While Nielsen’s prepared remarks at the Broadcast Engineering Symposium revealed nothing new, Arun Ramaswamy’s response to a question from the audience sure did.
Here’s the question followed by the response:
Question:
We’ve asked multiple times (whether PPM worked). We’ve always felt PPM did not work, especially in talk environments.
We were always told we were wrong, so I find it interesting that finally another broadcast vendor comes out with a product that many of us owned and purchased, and saw extraordinary results with.
A lot of us–-and I speak for many of my friends–-believed Nielsen was the most capable of fixing this. We didn’t want another vendor, or another box, or more cost associated with it.
We wanted Nielsen to fix it.
We’re personally very glad to see Nielsen work on this and come out with enhanced CBET.
What do you do to make broadcasters feel good about turning off Voltairs and eliminating them after you’ve told us so long that there weren’t any problems.
And how do we....I have to go back to my people and tell them this really works and we don’t need this other $15,000 box.
Answer:
I can’t really speak to what Arbitron did prior to acquisition. From a Nielsen’s perspective I can say basically we have demonstrated continuous improvement mentality.
We have made changes in the TV industry. We’ve overhauled the watermark in there several years ago and we actually made new investments in the meter.
And that’s really the philosophy we’re bringing to the audio.
So you will see a sense of continuous improvement cycles; tranferancy, showing what we’re working on in the R&D pipeline.
That’s really the philosophy we believe in and we have assets to do that. We have the best technologies to do that.
That’s the assurances I want to give you. That will happen.
Keep in mind that Nielsen announced that it was acquiring Arbitron on December 18, 2012. It closed the deal on September 30, 2013.
That means Nielsen has owned PPM for two years now.
Rumors of Voltair have been floating around for well over a year, so to throw Arbitron under the bus and claim that in contrast to Arbitron Nielsen “has demonstrated a continuous improvement mentality” seems disingenuous.
The company has had over two years to acknowledge the problem of under-counting some formats and fix it. Nothing happened until Voltair was officially rolled-out.
Why have broadcasters heard nothing about a PPM R&D pipeline until the company was forced to admit Voltair existed?
One wonders where PPM would be if it were not for Voltair.
Dr. Ramaswamy went on to directly answer the audience member’s question about Voltair. We’ll dissect his answer in our next post.
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