Page 85 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Revolt of the viewer? The elusive audience 73
As we have seen, the answer to the shattered consensus and trust is sought in putting
viewers to more meticulous rituals of examination, under the assumption that knowing
more precisely what happens in their living rooms will result in more accurate, more true
descriptions of ‘viewing behaviour’. Thus, in a review of the state of affairs in advertising
research, Leo Bogart (1986:13) sarcastically described the people meter as ‘a laudable
though rather belated recognition of the fact that television sets do not watch television;
people do’. In other words, greater empirical naturalism in audience measurement
practices is somehow expected to forge a new consensus about what constitute true
audience ‘facts’. In this context, it is not surprising that the passive people meter idea—
the panoptic instrument par excellence—has been received with so much enthusiasm in
industry circles.
However, the people meter (no matter how passive) is only one, and actually a quite
limited articulation of the wishful attempt to repair the damaged map of the streamlined
audience. More far-reaching aspirations are circulating within the audience measurement
community, that go beyond the attainment of more and more detailed data about exactly
who is watching what, as is promised by the people meter. In fact, the dissolution of
consensus has instigated a concern for incorporating a wider range of viewer variables in
4
the measurement endeavour.
Among advertisers especially, there is a growing interest in knowledge about the
relationship between television viewing and the purchase of products being advertised in
commercials. After all, this is the bottom line of what advertisers care about: whether the
audiences delivered to them are also ‘productive’ audiences (that is, whether they are
‘good’ consumers). For example, in more avant-garde commercial research circles the
search for ever more precise demographic categories, as the people meter provides, has
already been losing its credibility. As one researcher put it:

In many cases, lumping all 18–49 women together is ludicrous…. Narrow
the age spread down and it still can be ludicrous. Take a year-old
woman. She could be white or black, single or married, working or
unemployed, professional or blue collar. And there’s lots more. Is she a
frequent flier? Does she use a lot of cosmetics? Cook a lot? Own a car?
Then there’s the bottom line. Do commercials get to her? These are the
items the advertiser really needs to know, and demographic tonnage is not
the answer.
(Davis 1986:51)

The kind of research that attempts to answer these questions, currently only in an
experimental stage, is known as ‘single source’ measurement: the same sample of
households is subjected to measurement not only of its television viewing behaviour but
also of its product purchasing behaviour (e.g. Gold 1988). Arbitron’s ScanAmerica, for
example, is such a system. In addition to measuring television viewing (using a
pushbutton people meter device), it supplies sample members with another technological
gadget: after a trip to the supermarket, household members (usually the housewife, of
course) must remove a pencil-size electronic ‘wand’ attached to their meter and wave it
above the universal product code that is stamped on most packaged goods. When the
scanning wand is replaced in the meter, the central computer subsequently matches that