Last week, I suggested that the venerable average quarter hour (AQH) measure by Nielsen might be past its sell-by date. There is nothing wrong with AQH per se, but in a world where digital is taking more ad dollars off the table—despite far lower standards for qualifying impressions and egregious amounts of fraud—perhaps radio’s measurement standard for advertising needs to change.
Hebrew National says they “answer to a higher authority,” but I don’t understand why radio needs to follow that model in 2025.
I’ll approach the issue from what I believe to be a broadcaster’s viewpoint, but that raises the obvious question of agency and advertiser input. We already have their answer. Regardless of whatever negative attitudes radio may have with respect to Nielsen, the system is reasonably solid, especially compared to how some other media are measured. Yet I’m not hearing anything about how agency business is holding steady or increasing. Perhaps I’m wrong, but agencies just aren’t buying much radio, no matter how many great studies and stories Pierre Bouvard releases.
Any update to the system must take advantage of all data available today and some data that may not exist yet. The metric should be simple to understand. Do you think buyers and planners can fathom what goes on behind the curtain to create any of the video estimates out there today? No, but they can use the data and place lots of buys, whether the traditional way or through programmatic.
Let’s start my future dream world with the data collection part, and next week we can talk about metrics.
A major goal should be to reduce dependency on traditional survey methods. The PPM panels could be used for calibration only, which may allow for reduced samples if AQH goes away. The fact that Nielsen uses the panels for both audio and video media should give radio some reason to pressure for smaller panels that would be used for calibration of various other data sources. Next, let’s sunset the diary service. I’ve worked with it on both sides of the table for decades and respect what the system can do, but it’s time to write its epitaph. Remember, Nielsen already held a funeral for the TV diary back in 2018.
When I studied survey methodology in the ‘80s, the field still had very high standards and could generally execute to those standards. Of course, just about every U.S. home had a landline phone. Some survey operations still knocked on doors. We could do things like determine sampling error and feel comfortable that survey estimates would be projectable to the population being measured within a reasonable range.
Household representation became extinct as landlines disappeared and individual-based mobile phones took over. A federal law—the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991—prevented the use of autodialers to call known cell phone numbers, which made calling cell phones for surveys prohibitively expensive. Besides, most of us won’t answer a call from a number we don’t recognize, assuming the carrier hasn’t already designated that number as spam.
Plenty of surveys are conducted online today. A few of them are pretty good with lots of attention to detail, but most are less than ideal. If you question that, drop a note to Hillary Clinton to ask her views about the accuracy of the polls prior to the 2016 presidential election. It’s very hard and very expensive to do traditional survey methods in 2025, and it will only get worse. That’s not an excuse or indictment of any failings at Nielsen, but simply today’s reality.
What to do instead? Let’s start by using PPM encoding everywhere. A good chunk of U.S. radio stations is encoded, and Nielsen now has software encoding for PPM, which must be far less expensive to produce and install than rack-mounted hardware. Let’s get every station encoded, even if some ownerships have no interest in the data. And yes, that means Nielsen remains in charge because it’s their patented system.
We’ll need a lot of data to make this work. Why not do what everyone has suggested for ages, which is using cell phones as PPM meters? As a former Arbitron/Nielsen employee, I always gave the stock answer that microphone quality varies by model and that you also need to add some kind of app to the phone to handle the data collection. Taking that one step further, Apple is not a fan of allowing anything in iOS that doesn’t offer something to the user. I remember a test we did at Arbitron (not with PPM), and within days most of the software we had placed on iOS phones had disappeared.
We’re in a new world today, and that old retort about microphones won’t fly anymore. Video depends on big data coming from cable systems, streaming providers, and smart TVs. Do you believe that this return path data is perfect and contains all the information needed to create estimates? If so, I have a few bridges you may be interested in purchasing.
Further, Xperi’s DTS AutoStage holds promise. I spent some time at Arbitron looking into how we could integrate connected car data into the ratings. I was ahead of my time, but not in a good way, as the technology just wasn’t there yet. With AutoStage (as well as some proprietary systems that the OEMs may have), big data from vehicles is getting there. Let’s use it.
I’m not privy to what Nielsen is doing internally. We know there’s an effort on a digital diary, but one was used almost twenty years ago. That ship has sailed. Rather than digitizing the old, it’s time to build the new. Perhaps Nielsen has a skunkworks looking at putting PPM on smartphones. Any effort in that direction would also help their video measurement business, and they have a battle there. Even the NFL isn’t happy (see last week’s Wall Street Journal article).
I’m sure they chat with Xperi. There may be other potential big data options elsewhere in the world. If Nielsen is working in this direction, great. If not, you should have started long ago, so get off your butts now.
My Ph.D. dissertation was a bit over 130 pages, which is considered short. While my thoughts here won’t approach that length, I may have reached the end of some readers’ attention spans, so I’ll give you a break until next week, when the thought process will continue with a conversation about metrics.
Let’s meet again next week.
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