And I am sorry I didn't see your email. I would have liked to have asked your data disaggregation question.
While I have the program book in front of me (I'm at the office and don't plan to take it home), here's a brief summary of the session: The title of today's session was "New Tricks for Old Media: What Measurement and Method Tell Us About Traditional Media Consumption and Effectiveness." There were 4 speakers. 1. Nielsen guy talked about how Nielsen is working with "Return-Path Set Top Box Data" and described the advantages and disadvantages of using RPD (e.g., when a box is turned on, it's impossible to tell exactly who is -- or isn't -- sitting in front of a TV). Nielsen is conducting many studies to determine the reliability of RPD. Through the use of various statistical techniques, with only a few exceptions, it can be determined that they track quite closely with its People Meter data, which is currently the gold standard in measuring viewership. 2. University of Texas professor talked about measuring radio audiences. He did an interesting study on what happens when a radio station switched formats to Christmas music for the 5 weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas. (Ratings go up but the total radio audience doesn't increase.) 3. ESPN fellow -- ESPN.com's numbers go way up when guys go to work. ESPN mobile's numbers go up when guys are doing errands on weekends. 4. University of Wisconsin professor talked about his study on commercial skipping. Turns out that the more popular a program is, the less ad avoidance there is. I realize that that was a very brief summary. So, if someone has a specific question about those topics, I might have an answer. I did get to ask a question. The answer: no one -- advertisers or networks -- is currently making buy/programming decisions based on RPD. There was disagreement among the panel members whether RPD will ever be used in such decision-making. I haven't had a chance to finish looking through the program book; there may be some other sessions of interest to this group and I'll try to attend them if there are and I can. Melissa -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of PGage Sent: Monday, August 03, 2009 1:56 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [TV orNotTV] Re: Short notice On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 9:12 AM, Pollak, Melissa F.<[email protected]> wrote: > I'm at the Joint Statistical Meetings and will soon be attending a > session on measuring TV viewship. > > Anyone have any questions they want asked? There's actually a > presentation on ESPN. > > I'll be at this computer for another few minutes. So, you've got to > be fast > -- if you have a question -- I MAY be able to ask. I am sorry I was not at my puter when you first posted this. I am interested in the state of the art in estimating a program's total viewership including DVR and online views, and if the number of alternate views are currently large enough to make a significant difference in the judgment of a show's success (e.g. John Ham and Kevin Pollock both made a point on the Chat Show a while back that even though the first time viewership on AMC for Mad Men was small, the number exploded when including DVR viewership). How likely is it that one day a program, even on a broadcast network, will have fewer first time viewers than it does DVR and online - and be considered a success? I am also interested in anything they have on dis aggregating viewership by ethnicity, gender and age - both in terms of which programs now have the largest discrepancies in those groups, but also how confident they are in the reliability of their sample size for making this finer grained analysis? I am particularly interested if they think they really do a good job in getting an adequate, random and representative sample of ethnic minorities in the Nielsen samples. But really, I would be interested in anything you can report back from the session, and I hope you have time to give us one. Thanks! --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
