Electronic gifts can throw a wrench in readings
By Dave Lindorff
The holidays may bring great cheer to much of America, but over at Nielsen Research it's a season of bah humbug.
Blame all those wonderful electronic toys under Christmas trees.
To produce its readings on TV viewership, Nielsen gathers data from some 30,000 test homes, where recording devices are attached to TV sets.
A big part of Nielsen's job is keeping those monitoring devices functioning properly, and that becomes a real headache over Christmas when sample homes receive new TV sets and VCRs and families begin hooking them up.
Invariably, the first thing that goes is Nielsen's household meter. It either gets disconnected or knocked out of whack.
It can happen even when an existing TV set is moved to make room for the tree.
Result: The number of in-tab households--Nielsen homes where sets are recording properly--plummets to year-long lows.
Nielsen must then send armies of technicians out to set things right.
"We always have to have all our technicians on duty over the holidays to keep everything working properly," says a Nielsen spokesperson. "None of our field staff are permitted to take a vacation in January."
But even with a full field staff of several hundred people, she says keeping Nielsen's 30,000 households in-tab can be difficult.
"If people are having family over, they don't always want to have a technician coming in and fiddling with the wiring," she explains. "We work hard to have excellent relations with our sample households, and our people do give out a lot of goodies." She declines to specify what sort of goodies but the suggestion is of trinkets.
So how bad does the seasonal fall-off get?
Typically, people meter in-tab figures have fallen over the years during the holidays by about 7 percent and household set meter in-tabs by 5-6 percent.
In 1998, for example, set in-tabs fell from 92 percent to 86 percent between Dec. 15 and Jan. 3, and didn't recover fully until Jan. 11.
For people meter in-tabs that year, the picture was similar, as they fell from a high of 91.5 percent on Dec. 18 to a low of 86 percent on Jan. 3 and didn't recover until about Jan. 15.
This year, Nielsen made a special effort to combat the problem.
"We sent holiday greeting cards to all our families, telling them they have to let us know if they've changed equipment, and also reminding them to enter visitors into their people meters for the national sample," says a spokesperson. "We also added field staff."
The results were significant.
After slumping as usual from a high of 92 percent in-tabs on Dec. 15 this past December, the in-tabs fell to 88 percent on Christmas, but then held steady through the first week of January instead of falling further, as in prior years.
Similarly, people meter in-tabs went from a high of 87 percent on Dec. 15 to a low of 83 percent on Christmas day, but then held steady into January.
"Sometimes planning ahead works," says the Nielsen spokesperson.
That said, the problem will probably only get worse next year, as sample households start buying digital TVs, TiVo equipment, DDB antennas and other high-tech television equipment.
Computer games are also a big problem for the agency. Because many of these are hooked to TV sets, it's important for Nielsen technicians to set up the metering equipment so that it can properly identify whether a set is on because a program is being viewed or because it is being used as a game screen.
Media buyers and researchers know that the holiday season data is weaker than normal, but there is little they can do about it.
"All the new equipment being hooked up by sample households weakens the data, but the reality is we're going to end up using it anyway," says Anthony Torrieri, head of research at Saatchi & Saatchi.
-Dave Lindorff covers research and television for Media Life.