I'm not in the radio business...........just a listener. I'm hearing through the media that the method of taking radio ratings on our town will soon change. They will be using something called "people meters". It seems to be shaking up the radio community a bit. I've always been suspect of radio ratings (how could anyone possibly know how many people listen to a given station at a given time?). Can someone explain what a "people meter" is? Will this improve the ratings system?
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People meters...................what are they?
- Thread starter TheFonz
- Start date
It's like those little trailers that the police department puts along the side of the road. As you approach it, you speed is displayed on the "screen" adjacent to the sign advising you of the speed limit. Those are digital.
People Meters are analog. Like the guy wearing the Statue of Liberty costume attracting your attention to the storefront where they prepare income tax returns. This person replaces the "needle" in a giant version of a V.U. meter and advises you by the way he/she leans how large the audience is for your favorite station.
- O.K., O.K. fun time is over -
Various "schemes have been used to measure the size of radio station audiences.
In the past some company made phone calls to ask: Are you listening to the radio? What station.
In the recent past and current time, people have been asked to keep a diary for a week and list what station (if any) they were listening to in each time period of the day. (I suspect a lot of people do like I did the one time I kept a diary. The first day or to you are very meticulous and honest with what you write down. By the end of the week you are sitting down and guessing what you did over the last two days, and maybe showing some favoritism to you own personal favorite station.... whether you actually listened or not.
Here is what I understand about the People Meter. People recruited to be part of the survey have this little device maybe the size of a small MP3 player that they "wear on their person". It has a microphone that picks us the sound that you are hearing. Radio stations put little secret morse code beeps in their prgramming every few seconds. The People Meter device hears the beeps and stores in its memory chip a vote for the station you are listening to at any given moment.
The promoters of this device can tell a very compelling sales story that the People Meter is "Boy Scout Honest" and does not fudge in favor of your favorite radio station when you were actually watching TV and playing Wii. The critics will claim that the People Meter will hear what the teen agers in your house are listening to, or what the guy making pastrami sandwiches at the deli is listening to, while you were actually having conversation with your boddy from work and neither of you actually paid attention to the radio.
I read reports that is some markets, The results of the People Meter are drastically different that what the diary system had been reporting. Since radio advertising is sold based on ratings, it is upsetting the trends of purchases in the market place, and program directors are tearing their hair out while screaming at their program talent.
Next question?
People Meters are analog. Like the guy wearing the Statue of Liberty costume attracting your attention to the storefront where they prepare income tax returns. This person replaces the "needle" in a giant version of a V.U. meter and advises you by the way he/she leans how large the audience is for your favorite station.
- O.K., O.K. fun time is over -
Various "schemes have been used to measure the size of radio station audiences.
In the past some company made phone calls to ask: Are you listening to the radio? What station.
In the recent past and current time, people have been asked to keep a diary for a week and list what station (if any) they were listening to in each time period of the day. (I suspect a lot of people do like I did the one time I kept a diary. The first day or to you are very meticulous and honest with what you write down. By the end of the week you are sitting down and guessing what you did over the last two days, and maybe showing some favoritism to you own personal favorite station.... whether you actually listened or not.
Here is what I understand about the People Meter. People recruited to be part of the survey have this little device maybe the size of a small MP3 player that they "wear on their person". It has a microphone that picks us the sound that you are hearing. Radio stations put little secret morse code beeps in their prgramming every few seconds. The People Meter device hears the beeps and stores in its memory chip a vote for the station you are listening to at any given moment.
The promoters of this device can tell a very compelling sales story that the People Meter is "Boy Scout Honest" and does not fudge in favor of your favorite radio station when you were actually watching TV and playing Wii. The critics will claim that the People Meter will hear what the teen agers in your house are listening to, or what the guy making pastrami sandwiches at the deli is listening to, while you were actually having conversation with your boddy from work and neither of you actually paid attention to the radio.
I read reports that is some markets, The results of the People Meter are drastically different that what the diary system had been reporting. Since radio advertising is sold based on ratings, it is upsetting the trends of purchases in the market place, and program directors are tearing their hair out while screaming at their program talent.
Next question?
TheFonz said:
The People Meter (really the Portable People Meter or PPM) has been in real time tests for just about a decade. The technology was working when I first saw it in 1995... the meter was the size of a small brick, but it worked. Implementation had to wait on miniaturization of components and better batteries.
Houston has been under "real" (as in "no other survey method") measurement going on 4 years (after two of testing), and markets like LA and NY are in their third year... with this month's releases, about 45 markets will be PPM measured.
Technically, the meter "listens" at ear-level as it is carried by each participant. It's the size of a small pager (remember those?) and it detects as it listens embeded data bursts, up to 12 per minute, ccoustically masked in the station audio. Each burst includes the time and the unique numeric code for each station or encoded HD or web stream or other audio source.
The people with meters are part of what, in surveying, is called a panel. In a panel, the same people continue to participate over long periods of time... in the PPM up to two years. In the diary, there was a new group of participants each week. With a panel, we can get a tightly controlled group that exactly mirrors the general population in miniature so it is affordable and reasonably accurate. And the panel allows ongoing same-user tracking, which the diary did not allow.
In the PPM panel, all members of household units (families, etc.) participate to represent real living dynamics. If one member stops participating, the whole unit is dismissed. Panelists get points from Arbitron they can use to get rewards, and they are constantly contacted if they don't use the meter (it has a motion sensor).
While listeners and those not familiar with polling and sampling might disagree, the users of the data, advertisers, actively asked for this methodology and they do trust measurement based on proportional samples, given their success in doing so and the massive documentation of the ability to do proportional samples.
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