August 16, 2000
Who Pays Attention to TV and Radio
Commercials? Whispercode Knows
By BERNARD STAMLER
They are everywhere, cluttering the radio dial and the broadcast and cable
television channels as never before: commercials, lots of them, jammed by
eager advertisers into what seems to be every available second of
programming time.
So is anyone actually paying attention? Of course, broadcasters say. But
what proof do they have?
Sure, there are the ratings, which are provided by services like Nielsen for
television and Arbitron for radio and which are supposed to track just how
many people are watching or listening to given programs at given times. But
the relatively small audience samples and traditional audience-measuring
techniques used by these rating services -- hand-written diaries, for
example,
or manually operated people meters, where participants push buttons when
they watch television -- are said by their detractors to be inexact and
quaintly
old-fashioned, unfairly favoring traditional networks to the detriment of
less-
established media outlets.
The result? Advertisers are clamoring for more precise data, and for the
technology that can provide it, says Lee Weinblatt.
And Mr. Weinblatt thinks he can oblige.
The chief executive of the Pretesting Company, based in Tenafly, N.J., Mr.
Weinblatt is no stranger to audience response measurement. For more than
a decade, his firm has been testing commercials for clients like Anheuser-
Busch, Burger King and Johnson & Johnson before they are broadcast,
determining whether viewers are likely to watch them or, instead, to switch
them off on sight. And now he says that he has developed something that
goes even further: a passive system that measures exactly who is in a room
or automobile at the precise moment a television or radio commercial is
broadcast.
The new system is called Whispercode, and unlike the firm's commercial
pretesting, which is conducted in specially outfitted locations, it operates
entirely within the home or automobile of its participants. The system
involves the encoding of commercials with inaudible, identifying signals;
test
participants need do nothing to activate it.
Instead, once transmitted, the encoded signals are automatically detected
by a small device worn by participants -- a bracelet, for example, or a
keychain -- that will function provided they are in the room or car where
the
television set or radio emitting the signal is located. The devices are
motion
sensitive, so a participant could not put one on the table and leave the
house. The device then sends a signal to a nearby recording box "the size of
a paperback book," according to Mr. Weinblatt, and the box records the fact
that the wearer was in the room when the commercial was broadcast. It even
records whether a viewer leaves the room in the middle of a commercial. The
device later downloads its data via modem to a central computer, which
makes it available to advertisers the next morning.
Mr. Weinblatt says the system will be in place in a "few thousand" homes by
year-end, and in thousands more by the end of 2001. Participants will be
chosen at random, but in a manner that is demographically accurate and
representative of a cross-section of American households, he said. And they
will be compensated for their involvement by various premiums or coupons --
no cash -- relating to products or services like dry cleaning, which are
probably not among those that will be advertised and measured via
Whispercode..
"With Whispercode, we will finally be providing our clients with a true
accounting of where their advertising money is going," he said.
Perhaps. Still, despite expressions of interest from various advertisers and
a
satellite broadcaster, no one has signed up for Whispercode, Mr. Weinblatt
acknowledged. And even Whispercode has its limitations; while the system
may provide an accurate gauge of a person's physical presence at the time
of a broadcast, any couch potato can tell you that that does not necessarily
mean that he or she is actually listening or watching. Or, for that matter,
whether he or she is even awake.
"That is a flaw inherent in any passive monitoring system," commented Anne
Elliot, a spokeswoman for Nielsen Media Research, the television rating
company. Active survey devices like Nielsen's people meter are therefore
better in many ways, she said, because they require participants to actually
do something to indicate when they start or stop viewing a show.
But people meters also have problems, because they are dependent on the
honesty of participants and their willingness to keep pushing buttons, among
other things. And so, despite their drawbacks, passive systems still "have
enough interest for people like us for us to investigate them, too," Ms.
Elliot
said.
Nielsen Media Research has in fact signed an agreement with Arbitron, the
radio survey company, to participate in a test of just such a system, the
Arbitron Portable People Meter. Similar to Mr. Weinblatt's Whispercode (the
Pretesting Company actually sued Arbitron back in the mid-1990's for patent
infringement with regard to the Portable People Meter, but lost the case in
1996), the Arbitron system differs, however, in one significant respect: it
encodes entire programs, not commercials.
Arbitron began shipping encoding devices to Philadelphia-area radio stations
this week. It expects to begin testing in a few months and, if testing is
successful, to use the meters eventually to replace the manual paper and
pencil diaries now maintained by its radio ratings participants, said an
Arbitron spokesman, Thom Mocarsky, who added that "everyone who has
seen the system is very impressed."
Everyone, that is, except Mr. Weinblatt, who contends that its failure to
measure commercials makes the Portable People Meter an inferior device,
and that Arbitron and Nielsen are more concerned with preserving an
obsolete status quo than with truly measuring audience.
Not so, Mr. Mocarsky says.
"Our system can encode anything," he said. "But we've decided to base it on
programming and not commercials because that is the standard today. It's
simply a different technique."
http://www.nytimes.com/library/financial/columns/081600tv-adcol.html
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