Talk may be cheap, but building a device that can give more-accurate information on just who is watching their television by detecting people’s voices would be worth a lot to marketers.
Nielsen Media Research will begin fielding tests this summer of a passive voice-monitoring system designed to supplements its other technologies for measuring viewership. Paul Donato, senior vice president/chief research officer for Nielsen Media Research, says the device — which he estimated has 95% accuracy at this point — could better detect who was in the room with the television set. Donato outlined Nielsen’s plans for improving its sample monitoring to an audience composed largely of local television executives at the Television Bureau of Advertising’s annual conference in New York on March 31.
Local stations are not always eager for Nielsen to introduce more-precise measuring methods, because they tend to increase the perceived viewership of competing cable networks. Donato noted that making too many measurement changes too fast would lead to “chaos in the industry” because of the seismic changes in the ratings themselves that could ensue.
Another cutting-edge development, using infrared radio frequencies to detect what room people were in when watching television, is designed to be more of a “validation technique” of existing methods, Donato said. He said testing on this “local tags” technology would also begin in the summer.
Donato called a third method more of a long shot: another validation measure that uses infrared technology to determine if people are in the line of sight of their sets.
He said Nielsen would continue to roll out the Local People Meter (LPM) technology that proved controversial in New York and Los Angeles last year when some minority groups argued that it undercounted Hispanic and African American audiences. But others, including some prominent minority figures, backed the LPMs, saying that they proved more accurate than the current system of measuring local demographic viewing data through the use of people filling out diaries. By the end of next year, Donato said, Nielsen will have installed LPMs in 10 markets covering 30% of the population.
Concurrent with those efforts are attempts to improve minority participation in Nielsen sampling through more-aggressive recruitment — partly by improving incentives for taking part — and giving more personal coaching to people. But marketers trying to gauge who is watching their television ads in smaller markets will continue to face difficulties because they cannot afford to install new technologies to replace the diary method, which is considered relatively inaccurate.
