Gizmo measurement ditched in UK. Back to diaries
Michael Hedges April 28, 2008
Creak! The sound you’re hearing is the door closing on the ambitious experiment to measure audience electronically. The gizmo works just fine. The problem, judged insurmountable, is that people just won’t turn the damned things on.
 The UK’s radio measurement organization RAJAR – Radio Joint Audience Research – announced (April 28) that it “is to undertake an industry-wide review of the future direction of radio audience research.” The long, painful slog for electronic measurement is over. RAJAR and its TV counterpart BARB will end – early – their joint test of the Personal People Meter (PPM) electronic measurement device. (Read the RAJAR release here)
“It is not the PPM that has caused the problems – rather the respondents,” said the RAJAR spokesperson in an email. The conclusion drawn by the RAJAR board – composed of commercial broadcasters, the BBC and the advertising people – was that compliance, getting people to wear the gizmo or even turn it on in the morning, is an insurmountable task. If panel participants forget to activate the device in the morning, when the lions share of listening is done and advertising money spent, what, then, is the point?
The advertising people hammered broadcasters for much of the last decade for a passive measurement system that would eliminate the memory issues of diary keepers. The added bonus would be a change for broadcasters to measuring what people ‘heard’ rather than what they remembered tuning into.
“We would like to measure all audio distribution regardless of digital or analogue platform; live or listen again; fixed, mobile, or personal listening device; out loud or on headphones; alone or collectively; in the home, the car, the office or elsewhere,” said RAJAR managing director Sally de la Bedoyere. To accomplish all that RAJAR hired a new consultant to explore the needs and wants of broadcasters and advertisers…again. At the same time it will develop an online diary.
RAJAR invested a small fortune testing and re-testing electronic measurement systems since 1999. But that investment pales in comparison to the vast fortune spent by US measurement firm Arbitron, developer of the PPM device and all related patents. Arbitron conducts radio audience measurement services in the US and has rolled out PPM based measurement. It, too, has been plagued with – you guessed it – compliance problems.
Media Measurement Moves Forward and Everywhere
Includes: mobile and internet metrics, electronic measurement systems and device descriptions, PPM (US) debate, Cox Radio President Bob Neil interview, RAJAR (UK) debate, with comments. 68 pages PDF (February 2008)
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