 Aloha. Welcome to Think Tech Hawaii on Monday, November the 22nd, 2021. This is, this show is the state of the state of Hawaii and it broadcasts every other Monday. I'm your show host Stephanie Stone Dalton. Today our topic is media ratings and we have an expert guest to discuss media ratings from their origins in the last century when television was first introduced or maybe not even at first maybe later but she will tell us more about that and and and and we have about almost a century of history on this industry's development. Our guest has studied and researched and published on on media ratings as she was a professor at the University of Missouri and she's also taught at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey. But we welcome Dr. Karen Buzzard as our guest today. Welcome Karen. Thank you Stephanie. Nice to be here. Well thanks for participating in in Think Tech and and certainly thank you for being on this show and taking the time in your in your schedule. It's it's always a great gift. Thanks. Now and getting to know you's been fun too since we've been talking about the show I've come to call you Karen. Is that okay? That's fine. I'm very tired so. Okay thank you Doctor. You're saying from the court is he's okay good. Why don't you say a few things to us about how you got interested in in the topic of media ratings? Well I got interested when I was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin working on my PhD and I was had finished my classwork and was looking around for a topic for my dissertation and sort of serendipously a head of Taft Broadcasting, a gentleman came through who had graduated from the University of Wisconsin and he was looking for students to work at broadcasting so all the students of course lined up and he selected me to be director of research at what was then WTAF television in Philadelphia. So I became experienced then as director of research there working with the rating system particularly Nielsen, Arbitron with the two key rating services. Nielsen did the national ratings as they were called and Arbitron and Nielsen at that time split the local television ratings market so basically there were two sets of ratings that we got which were the national ratings and the local ratings. Interesting. So kind of how I got involved by working there and then when it came time to write my dissertation which I had left what they say ABD of dissertation I decided to be sort of a detective because a lot of the determined terminology that we were using on ratings hadn't really been given a history so I decided to kind of track down the figures which some of which were I was lucky you're still alive at that point because it was the 80s early 80s and so I was fortunate enough to interview some of the very first rating companies and the gentlemen who had started them such as Archibald Crossley who actually was the very first rating raider and invented the term rating. Well before we go on to the heroes the pioneers and the specifics what what did people think a media rating was then and and if that's a is that a question that's meaningful. Well actually the ratings if you really started with radio was in the 20s and 30s that the rating system started and it was a kind of a joint venture at that time between advertisers who wanted to know what kind of audience they were getting for their products for buying television and broadcasters who wanted to know how their programs were rating or how they you know so they could sell the program to advertisers so it was a sort of joint venture and in terms of different types of ratings I think the rating is always the percent of some base so not all bases are the same so you have to kind of look to see if the bases are comparable like for example today Netflix uses its subscribers as a base whereas the television marketplace and cable use the what's called the number of TV households so there's something like 350,000 TV viewers today which becomes the base for their ratings so they're not really comparable unless you look at to see if the bases are comparable. Okay so when these were were inaugurated this was about the mostly that the advertisers right so this was mostly about primarily the advertisers at the time and if you look at radio and early television it was the advertisers who did the programming for radio and early television they sponsored the programs a lot of the sets at the time and radio and television had what they call a sponsors booth on the set where they would have the people in production sit in and watch what was being produced and if you recall you know the advertisements were inserted right into the program where they would interrupt the program and one of the actors would give a commercial inside the program so that was where they would interrupt this program right right a bunch of a missile or something but yeah okay well so are you telling me that like for what can I remember from back I mean like a program like Babylon Cassidy or the or the honey boners or Jack Benny or can you give us some examples is that those programs actually had their yeah a lot of them just had what they call the single sponsor so the sponsor produced the whole program so they would interrupt the program let's say like Gunsmoke was brought to you by some cigarette company I forgot which one it was but they would interrupt the program and give you an ad for a commercial with cigarettes so and earlier even before that on radio they would have the actor you know stop and then you know talk about the cigarette so it sort of gradually became inserted into the program and then eventually they moved to what the method we do today where they insert multiple commercials in a program it's no longer tied to a single sponsor okay so Karen on the then the the qualities or the the uh censoring I mean at that time they were looking out on behalf of their product they were working to get the best information about how that product could be made more attractive through these commercials and a better program to lure the audience so then they'd be able to sell more people okay yeah weren't there other things that were protecting the values that were expressed in the program I mean like wasn't there more censorship like did they do anything more than the product did they worry about language and you know oh yes they were much um they had very strict um censorship rules about what could and could not be shown on television you know things like um like similar to television where or to move these where you had to have you know uh you couldn't be laying in bed you had to have one foot on the floor that kind of thing um so they had censorship rules uh which were provided by the usually the broadcast networks offered the censorship so they oversaw them to make sure that you know they were on the um presenting what they considered moral standards at that time okay so on those moral standards that we're sort of talking about there was a framework around the programming right already that these these advertisers may or may not have had um participation in right okay but kind of you know forecasting to like talking about now where you know some of these things have gone away but they were there pretty much in place right like you couldn't yeah okay so that's what I was interested to know and so then um okay so did the audiences did people know about media ratings with who use who use these early ones how did they uh first I think public kind of interest in the ratings was under a ratings company called um Hooper ratings which was the prominent rating service during the heyday of network radio uh days you know radio programs like Fiverr McGee and Molly and uh the loner Hooper um invented what were called coincidental ratings which were calling in coincident with the program called when the program was on to see what people were watching they were sort of considered the gold standard for that time and uh so uh basically uh it was Hooper who began the uh idea of releasing these he was a great marketer to the press so he released the top 10 programs you know this week or whatever to the press so they would get um kind of marketing and uh kind of uh information that the public would want to know what programs were the most popular were there any data collected on who these viewers were did they do anything to find out more uh yes originally the data collection was just sort of random they would use viewer letters that kind of thing but eventually they moved to sampling different types of sampling and actually it's sort of interesting the rating companies grew up alongside survey sampling at the same time was growing as a field so originally early readers used something called quota sampling and which was not um basically you couldn't project that to a to a audience but when Nielsen came along he his big breakthrough uh was in radio and then later television he used random sampling which was meaning that the sample number could be projected to the entire tv population so if you had a five rating it would be five percent of the total tv population so that was sort of his invention this or his use of random sampling really kind of put him on the map and it allowed him to sell audiences by what's called cost per thousand so it tied audiences to a type of currency if you will for ratings so audience could be bought and sold based on the currency of the ratings okay so then that means he was looking at he was sampling from the viewer population yes he would well he collected the number of television households that were in the u.s the number of people that had televisions in their homes and used that as the base for his ratings regardless of whether they were on for any particular program or not just having the tv well then that became the share what you're talking about the share is uh different from the rating the rating is the entire population regardless of whether it's on or off the share is the percentage of that is watching during that time period so it's just the on portion well how did they know this how did they know whose was on uh well they used Nielsen came up with a device called the set meter so he could electronically put a little box on your set and they could watch it or basically the early ones were mail in they would have some of their work staff come out pick up the little boxes that were recorded in and then they would take them back and look at what was recorded later on they became instantaneous they develop a new type of meter which was instantaneous so they could get even overnight ratings but basically it was tying a device a meter to your set top box who gave them an idea of who was watching or how many people watching well people willing to do that i mean that so what what was the reception of and what years was this when when they were and how did he well he started in his service i think in 1942 but that was Nielsen that is he started with radio and then when television wasn't yet a viable medium at that period and then television came along he gradually moved into television readings and uh kind of uh bested hooper who was his competitor uh because of his incorporation of television readings okay and so did hooper make it through that challenge or well hooper had a unsuccessful and he went fishing and he fell into the blades of a so he ended up so the rest of hooper readings was sold to nielsen and so nielsen kind of took over the field gosh that's oh my okay that's what very interesting history so then okay so then who were these pioneers again so we've talked about hooper now he's gone nielsen is probably the i got the most stay in power why yeah right nielsen is still kind of the uh standard barrier today or the first one was crossley archival crossley that i mentioned and uh so he was kind of the first one to come up with the term rating and then hooper came along and he uh came up with the idea of using uh well he used quota sampling but he came up with the idea of rating and share both and using them differently and then when nielsen came along he came up with the idea of projectable ratings because of that you could project the rating to the entire population and find out exactly how many viewers you got and paid by paid based on the cost per thousand so that was his innovation so each of them had kind of different things they innovated and became part of the standard vocabulary because early services they were just very hodgepodge nobody had the same ratings they weren't comparable etc so they kind of standardized vocabulary that the whole ratings industry used okay so take us to the next step so did did the terminology start and and the methods did they start to change out into the tell so we understand it started with the radio now we're into the television okay so how can you take us along the changes that that occurred in the next phase okay well i think that um one of the moving along from television of course the addition of cable was a huge change uh because then they had to incorporate a cable television audience well the cable if you think about it a cable rating is not the same as a tv rating because cable audience is smaller than the entire television audience so uh if you're so they had to uh create a you know new rating for cable ratings because of the base being different as i mentioned earlier so uh i believe only i think there's something like 10 or 15 percent of homes that have don't have cable and then currently there's a big issue with people dropping cable all together and going to the streaming services so um they've had a huge turnover with people who feel that cable is too expensive you know and have dropped off and moved to entirely um streaming services so um the cable audiences sort of vary but uh that's a big issue today is um the departure of the audience for streaming services but so that was another big thing the other big change i think was the um changed digital i don't know probably a lot of the ordinary public didn't follow this but in 2000 just after 2000 the whole television you know you was over the air you know broadcasting was over the air the whole idea you had an antenna on your roof and uh you picked up the signals everything well that all shifted when television went completely digital i believe it was 2000 and um nine or ten or something around there and um so uh now everything you can still get a digital antenna and get the digital signals over the air but uh that was another big shift for television they ended up selling off a lot of the airwaves to telephone um antenna sites or you know cell phones sites so uh now it's completely digital television so that was another shift and also affected measurement okay so what did that make it easier well um if you think about cable and the uh what are called the set top devices today like um if you had a streaming device or they had to put a what's called a set top device on your set right so you might get a tivo or something and then you get a box and you attach that cable you had to get a box and attach that so all these set top boxes uh originally were one way they just recorded what you were watching but um then they just came up with the idea of making them two-way meaning um that you could you know so you they could get well it was you they could get information both ways so the result was they began to incorporate these set top box viewing as a way of replacing some of the other methodology they had used but of course the problem is that not everybody has the interactive set top box because a lot of the old set top boxes are still in use and were just one way so they couldn't get data back so um so basically that's been another makeshift is playing around with how to get a more accurate data they also used a method called diaries which you may have gotten a diary in the mail at some point uh well originally they were um considered a excellent device and when you had like a five station market or early on but now with cable and you know channels they've also become kind of questionable and the industry's always kind of looking for a new method to try to handle the multi-platforms they have to measure today another key issue of course is the telephone then right even today they have figured out how to include if you're watching on your your cell phone i don't include that in the ratings so that's another big issue for them and the ipad the ipad is another one of those yeah and and yeah any laptop device too yeah all right so what is what has happened um as far as the nielson um that that he was is he is nielson i know mr nielson has gone on probably but is uh nielson the major rating service who's doing all of this work i mean it's still nielson nielson the nielson family themselves who started the whole thing um sold the business way back uh mr nielson the original one died the son ran the business arthur nielson junior for about 10 years and then he sold it to at the time i think it was done in broad street and now it's run by uh private equity companies who haven't managed so uh but it's still kind of the king pen if you will of the rating services most uh advertisers and um broadcasters get some form of nielson ratings in order to um to determine how to sell you know they need some kind of measure to sell advertising so any advertising supported media uh has to get some kind of rating system okay so isn't that all media can you make a generalization that no not really this netflix for example that doesn't have doesn't sell advertising so in fact a lot of the newer media came out because it was a reaction a lot of people didn't like advertising and their programming so they wanted uh ways of watching programming that they were interrupted by commercials so netflix was kind of um key in that netflix was sort of interesting it began uh as a subscription service you may remember in the mail you would get the you would mail the netflix things back and forth in the mail and that was Reed Hastings the founder of the company was annoyed when he used to have the um video companies who remember the stores where you go in and you get your dvds or videos bring them home and watch them he was angry at the late fees he had to pay so he created a service where there were no late fees and that's when he started the mail and mail you can still do this I think with uh netflix you can get them by mail and then put them in your dvd or whatever but that was the origins of netflix and the whole basis was uh not watching commercials so um one word question why does uh a company like um netflix even need rating services such as nielson because they don't sell advertising and the basis of most ratings is to sell advertising yeah that would be the question the same thing for HBO HBO too yes okay so I mean their big blockbusters have been paid for by well like Game of Thrones um who pays for that whatever foundations or whatever resources they use are different from that's how a lot of them are part of some big multi conglomerate and they have resources from other areas they can use and netflix has been so successful that it's become also a major producer of programming and its own right so the entire budgeting process the all the fiscal matters are in now like a corporation running hey exactly yeah marketing in many many more ways that they busted out of this net that's right a really important niche all right so somebody like um okay this is also HBO and in fact as you know bill mar is coming again after being away for a while too placed over the new year's eve celebration but um so same thing right he's not got advertising at all so he's now HBO is also a non-advertising medium and if you remember Tevo I don't know if you ever had a Tevo but that was the whole basis of Tevo was to eliminate commercials from your program it would tape it and then you could go through the commercials you didn't have to watch the commercials because uh commercial television got really bad with and even sometimes you can see this today where they break up the program every two seconds and some people get sends and they go to a commercial or something so uh people got really sick of the commercials so um I think that created a lot of this um push toward creating a uh services that were commercial oriented right well um so okay then that gets to the question um I was going to ask you about the power of media ratings in that industry and the industry to influence what is our media does that uh it's very powerful because um it is a determinant for advertisers uh what programs they buy you know like uh they try to buy programs that match their products the key demographic is the 18 to 49 group for advertisers so that means if you're over 49 most of the programings aren't designed for you okay or if you're under 18 so that affects the type of programming that we see so we're not seeing any really programming for older people or younger people that much except for maybe PBS which is its own uh separate for no commercials or did it's kind of sliding them in now with sponsorship but basically that was the whole idea behind PBS was not to have sponsorship so that would influence the programming so um so it's been a major um I think a shift toward um moving toward these non-commercial programs and Tivo I think was very influential although I read recently that they sold Tivo to some other company who wants to use the technology for something else so I'm not sure what will happen with that you're interesting to to follow that up well then then then what for the meeting media ratings or the media rating industry so tell me what you see as the key issues for them today obviously this marketing well it's kind of interesting to note on our recently Nielsen was decredited both for the national ratings and the local ratings uh because during the pandemic they reported a decline in programming in February of last year which um during the COVID crisis so this did not make sense to a lot of people because you know you would think most people were at home watching more television not less television so uh basically they um kind of came out with the idea that the reason that the numbers went down is that Nielsen employs a staff of employees who go out into the field to make sure that their meters are working and so forth and during the pandemic they did not send them out so there was a concern that there was a lot of people who had left their homes wherever they were and so they were not recording uh they were recording nothing on their television during that time because they maybe went to the country they had home in the city or something like that so um so that affected the lower ratings they believe so the result was that Nielsen today just got um accredited by the accreditation association called the media ratings council both nationally and locally because of this flip with the pandemic similarly they've just come out I think and today with this new thing called the gauge which is going to be interesting that's just developed it's a way of using a router somehow to record programming and what they're trying to do which was the kind of the goal is to get all all types of services measured by the same device and use the same base so they could be truly comparable so that would boost the validity and reliability of the right right so um so even um Netflix has sort of on board with this because they use this kind of router based technology and according to what they found for the first time was um 60 of the audience viewership was watching still watching cable and television 26 was watching streaming and the rest of the audience was watching kind of those nine percent like video games and stuff like that so um and the top ratings company which was sort of streaming companies were um youtube and uh netflix again the most streaming that is very interesting what now one more question and then we're going to be needing to close but um and what is the most important thing they want to find out through these ratings today can you uh yes i think probably the most important thing they would like to uh implement them see if the people who are watching these commercials actually buy the products that they're watching so to somehow tie it to uh product usage that's kind of really their overall arching goal is like so you saw a commercial on some type of shoes can they somehow a lot of them are in retail businesses as well can they somehow tie this to uh you're going out and buying those shoes so that's kind of what they're looking for is how effective was the commercial did you actually buy their product after you watched it so that is what uh is so interesting is that it's really commercial commercial is the theme quite through and and it's not quality no uh in fact that's what i was saying the idea of ratings as invented by crossley he said was a misnomer because people thought popularity meant quality you know that it was some measure of quality in fact it's only a measure of quantity you know and they're not necessarily related because different day parts have different numbers of you are watching so you're going to have higher ratings at night for example because more people are at home than during the day so ratings are only measures of quantity during the time period that they're being used or watched uh so um it's kind of different i think that people assume that it's a measure of quality but it's not well um it it's so low hot time for us here and we'll have to wrap it up but i'd be we've been talking with dr karen buzzard about the origins and development of media ratings and that industry and i believe we've learned a lot about what media ratings are and are not and what they do and it's really quite simple isn't it it's it's it's about um whether there's a commercial gain out of it so um maybe in the future there'll be something more complex that can get more information about quality but thank you um for all of this information karen and it's very stimulating and i hope that you know it helps us just understand better what what's going on since we're all involved in media watching and maybe this can help us make it the best it can be for ourselves uh and at least know what it really is and what it is and when we get recommendations but i'm steven east old dalton your host for this show the state of the state of hawaii i'll see you again in two weeks and mahalo for your attention everyone please have a very happy thanksgiving this week hello ha