We saw a nice bounce-back for the Super Bowl this week. After viewership dipped to 91 million for Tampa Bay’s win over Kansas City last year, 2022 saw the game climb back over the 100 million mark. It is still a long way off from the record (114.4 million for the Patriots’ win over Seattle in Super Bowl XLIX), but it is a step in the right direction.
Nothing draws numbers like the Super Bowl. When it comes to television, live sports are the only reliable rating grabbers. That is why rights fees skyrocket every time a major property hits the open market.
The rest of television relies on what are called live-plus-seven ratings in order to tell their best possible story. Those ratings measure the number of people that watch a show in real time, plus the people that DVR it and watch it back within seven days of the original air date. Even then, stations don’t get a truly accurate measurement for a single number, but Nielsen has at least tried to account for television’s non-traditional audience.
Where the hell is radio’s live-plus-seven?
Covid-19 shifted our consumption patterns. It changed where, when, and how people listen. Ratings systems have always been flawed. Now they just don’t account for reality.
I don’t want to come off as another radio guy making excuses for the ratings drop that inevitably comes to many sports talk stations after the football season ends. Instead, I am asking Nielsen to be fair to the entire radio landscape.
PPM was an epiphany for ratings. No, it isn’t perfect, but it is undeniably better than diaries.
Here’s the thing though, PPM, the last great innovation in measuring radio audiences, was rolled out fifteen years ago. That is multiple lifetimes in terms of technology. Arbitron reinvented the wheel with PPM. It is time for Nielsen (which purchased Arbitron in 2013) to reinvent it again.
Start with small steps. A station’s total listening measurement should come in a single number. That should be standard. No one from that company can look you in the eye with a straight face and give you a good reason why WFAN’s terrestrial signal and WFAN’s stream have to be counted as two separate things.
Work on radio’s answer to live-plus-seven ratings. Shows should be given credit for the listeners that are consuming their content through podcast replays. Work with Blubrry, Apple, or other fruits to develop a formula that gets you to a number that tells that story.
These are big ideas, and it is easy to sit here on my couch and type them out. I have no financial stake in Nielsen. I don’t have to worry about the cost of developing a new rating system or overhauling the old one. Even if the company’s initial inclination is to complain about the cost, the fact of the matter is that Nielsen has to innovate when it comes to radio ratings or someone else will.
Just look at what is going on at NBC, which announced a partnership with iSpot. The network believes their partnership can offer advertisers a more realistic way to measure viewership than Nielsen can provide. NBC has lost so much confidence in Nielsen (and honestly, why shouldn’t it?) that it didn’t decide to test this new ratings system out on a new comedy or even on an established franchise like America’s Got Talent. Instead, the network decided it was going to unveil its new measurement system during the Winter Olympics and Super Bowl LVI.
That should speak volumes about what is at stake if Nielsen cannot get the market’s confidence back. That will never happen if the company chooses to stand still.
It may have felt like the world shut down with the Covid-19 pandemic, but really it didn’t. It just changed in a monumental way. If the world’s premier audience measurement companu can’t adapt to reflect the effects those changes have had on media consumption, than any number it produces is valueless.
Demetri Ravanos is a columnist and features writer for Barrett Media. He is also the creator of The Sports Podcast Festival, and a previous host on the Chewing Clock and Media Noise podcasts. He occasionally fills in on stations across the Carolinas in addition to hosting Panthers and College Football podcasts. His radio resume includes stops at WAVH and WZEW in Mobile, AL, WBPT in Birmingham, AL and WBBB, WPTK and WDNC in Raleigh, NC.
You can find him on Twitter @DemetriRavanos or reach him by email at DemetriTheGreek@gmail.com.
