right in criticizing the former position as a rather self-
serving and narrow-minded perspective that neglects the larger political context in which