Your comments are understandable and I don’t disagree. However, I think Mr. Shula is complaining about the fact that diaries are weighed-up amongst certain demos. For example fewer and fewer people in the 20 to 40 year old range are listening to the radio at all, however Nielsen tries to wear them up to match the population of the market.
That is not how it works.
The radio survey measures people's behaviour and includes those who listen a lot, a little and not at all. Nielsen does not sample "radio listeners". It samples people. It tries to get a sample as close to matching the population on a whole bunch of metrics, but when the match is not perfect, they achieve balance by weighting.
So, if the 18-24 population is 7.6% of the market, then 7.6% of the diaries go to persons who are in that age group, irrespective of whether each person with a diary listens or not.
Nielsen has to try to match the population on age, gender, ethnicity, geography, income and education. When they don't get an exact match, they weigh individual respondents up or down in the category they are tabulating.
In Buddy's case, older people are better at filling in diaries and returning them, so often 55 and over gets weighted down while tough demos like 18-24 may be weighted up. Since Nielsen does not know how each weak has done, they do weighting "after the fact" when diaries come back in the mail.
I believe what he is saying is that if there aren’t as many people in that age group even listening to the radio, how can they waive them up to the overall metro population in the demo.
That is not the case as "listening to the radio" is not part of the recruit specification for ratings.
I don’t think he is saying that 20-40 year olds should be writing down WECK. If I’m hearing him correctly, I think he means that they shouldn’t make it look like there are more people in that age group listening to radio in the first place, and then to act like there are hurts other stations. I don’t know how he is doing his math and don’t understand it, but in concept he has a point.
That's not the case. In any event, among adults over age 18, there is not a lot of variation between weekly radio usage of 18-34, 18-49, 25-54 and so on. Where there is variation is the amount of listening, and that is most prevalent among 18-24's, which is not a common "buy" demo anyway.
Here in Canada, we have a similar way to measure audience, however it is done electronically, and it is much more transparent in terms of how they get about the number.
The larger markets license the PPM technology, and it licences it from Nielsen. The smaller ones use a method very similar to the Nielsen diary.
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