Page 86 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 74
information with the family’s recent viewing patterns, thus producing data presumably
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revealing the effectiveness of commercials (Beville 1986b; Broadcasting 27 June 1988).
Needless to say that this system is technically ‘flawed’ because it necessitates even more
active co-operation than just button-pushing. But the tremendous excitement around the
prospect of having such single-source, multi-variable information, which is typically
celebrated by researchers as an opportunity of ‘recapturing …intimacy with the
consumer’ (Gold 1988:24) or getting in touch with ‘real persons’ (Davis 1986:51),
indicates that the purely objective, thing-like variables of size and composition alone are
no longer perceived as sufficient markers for categorizing the television audience.
Another, similarly unsettling development in the American ratings scene in the 1980s
has been the idea of so-called ‘qualitative ratings’. Here, the aim is the measurement, and
thus quantification, of the ‘quality’ of aspects of watching television. For example, an
organization called Television Audience Assessment (TAA), based in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, has attempted to enter the audience measurement market by developing a
system which not only measures audience size and composition, but also viewers’
attitudes towards the programmes they watch. A ‘Program Appeal Index’ is intended to
measure the level of enjoyment viewers derive from a programme; while a ‘Program
Impact Index’ rates the intellectual and emotional stimulation a programme gives its
viewers. Not surprisingly, test results confirmed our common sense knowledge that
programmes vary widely on both variables. TAA marketed its service by stressing the
usefulness of these indices for the production of new kinds of knowledge which could be
relevant for the industry, because high Impact and Appeal ratings may positively
influence viewers’ receptivity to commercials. Thus, test results suggested that people
were most likely to plan ahead to view programmes with ‘high appeal’ and to remain
loyal over time to such programmes, and that programmes with ‘high impact’ tended to
be watched with more involvement and attention. Another useful kind of ‘fact’ to know,
especially for advertisers, is that for low-impact programmes, 46 per cent of the audience
leaves the room during the commercials, compared to only 26 per cent of viewers who
rate the programme high in terms of impact. One could guess what impact such ‘findings’
could have on the negotiations between advertisers and broadcasters (eg Beville 1985;
Television Audience Assessment 1984).
What is most important to note here, however, is that such measurements produce new
kinds of empirical truth, undermining, or at least relativizing, the existing, cruder, ‘facts’
constructed by traditional ratings discourse. With the idea of qualitative ratings subjective
elements have squarely sneaked into the field of ratings discourse—something that has
been so neatly excluded from the basic idea of audience measurement in the United
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States: head counting based on the binary opposition of watching/non-watching,
resulting in hard measures of size of audience and audience segments. And this incursion
of the subjective dimension in ratings discourse threatens to put the aura of objectivity
surrounding ratings under pressure. Thus, Mal Beville (1985:131–2) vents his scepticism
about qualitative ratings by contending that quantitative ratings (such as produced by the
meter, the diary, and the people meter) at least ‘report…the actual viewing behavior of
the household or person in the sample’ (emphasis in original) and provide, if the
measurement is accurate, ‘an objective recording of what took place’. Yet isn’t Beville
overly confident here? We could also put forward an opposing view: the interest in
qualitative ratings could just as well be seen as bespeaking a recognition that quantitative