Megan West(erby)

How Your Nielsen Ratings Sausage Is Made

kateoplis:

sectionfive:

According to this article, 25,000 people are being polled for the ratings. That’s 1/4 of 1% of the 100,000,000 TV Households.

That’s not an accurate sampling. It sounds like a joke. (via NewTeeVee)

So is the MPAA rating system. How many board members does it have now? 10? 12?

Listen,  TV/Movie market research has always been smoke and mirrors; there’s really no such thing as an “accurate sampling”. It has no basis in fact either for that 1% or for the extrapolation of that data into the greater audience. In fact, market research has shown that companies who don’t use market research are more successful.

Nielsen’s reasoning for not pulling data from cable boxes boils down to inaccuracy from losing the demographics, but that’s precisely what we should hope for: that one day we can all be lumped into the demographic of ¨people¨ (or more likely ¨widgets¨ or ¨units¨), instead of these made up racist, agist, and sexist categories ad agencies are so salacious for.

It has always bothered and confused me that so much cultural zeitgeist and marketing money is balanced on top of imprecise and narrow-minded systems.

(via ericmortensen)

18 September 2010 ·