The year was 1973, and Lynyrd Skynyrd released their first album, including a song called “Gimme Three Steps” that I’ll bet is still in the rotation on many classic rock stations. More than 50 years later, Nielsen is channeling that song into a methodological change.
While the word had been going around, the formal announcement was sent to subscribers on August 8. During the Arbitron days, almost any methodological change was referred to as an “enhancement”. The company did almost as many enhancements as a busy plastic surgeon.
Many years ago, I was the research director for WPXI-TV in Pittsburgh, then owned by Cox. I reported to our sales manager, Howard Zeiden, alias “The Z Man,” who was a wonderful character. While I’m certain he didn’t coin the phrase, he always said, “When they say it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.” If you read between the lines of the Nielsen release, you can bet it’s about the money.
Nielsen’s release state,s “Due to a variety of factors, we are finding that the time required to recruit a new home has increased.” If releases like this were truly honest, it would read something like “People are less likely to participate in the PPM panel today, so our costs have gone up. We have to find ways to cut costs.”
I’ve written before about the decline in response rates to all sorts of surveys. If you doubt me, you’re welcome to get in touch with the now-former head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. She’s not busy these days and can offer insight from her experience.
Let’s assume this was a cost-driven move. Nielsen is like any other company and is on the lookout for expense reductions wherever possible. The real questions revolve around the effects on the ratings.
Nielsen’s release states that around 36% of panelists stick around until the end of their tenure, which is supposed to be 24 months, but can be extended to as long as 26 months. Here a non-exhaustive list of questions that Nielsen should answer and I suppose the MRC Audio Committee asked them, but those deliberations are confidential:
- ·Are the demographics of the households that last for full two years similar or different than the rest of the sample? In what ways, because it’s nearly impossible that they look the same? How do they differ by any of the PPM weighting variables (age/sex, race/ethnicity, geography, employment status, presence of children, and in some markets, language usage among Hispanics)?
- Does the full two year tenure percentage vary by market? 36% is an average of 48 markets. What is the range? What is the current number for each individual market?
- Has that 36% average changed over time? Increased or decreased?
- What are the average listening levels for the people who stay for two years versus those who drop out earlier? How do these levels differ? Use sales dayparts, not the total week.
- How do listening levels look by demo across tenure? For example, do levels stay steady, increase, or drop off at 6 months, 12 months, 18 months, etc.? How do these changes compare with overall levels, which have been declining across time?
- How many stations, on average, are used by the long-term panelists compared to the short-term ones? Again, let’s see the results across time.
- What do the cumes look like across time?
- Does this change mean that Nielsen will reduce the number of employees who handle recruitment? If so, will Nielsen drop more experienced recruiters who are probably paid more than newbies?
Ideally, this change will have no real effect on the ratings, but as anyone who has worked with PPM data over the years knows, a few meters can make a huge difference. The tyranny of the average quarter-hour measure at a time when only a few percent of a market listen to radio at any given time can affect careers. PURs of 3 or 4 for P25-54 M-F 6A-7P are not uncommon, so a couple of regular listeners with meters could keep a station near the top for an extra year. Conversely, other stations will be back in the pack for longer. Nielsen will say those are the breaks of the game.
The real issue here is not so much the extra year, but the metrics. If all we had was cume, an extra year wouldn’t matter a great deal and I’d be fine with the change. Unfortunately, we’re still using the same sales and programming metric going back to the days of the NBC Red and Blue networks.
For that reason alone, I’d like to see Nielsen go public with more data supporting this change. I’m not holding my breath on that one, but one can ask. It’s not as if other companies are clamoring to get into the radio ratings business, so why not go public? Non-subscribers will still not have a say, not that the subscribers can easily change Nielsen decisions.
While Nielsen may be channeling their inner Lynyrd Skynyrd for the panel, the last line of the chorus was “And you’ll never see me no more”. Until Nielsen discovers that “it ain’t no fun staring straight down a forty-four” (figuratively, not literally), I expect we’ll be seeing Nielsen back at The Jug again, looking for more ways to cut costs.
Let’s meet again next week.
