25,000 homes.
The entire platform of
network television advertising is based on 25,000 homes! Really Nielsen?
Really. Really! (I'm channeling my best Seth Meyers impression). You put a box
in the house to measure this? Really? Isn’t there a better way? Your lack of technological
innovation astounds me. And yep, I’m still pissed about Firefly being
cancelled. I hold you personally responsible, and I’m about to go all
Hatfield’s and McCoy’s on you.
I recently read a book
called The Search by
John Battelle that described the incredible amounts of data that Google has at its
fingertips. It can track everything you click on and how long you view the
page. So why is it that TV ratings are soooooooo (I feel like I should use a
soogol here: a ‘so’ followed by a hundred o’s) antiquated.
I was just browsing
through an issue of Wired magazine
and I read an article called The New rules
of the Hyper-Social, Data-Driven, Actor-Friendly, Super-Seductive Platinum
Age of Television by Tom Vanderbilt. I compared his very low
opinion of Nielsen to the high opinion I have of Google from reading The
Search, and I once again wondered why in the hell companies spend millions of
dollars to place television advertising based on something so archaic. There
are 313.9 million people in the U.S.! Measuring 25,000 homes is only .0002% of
the population (assuming 3 people per household). Sure, 25,000 seems like it
meets the statistical requirements (what was that law in stats called?), but
seriously???? Not to mention it only counts shows that are watched within 3
days of the original air time. Please. I just finished watching the last
episode of Fringe last night and that was off the air five months ago. And to
top it all off, these people know they are being tracked.
Ever heard of testing bias??? I would like to see how many of those people are
watching Cinemax late at night. Compared to Google, Nielsen's statistical
tracking capabilities are the equivalent of a revolutionary war soldier
compared to the Master Chief. Incredibly outdated and hopelessly outmatched.
Isn’t every cable box
in America connected to the internet? When you push the button on the remote,
doesn’t it send a signal somewhere to change the channel? So all some enterprising
Columbia grad has to do is write a program that will connect to every cable box
and track what shows you watch, how long you look at the guide, how many pages
you scroll through, and if you push the 'More Info' button for a better
description of the show. Then they can just sit back and collect the data.
Sure, the cable companies and viewers may throw a fit, invasion of privacy,
blah, blah, bladitty, blah. In time, this too will be accepted as part of the
new data-driven society and television companies will follow the money. Once
someone creates the cable television version of the crawler ‘BackRub’ (and yes,
I expect royalties when you do) everyone will pour over the statistics and
wonder why our caveman mentality prevented us from seeing the big picture for
so long. Sure, some of you are saying “That’s not possible”, different boxes,
different satellites, etc., etc. Yeah, I imagine that’s what they said when two
people tried to map the entire internet and read every link on every page. This
may seem complicated to us now, but in six years, it won’t. Time to leave the
Stone Age behind Nielsen, and at the very least enter the Bronze age.
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