Nielsen to Radio: PPM is perfect. Now We’ll Fix It.

Totalitarian regimes use torturous language when admitting problems and failures. They hope that by couching confessions within reassurances they can hide the truth in plain sight.

We were reminded of this as we listened to the recent Nielsen PPM Webinar.

Officially the presentation was exclusively for Nielsen Audio clients and invited guests, namely the NAB, RAB, and MRC, but we suspect we weren’t the only gate crasher at this long anticipated extravaganza.

We’ve held off offering a detailed critique of what Nielsen had to say because Nielsen's Matt O’Grady made assurances during the presentation that it would be made available to all clients. We’re still waiting.

How long does it take to post a ten page presentation?

Maybe somebody within Nielsen decided there was too much honesty. Maybe the implications of the promises and assurances were a little too transparent.

Whatever the reason for the delay, we’re going to go ahead and examine the presentation, its claims and promises and translate all 4,400 words into plain English.

Here’s the bottom line:

Nielsen claims PPM works like it is supposed to, but it is going to make significant changes to the encoding process to fix the problems that Nielsen claims do not exist.

Nielsen also claims that extensive testing has shown that Voltair doesn’t really increase ratings, but if it does, it might do so by creating spurious codes while degrading the listening experience for panelists.

(If you’re one of the hundreds of radio stations successfully using Voltair all this may be contrary to your own experience, but Nielsen says they’ve proved it.)

In the coming days we will parse and decode the claims of Nielsen. You won’t want to miss it.

Comments

[James]

The Nielsen seminar was a masterpiece of lawyer speak.
After many, many years of client complaints about strange PPM behavior, it took Voltair to get them off their asses. And then, they claim that Voltair is ineffective but will now write new software (their first in how many years?) which will address what Voltair already has successfully addressed which are issues that Nielsen says do not exist!
A masterpiece of double-talk!

[Andy Holt]

Thanks for your leadership and insights, Richard. When I was at KOIT/San Francisco, a 5k AM time brokered station in Berkeley showed up #2 in two consecutive weeklies. 25-54. That and some other not infrequent anomalies told me all I ever needed to know about PPM. 2,300 in-tab meters covering 6.6 million pop was a bit scanty. Hopefully, the Voltair revelations will spur Nielsen to repair this flawed methodology, whatever the cover story turns out to be.