Page 62 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

New technologies, audience measurement and the tactics of television consumption 53
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 (see, e.g., Gold 1988). Arbitron’s ScanAmerica,
for example, is such a system. In addition to measuring television viewing (using a push-
button 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
information with the family’s recent viewing patterns, thus producing data presumably
revealing the effectiveness of commercials (Beville 1986b; Broadcasting 1988). Needless
to say, this system is technically ‘flawed’ because it necessitates even more active co-
operation than just button-pushing. But the tremendous excitement about 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 the increasing
discontent with ordinary ratings statistics alone as signifiers for the value of the audience
commodity.
Similarly, one British advertising agency, Howell, Henry, Chaldecott and Lury
(HHCL), has recently caused outrage in more orthodox circles of the advertising industry
by launching a strong attack on the common practice of selling and buying advertising
time on the basis of people meter ratings statistics. In an advertisement in the Financial
Times it showed a man and a woman making love in front of a television set while
stating: ‘Current advertising research says these people are watching your ad. Who’s
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really getting screwed?’ (see Kelsey 1990). HHCL’s alternative of getting to know the
‘real consumer’, however, is not the high-tech method of computerized single-source
research, but more small-scale, qualitative, in-depth, focus group interviews with
potential consumers of the goods to be advertised.
What we see in this foregrounding of qualitative methods of empirical research is a
cautious acknowledgement that television consumption practices, performed as they are
by specific individuals and groups in particular social contexts, are not therefore
generalizable in terms of isolated instances of behaviour. If anything, this marks a
tendency towards a recognition of what could broadly be termed the ‘ethnographic’ in the
industry’s attempts to get to know consumers. This ethnographic move is in line with a
wider recent trend in the advertising research community in the United States and
elsewhere to hire cultural anthropologists to conduct ‘observational research’ into the
minutiae of consumer behaviour that are difficult to unearth through standard surveys
(Groen 1990)—an interesting and perhaps thought-provoking development in the light of
the growing popularity of ethnography among critical cultural researchers!

CONCLUSION

What are we to make of these developments? To round off this chapter, then, some
concluding remarks. First of all, it is important to emphasize that a research practice such