Radio InSights

Nielsen to Use PPM for TV. Will Nielsen Screw Radio?

Nielsen’s plans to measure local television with PPM creates potentially grave problems for radio.

Radio’s prime hours are during the day. Television’s prime hours are during the evening.

Together, the two media’s prime hours span around fifteen hours.

Nielsen, however, only requires that PPM panelists carry their meters for eight hours a day, only five hours for school-aged panelists.

Keep the meter in motion for eight hours, the panelist is compliant, and she’s rewarded financially and other ways. Anything less and she gets a call from Nielsen’s Panel Relations Specialists.

In other words, the meter can sit docked in the charger for more than half the day and Nielsen’s Panel Relations Specialists will be happy, and the incentives (cash) will continue flowing.

Radio Insights noted the implications of compliance in a 2011 post Arbitron's Perverse PPM Panelist Incentives.

We observed back then that:

As far as the participant is concerned, Arbitron is measuring motion, not radio.

The incentives (and threats of losing incentives) encourage panelists to figure out how little they have to do to keep the money flowing.

The lead researcher in the sole independent study of PPM raised concerns about compliance noting:

It is inevitable that they (panelists) will resist this sometimes, or simply get caught up in their lives and forget about the audiometer (PPM meter) they are meant to be wearing.

Nielsen assures us that panelists carry the meter throughout the day, but if that were true why is the compliance requirement only eight hours, less than half the time span that the typical person might be exposed to encoded radio and television?

The reason is that Nielsen and Arbitron before that found that eight hours were about all the cooperation they could get from a panelist.

It already takes a whole building full of Panel Relations Specialists nudging, cajoling, and when all else fails threatening panelists just to get them to carry the meter for eight hours.

With the addition of television will Nielsen up the requirement to 10 hours or 12?

We doubt it. Large numbers of panelists would fall short of the required compliance and in-tabs would fall.

Maintaining the eight hour rule means that radio or television is going to get screwed. And it is not out of the question that both media get screwed.

If a panelist carries the meter for eight hours during the day, TV is screwed. If a panelist lays the meter next to the TV while she goes about her evening routine, radio is screwed.

As PPM rolled out in market after market radio stations saw listening levels drop. Yet radio remained silent and like lambs to the slaughter accepted PPM.

We doubt television people will be as docile if they see a similar drop in ratings.

We suspect Nielsen’s Panel Relations Specialists will play a central role in making sure that ratings don’t drop for local TV stations, radio be damned.

Nielsen PPM Meets Dick Tracy

Last Week before a group of broadcasters Nielsen’s Rich Tunkel rolled up his sleeve and proudly displayed his smartwatch PPM meter.

Declaring that Nielsen was working on both a smartphone as well as a watch PPM, Mr. Tunkel brushed aside continuing questions about PPM’s ability to accurately capture radio listening.

The surprise announcement was ironic for a number of reasons.

In 2005 Arbitron’s PPM faced competition from Eurisko with a smartphone alternative as well as the GFK Radiocontrol watch. All three devices could detect radio exposure, and all three were tested by the UK’s ratings service RAJAR.

PPM won the three-way competition.

It was, however, a hollow victory. RAJAR ultimately decided that passive electronic measurement was deeply flawed. It rejected PPM and instead decided to develop an electronic diary, a measurement that the UK uses to this day.

The surprising “reveal” of both a smartphone and watch alternative to the current beeper-lite PPM meter came on the heals of a number of Nielsen missteps.

March 17, 2016 Nielsen announces the launch of Digital Audio Ratings. According to Brad Kelly, Managing Director, Nielsen Audio:

With the way people consume content in a continual state of change, it’s critical to capture all the platforms where people are listening to audio....We must provide a comprehensive view of listening behavior across all platforms.

One year later, nothing.

In November we had the “Nielsen PPM Device Connectivity” fail.

The company belatedly discovered that in moving to a new collection site a number of meters had become inactive and three months later only half of the affected meters were back on line.

Then in January Nielsen proclaimed Tampa’s WYUU’s stream number one in persons 18-34, becoming the first station in any of the 48 PPM markets to achieve this accomplishment.

It was incredible.

It was incredible not in the common way the word is used, but instead as the dictionary defines incredible: too extraordinary and improbable to be believed.

The station (like virtually every other streamed station) had never appeared in the Tampa book. It was a story-book worst to first accomplishment.

Rumors began circulating that the numbers were driven by one or two heavy users of the stream. With a reported AWTE (average weekly time exposed) of nearly 36 hours, it was clear that something was odd.

Nielsen, however, defended the ratings at first:

Nielsen has a series of rigorous compliance controls designed to ensure that PPM panelists meet eligibility criteria and their credited listening is valid.

Then Nielsen reversed course claiming:

Following the (Panel Relations Specialist) training visit, the household’s meter wearing compliance behavior did not change, and per our quality assurance procedures, we removed the home effective with the start of the March survey.

The official statement is oddly reminiscent of statements of Chairman Mao’s Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution. We can only hope that the two guilty panelists were not banished to the countryside. But we digress.

So perhaps the show of PPM bling was a diversion, a way to change the conversation.

Radio Insights has written frequently about the need for the PPM meter to “hear” a station for exposure credit to be given.

We’ve asserted that PPM is not capable of detecting all exposure and consequently PPM under-estimates listening.

Nielsen essentially admitted we were correct when they introduced eCBET increasing the sensitivity of the meter.

The irony probably escaped Mr. Tunkel as well as his audience, but his reveal took a few seconds as he first pulled up his jacket sleeve and then his shirt sleeve.

The watch was hidden below two layers of clothing.

Better hope panelists wear short sleeves.

 

Hillary Got Screwed Once. Radio Every Month.

Did you think Hillary would win the election? Her campaign certainly did.

Why wouldn’t they? Nearly all polls showed her leading right up to the election.

The final Real Clear Politics poll of polls had Hillary ahead in 12 of 13 polls it tracked.

Fivethirtyeight said her chance of winning was 71.4%. The New York Times gave her an 85% chance. British odds-makers put the chance at 80%.

Fox News, of all sources, flatly declared, “Trump is headed for the worst (Republican) defeat since 1984.”

Yet Trump won. Donald J. Trump will become America’s 45th President on January 20th.

Remember all those wrong polls next time you’re trying to make sense of the latest Nielsen ratings.

Nielsen ratings are just like the Presidential polls.

And Nielsen ratings can be just as wrong as all those polls that said Clinton would win the election.

Nielsen ratings are estimates based on polling listeners. And like every other poll Nielsen ratings have a margin of error.

The problem is that the potential mathematical error inherent in polls, the so-called margin of error, doesn’t capture the extent of the unreliability of polls including Nielsen’s ratings.

Improper weighting of responses can have a bigger impact than sample size on the accuracy of a poll. And critics point to misapplied weighting for leading pollsters astray.

Each month the political pollsters weighted their responses. They “adjusted” their numbers so that the make-up of each month's sample reflected their expectation of who would vote.

The problem is that small variations between the make-up of each monthly sample can be amplified by the weights pollsters apply to the numbers.

Misapplied weighting has the potential to exacerbate month to month swings of a poll as well as the differences between one poll and others.

That’s why even on the eve of the election the gap between polls was six points, exceeding the theoretical potential for error.

Now think about Nielsen ratings.

Nielsen ratings have their own theoretical margins of error. But do those calculations really reflect the entire uncertainty of the numbers?

As with political polls Nielsen’s listening data have to be weighted each book to better reflect population demographics of each market.

For a diary market, each diary is assigned a person-per-diary value (PPDV) that is applied to each individual’s diary based on sex, age, and ethnicity.

In PPM markets the weighting that Nielsen applies is much more complicated.

Each day each active panelist is re-weighted based on the day’s usable meters to match Nielsen’s best guess about the make-up of the market.

One day a given panelist might (say) represent 2,000 women, the next day she might represent 1,000 women. The next day it might be 3,000.

Small changes in a meter’s weighting is amplified across meters resulting in swings that are potentially well beyond the theoretical accuracy of the numbers.

Challenge Nielsen about their rating estimates and they will confidently tell you that they are accurate and any shift in the numbers from once month to the next is real.

How is this different from the pundits who confidently used the polls to claim that Trump had virtually no chance to win?

Next time you look at the Nielsen ratings think about poor Hillary Clinton and her supporters. They all trusted the numbers.

Don’t make the same mistake.

Now Television Has Its Own Nielsen PPM Problems

Did you find the switch to PPM added additional stability, precision, or depth to radio ratings?

PPM may have increased granularity to the numbers, but it’s hard to claim that PPM brought stability or precision to radio when ratings are too often based on one or two meters.

Now Nielsen intends to use PPM to measure local television promising, wait for it...greater stability, precision, and depth.

If you think you’ve got problems with PPM, take some solace that television broadcasters in 44 markets will soon feel our pain and then some.

While Nielsen’s plans may not seem to have a direct impact on radio, the move has implications that do not bode well for radio.

According to Nielsen’s press release:

The addition of PPM panelists to the local TV service will...provide local clients with ratings that reflect precise measurement of local viewing behaviors and insights, and boost ratings fidelity....

The inclusion of PPM measurement into the Nielsen Local TV service will bring additional stability and depth to local TV ratings. The integration will advance Nielsen's ability to provide clients more granular data while measuring consumers wherever they watch.

We hope TV people talk to radio people before they get too excited.

Radio people were given those same assurances as Arbitron rolled out PPM.

Radio may have been sold a bill of goods with PPM, but at least Arbitron replaced the diary with PPM in the top markets.

Nielsen isn’t even going to do that.

Nielsen apparently intends to combine data currently gathered via other means with PPM data, much like the company’s RADAR studies for network radio combine PPM numbers from large markets with diary numbers from small markets.

How’s that worked out for radio?

Radio’s RADAR was stripped of MRC accreditation in 2010 when Arbitron started combining PPM and diary data. The MRC has a problem combining different measurement methods.

Local television diary measurement is Media Rating Council accredited. However, the MRC is warning that local television too may lose MRC accreditation.

Every time the MRC refused accreditation to one of Arbitron’s new products executives quickly reaffirmed their commitment to accreditation:

We will continue to focus on obtaining and maintaining Media Rating Council accreditation in all of our PPM and
Diary markets. (Michael Skarzynski, CEO Arbitron 2009)

MRC accreditation for our PPM markets is a company-wide priority at Arbitron. (Gregg Lindner EVP Arbitron 2013)

Nielsen, in contrast, barely acknowledges the accreditation process, perhaps because so many of the company's products are not accredited.

In fact, no new radio PPM market has been accredited since Nielsen acquired Arbitron, and today nearly half of PPM markets remain unaccredited a decade after PPM launched.

Even the number one market in the nation—New York—is not accredited!

Nielsen pays lip-service to accreditation and then rolls out another unaccredited product.

If Nielsen is willing to compromise television ratings to save money how likely is it that Nielsen will invest to improve radio ratings?

Off to the Nielsen PPM Races

Each month Nielsen releases client PPM 6+ rating estimates to the world, and each month we read numerous analyses of who’s up and who’s down.

While the monthly rating play-by-plays are widely read and taken seriously, they shouldn’t be.

This is the sort of analyses we see:

WHTZ was up to #2 for the first time in over a year but with only a slight increase of share.

WLTW’s 6.0 in July was its lowest 6+ share since November 2014. Its +.1 (share) in August halted four successive declines with a cumulative loss of seven-tenths.

WSKQ tumbled for the third successive sweep, a combined -1.4 since June, drifting from third to sixth.

This is the wrong way to look at Nielsen estimates. We all would like to believe that monthly numbers reflect reality, that the number one station really has more listeners than the number two station, but that’s not the case.

The ratings are not month-to-month battles between stations to be analyzed like a horse-race.

Stations inch ahead in the monthly trends not like horses but rather like heads and tails in multiple coin tosses. 

Month-to-month rating changes are random. They are no more predictable than whether a coin toss “winner” will be heads or tails. It’s something we’ve addressed here, here, here, and here.

That’s why wobbles are not rare events. And the wobbles can be great enough for stations to swap positions from month to month.

Even New York with its 4,000 daily in-tab doesn’t have a large enough sample to prevent month to month swings in rank.

To illustrate the degree to which uncertainties can impact month to month changes, we took a close look at recent New York numbers.

The first graph reflects the way station ratings are typically reported emphasizing  month-to-month changes.

We’ve graphed the 6+ numbers for the top five New York stations trended from June to August.

As you can see, even top rated New York stations go up one month, drop the next, then repeat the process month after month.

For example, WLTW started the period in first place, fell to second one month, and rebounded the next month.

Meanwhile WCBS-FM started in second, wobbled its way to first in July, and ended the four months right where it started.

A much more useful way to look at monthly PPM trends is to look across the same months in previous years. Are stations ahead or behind where they were one or two years ago?

To make comparisons even more useful we can average three month’s numbers, a quarter’s worth of estimates. It won’t eliminate wobbles, but it will temper their impact.

The second graph is the result.

It shows the same five stations, but here we’ve averaged three months and compared the three months to the same months in the previous three years.

Looking at the numbers this way gives us a completely different view of what’s happening at the top of the New York ranker.

The first thing that jumps out is that four of the five stations are below their 2013 numbers.

Worse than that, three of the five stations are at their lowest point going back four years, some significantly.

One notable oddity is that four of the five stations spiked in 2015, only to fall again this year. Why would four of the top five stations all spike simultaneously?

It is unlikely that all four 2015 spikes are real.

Share is a zero-sum estimate. It always equals 100, so for one station to go up, some other station goes down.

Even with WSKQ’s growth, more than two shares evaporated from the top five New York stations in 2016. It's hard to believe that four out of five of the top New York stations would really tank all at the same time.

And what about Mega 97.9's steady growth over five years?

Recall that quote from one of the analyses, "WSKQ tumbled for the third successive sweep, a combined -1.4 since June, drifting from third to sixth."

The steady growth of the station over the past three years puts that “tumble” into perspective

It’s an example of why month-to-month comparisons can be so misleading. None of this was apparent from the monthlies.

We kept this analysis to five stations to make it easier to see what’s going on. Now that you’ve got the idea we’ll dig a little into New York numbers as well as other markets in future posts.

Why Good Books Look Bad & Bad Books Good

Your ratings are just like Presidential polls: Both are estimates, an approximation of something that can’t be precisely measured.

Presidential pollsters like to present their poll numbers as accurate and precise, but there is a limit to their precision and accuracy.

You may have noticed that every Presidential poll mentions a margin of error or confidence interval.

Margins of error are statistical calculations that indicates how much variance we should expect from one poll to another.

The larger the margin of error, the more the numbers are going to jump around.

Nielsen too likes to present their ratings as precise, an accurate measure of how well each station is doing.

However, like Presidential polls, Nielsen ratings are also estimates that have a certain margin of error. The "real" numbers might be higher than reported by Nielsen. They might be lower.

Unfortunately in analyzing Nielsen numbers we rarely acknowledge the uncertainty associated with polling.

We talk about "wobbles" as aberrations, but the truth is that every Nielsen number is a wobble.

Radio's problem is that while Presidential polls always clearly state their margins of error, variance of radio ratings is rarely reported.

You have to dig pretty deeply into the book to find it, and even then it isn’t obvious how much the numbers can vary and still be "within the margin of error."

Here’s one example that illustrates what you would find.

The first graph is a cume ranker of seven stations in one medium size PPM market. The ratings and stations are real but we’ve labeled them generically to avoid running afoul of Nielsen’s "fair use" rules.

They are ranked by Nielsen’s published estimates, but rather than show a single number for each station we’ve shown the range of ratings that would be accepted as "normal," that is within Nielsen’s confidence interval.

For example, Station 1 has a cume audience somewhere between 280,000 and 370,000. Meanwhile, Station 2 has a audience that could be as high as 370,000 or as low as 280,000.

This means that while Nielsen ranked the first station over the second, we really can’t say whether Station 1 or Station 2 has a larger audience anymore than a Presidential pollster can say which candidate is really leading if the lead is within the margin of error.

But it gets a lot more complicated than that.

Draw a horizontal line across at any point and see how many stations it touches.

Draw the line at 350,000 persons and it will run through three stations. That means that the top three stations are "within the margin of error," essentially tied.

Draw a line at 300,000 persons and the line runs through six stations.

It means that any one of the top six stations could be first...or sixth! We just don’t know.

You’re looking at 6+ full week numbers, the numbers with the lowest variance and we can’t definitively say which of the top six stations is number one.

Imagine what the variance is when we get into smaller demos or specific day parts.

The second graph is kind of messy but even more important. Take some time to study it.

The graph shows one station’s four month trend as you’ve never seen trends displayed. Again, the numbers are real but we can’t tell you the market or station. Here we’re looking at share.

The solid green line in the middle is the published share for each of four consecutive months. The blue line is the lower confidence limit according to Nielsen. The red line is the highest confidence limit.

The gray area is the area that falls within Nielsen’s total person estimate variance. In other words, the station’s share could be reported anywhere within the gray area and fall within Nielsen’s confidence interval.

What this means is that it is highly likely that the station’s share is somewhere between the blue and red lines, but we can’t say for sure exactly where it is within it.

So officially month 2 was a good month for the station, gaining nearly a full share. The station then lost ground for two months in a row.

But is that what really happened?

The margin of error for this station is about three shares. What that means is that the station has to gain or lose three shares before we can confidently say something real happened to the station.

(I’m simplifying here since Nielsen margins of error are asymmetrical, but you get the idea.)

The dashes show three very different trend scenarios, all equally likely to have happened.

First, the yellow dashed line shows the station flat over the four months. No change, solid as a rock.

Next look at the turquoise dashed line. It shows a steady uptrend for the station, from a mid four to nearly a six share in three months. Good job!

Now look at the purple line. From a mid six share the station has fallen below a four share!

Imagine how you would feel losing a third of your audience in a few months.

A flat trend, strong growth, or a free fall. All equally possible.

Two of the three plausible scenarios are wrong, but which two? And what if you react to one of two wrong scenarios by making changes to the station?

And keep in mind that our illustration is total week 6+ shares. You are probably studying demos, and typical programming demos have a variance two or three times the 6+ numbers.

This is why we always caution stations to resist the impulse to react to monthly changes in the numbers.

Wobbles are not aberrations. Wobbles are baked into ratings.

Next month when your new numbers roll out you might want to reread this post. And if it's a bad month you might want to make copies and pass them out.

 

Nielsen’s “One Size Fits All” PPM Solution.

Has Nielsen’s enhanced PPM encoding helped or hurt radio? We fear it may have done more harm than good.

Yes, Nielsen bragged that radio Average Quarter Hours increased 13% after the roll-out of enhanced encoding.

However, Nielsen looked at a period when radio stations were rushing to install Voltairs.

As we pointed out at the time, AQH started growing well before the introduction of Nielsen’s enhanced encoding. That means most of the gains could have come from Voltair, not eCBET.

Regardless, radio can take some solace that after a decade of denying that PPM under-counted radio listening, Nielsen essentially admitted that PPM really hadn’t been capturing all listening.

It was also an admission that PPM was not format neutral, as the company claimed. It’s now confirmed that some formats and programming were under-counted more than other formats, and that may still be the case.

But the moral victory and gains in AQH came at a cost.

Nielsen’s tweak to the encoding seems to have been rather heavy-handed with the annoying codes now clearly audible on some stations.

To our ears the increased audibility of encoding has made some stations unlistenable. And station engineers we’ve spoken to agree.

What good is it that the meter picks up more listening if encoding drives listeners away?

Nielsen’s Arun Ramaswamy claimed that Voltair introduced audible artifacts that, “could possibly effect the user experience for our panelists.”

Any misused audio processor including Voltair can create artifacts, but the solution is to properly adjust the processing.

A station using Voltair can lower the processing so that no artifacts are audible.

That’s not true with the enhanced encoder.

Nielsen’s is a “one size fits all” solution. If enhanced encoding creates audible artifacts on your station, there is nothing you can do.

So it turns out that PPM is still not format neutral. PPM still picks winners and losers based on format encodability.

The audibility of the encoding tones, and the possible negative listener response (user experience), is not equal across formats.

The tones are better masked on some programming. Listeners to these stations won’t be driven away, while listeners to programming where the tones are not well masked may be.

A recent Radio Insights post provided a link so you could hear the encoding tones.

Listen to the tones and then tune around your market. Once you know what to listen for, you’ll be surprised how easy it is to hear encoding—maybe on your station.

Do you think listeners want to hear that?

Is Nielsen's PPM Making Radio Unlistenable?

Is Nielsen's PPM Making Radio Unlistenable?

Recently Nielsen touted ratings growth coinciding with the roll-out of enhanced PPM encoding (eCBET).

According to Nielsen, the enhanced encoding, "Makes the PPM codes stronger and more robust, which improves code detection in challenging acoustic environments."

Unfortunately, as a consequence of stronger and more robust encoding, the encoding tones seem to be much more apparent. The sound of the tell-tale buzz-saw sound of encoding is now a regular feature of some encoded radio stations.

(At the bottom of this post you’ll find a link so you can hear what it sounds like.)

Back when PPM was being developed engineers told Arbitron executives that the only way to make encoding work reliably was to make the encoding tones audible.

Since few radio listeners enjoy the sound of buzz-saws, Arbitron decided to lower the level of the encoding tones anyway.

Voltair demonstrated the extent to which the decision hurt radio ratings. Some formats were losing upwards of 30% of their listening credit, and Voltair was giving a good chunk of that back.

Faced with incontrovertible evidence that PPM was not capturing all of radio exposure Nielsen had to do something.

So they cranked up the tones.

Yes, it helped radio station ratings, but at what cost?

The enhancement appears to have been an inelegant blunt-force effort to block Voltair. And in the process it bludgeoned programming quality.

It makes the tones more apparent in the oddest places.

The buzz-saw becomes most apparent in programming that already encoded well. High density midrange stuff seems to trigger the loudest encoding. Meanwhile, the stuff that was poorly encoded has seen limited improvement.

It’s true that Voltair could conceivably produce a similar problem, but it only appears when Voltair is turned up too much. Turning it down makes the problem go away.

With eCBET, Nielsen sets the level of audibility. You have no control. You’re stuck with audible encoding and no way to reduce the effect.

Listeners often choose one station over another for reasons other than format. Sometimes they gravitate to a station just because it sounds better.

Higher perceived audio distortion (and encoding tones sound like the worst kind of distortion) has the potential to drive listeners away.

Research has shown that listeners react negatively to noise:

When activity between the auditory and emotional parts of the brain increases, it may cause a sensation of revulsion or disgust at a sound, as typically occurs to most of us when we hear somebody scrape chalk or their nails on a blackboard.

When we hear unpleasant sounds, the auditory cortex and the amygdala interact more intensely and process the negative emotions. The amygdala is a small almond shaped part of the brain that processes our emotions and aggression. It also controls fear responses and forms emotional memories.

Wouldn’t be ironic if the battle to fix flaws with PPM ultimately drove people away from local radio because eCBET made radio unlistenable?

Once you know what you are listening for, you'll begin to hear the buzz-saw sound of encoding on many stations. Here's what continuous encoding sounds like:

EncodingTones Only

 

PPM Missed 1.4 Million Quarter-Hours of Radio...Sorry :(

Our PPM under-counted radio listening by 1.4 million quarter-hours...Sorry.

That should have been how a recent Nielsen press-release started, but instead the company crowed about a 13% year over year increase in radio AQH (average quarter-hours).

We have to take our hat off to Nielsen. It takes a lot of balls chutzpah to spend years dismissing concerns that PPM wasn’t capturing all radio listening, announcing the 13% increase, and declaring, "There is a reason Nielsen is so optimistic about audio."

Huh?

Yes, it’s great news that radio ratings are up, but radio has lived for nearly a decade chained to a flawed ratings methodology that has hurt radio by undercounting its listeners.

Nielsen’s press-release was pure Orwellian doublespeak essentially bragging about improvements to a technology that Nielsen and before that Arbitron claimed was virtually perfect.

It wasn’t that many months ago that Nielsen claimed that PPM credited all the listening that radio stations deserved. Any rating gains that Voltair produced were spurious artifacts and double counting.

Arun Ramaswamy, a co-author of this gushing self-congratulatory announcement, acknowledged a few months ago that Voltair increased ratings but questioned whether is was “true listening.”

He claimed that Voltair altered the codes allowing stations to receive credit for unintelligible listening.

It seems rather ironic that he should now declare eCBET, the enhanced code, a huge success explaining that:

We found that enhanced CBET makes the PPM codes stronger and more robust, which improves code detection in challenging acoustic environments such as low volume and/or high background noise conditions.

So Nielsen is now claiming credit for the gains after making the same changes to encoding that the company criticized Voltair for doing.

The announcement came with nary a mention of Voltair or the admission that many if not most of the gains have nothing to do with eCBET.

As we noted last August, national AQH ratings started trending up in late 2014 and really started accelerating in early 2015. After more than a decade of declining ratings, the trend reversed about the time that Voltair appeared.

In announcing the roll-out of eCBET Matt O’Grady promised an open and honest process. In that spirit we challenge Nielsen to release the same AQH rating comparison found in the press-release over the period before implementation of eCBET.

Show us comparable numbers for September 2014 to September 2015 so the entire industry can see what impact Voltair had on AQH.

Once the company does that all of us will be able to see how much credit Nielsen can take for radio’s miraculous turn-around.

It would be the honest and open thing to do.

 

Three Reasons Why PPM Minute-by-Minute Misleads

Did you know one easy way to increase your audience is to have more commercial breaks?

Yep, that’s what Minute-by-Minute tells us.

We looked at over 500 commercial breaks across multiple formats and stations. We compared the number of panelists at the start of a break to the number at the end of the break.

We found that rather than lose panelists, radio stations had a net gain of panelists by the end of the breaks.

Panelists ran away less than a third (37%) of the time. That compares to 43% of breaks that saw an increase. (There was no change during the rest of the breaks.)

Do you believe that more commercial breaks really translates into more listeners?

If you don’t, how can you trust minute-by-minute to tell you anything else useful about your programming?

We’ll look at the commercial break phenomenon in greater detail in a future post, but in this post we’re going to discuss the three biggest problems with minute-by-minute, and why you may be misled if you use it to make programming decisions.

No Way to Attribute Tune-Ins and Tune-Outs

If you make programming decisions based on minute-by-minute it means that you believe that meter count changes reflect actual reactions to content.

But much of the evidence suggests just the opposite, that many if not most meter count changes are driven by factors other than content.

The fact that PPM says people like commercials should be the first clue that maybe a decline or increase in meter counts has little to do with your programming.

The meter is not perfect.

It fails to accurately log all listening, a fact conclusively proved by Voltair and confirmed by Nielsen.

If PPM is to be believed, the majority of panelists listen to a single station, switching it on and then nine or ten minutes later switching it off.

That’s what PPM says.

According to Nielsen's own research, proportionately few panelists actually switch from one station to another.

In other words, the majority of minute-by-minute tune-outs are not when someone switches to another station.

Can we really believe minute-by-minute switching behavior when the majority of panelists aren’t really switching?

Knowing what we now know, it is far more likely that many occasions of switching behavior reflect flaws with PPM rather than a real reaction to what a person is hearing on the radio.

Keep in mind PPM detects some programming better than other programming.

Even with the enhanced CBET, it remains true that there will be times when meters will have difficulty determining if a panelist is being exposed to an encoded radio station.

So an apparent decline in meter counts can be nothing more than poorly encoded programming, perhaps a bad commercial, an MP3, a caller on the telephone, or a whiny jock.

Nielsen has assured us that encoding redundancy improves meter reliability at the quarter-hour level, but reliability at the minute level is another matter.

These reasons alone seriously compromise Minute-by-Minute as a useful programming tool.

Unfortunately, the problems don’t stop there.

We’ll explain additional problems in part 2. In the meantime, take a look at what happens to meter counts during your commercial breaks. Do you gain or lose listeners?

Nielsen Flips Off Media Rating Council...Again

If Nielsen seemed overly anxious to quickly put the Voltair matter behind them, it is perhaps because they have bigger fires to put out.

While those bigger fires are about the way Nielsen measures video consumption, Nielsen's actions have major implications for radio.

It’s no secret that Nielsen is struggling to measure all the ways that people today consume media. It is true for both television and radio.

Radio’s dispassionate passivity regarding Nielsen’s poor performance, however, stands in stark contrast to television’s very vocal public reaction to Nielsen’s poor performance on the TV side.

Alan Wurtzel NBC’s research president has been particularly blunt in his assessment of Nielsen:

Nielsen will become increasingly marginalized. They are incapable of doing certain things and it's only getting worse.

At CES Linda Yaccarino, NBC’s chairman of advertising sales and client partnerships, described Nielsen’s current rating system as antiquated:

It's unfair to marketers, it's unfair to content creators, and it's up to all of us in this industry to take a stand. We need to reach beyond Nielsen’s C3 (the current) rating.

To Wurtzel the problem is that Nielsen isn’t measuring media the way it’s consumed today and the company's failure is hurting television:

Whether we like it or not, Nielsen winds up being a reflection of what the industry is, and what troubles me is that people, because they're looking at these flawed numbers, are getting the idea that the pie, the use of the video medium, is shrinking. Well, it's not. If anything, it's expanding. It's just not being measured.

While Mr. Wurtzel is talking about television, there’s no evidence that Nielsen is any more accurate in their measurement of radio.

Radio buyers are looking at flawed numbers and getting the idea that radio is also shrinking. Radio like television is being consumed in many new ways, and radio too is being hurt by Nielsen’s inability to measure all consumption.

In some respects radio is probably being hurt proportionately more than television because of the flaws in PPM measurement. We know that PPM is missing most streamed listening. Now we’ve discovered that PPM is missing plenty of broadcast listening too.

And if the next step Nielsen is taking in television is any indication of what Nielsen intends for radio, radio measurement accuracy could actually get worse.

You see, it is getting so expensive to measure people’s media habits by way of a survey that Nielsen is going to stop asking people.

Henceforth the company is just going to “model” television rating demographics in smaller markets using increasingly inaccurate estimates of larger markets.

As reported by MediaPost:

Nielsen is poised to make the most fundamental shift in its core currency -- national TV ratings -- since it introduced people meters in 1987. That methodological shift, which will effectively begin modeling a large portion of TV ratings instead of actually measuring them, is set to change on Dec. 28th (2015) and will be the new currency for the national TV advertising marketplace for the foreseeable future.

Local television stations in smaller markets are upset, but what choice do they have?

If Nielsen can make this move stick, why not do the same for radio? Smaller markets may have their ratings “modeled” based on what’s happening in nearby larger markets, essentially estimates based on other estimates.

In a surprising show of backbone, the Media Rating Council is not just rolling over. The MRC has expressed concerns about the accuracy of a ratings service that doesn’t even make a token effort to actually talk to media users.

The MRC has yet to vote on accreditation (PDF) for Nielsen’s modeling, but Nielsen is moving ahead without the MRC’s blessing. In discussing Nielsen's moves, MediaDailyNews notes:

It will be the first time its national TV ratings are un-accredited since the MRC began auditing them in the 1960s, stemming from Congressional hearings on the TV ratings business and a consent decree with the Justice Department.

It's a point that Nielsen disputes. However, according to Nielsen's own press release:

The MRC has yet to make an accreditation determination related to the Viewer Assignment process for persons-level viewing estimates in these markets only and therefore they will not be accredited effective Dec. 31st.

Nielsen still doesn’t have MRC accreditation in all PPM markets. If anything, the process is virtually stopped with no new markets added to the accredited list since August 2013.

And now Nielsen’s radio diary methodology is under MRC review.

Yet unlike television’s vocal critics, radio’s leaders remain silent and on the sidelines.

NOTE: The original post stated that there were fewer markets accredited today than in the past. Nielsen has yet to gain accreditation in twenty-two markets, a number that has not changed since 2013. In January 2012 the MRC revoked Salt Lake City's accreditation and the market remains unaccredited. New markets, however, have since been added keeping the total accredited markets at twenty-six.

We have also added a link to Nielsen's press release regarding the status of the company's Viewer Assignment accreditation.    

PPM Minute by Minute: Astrology for Radio Programmers

We’ve spoken to dozens of programming people who are absolutely convinced that changes in PPM minute-by-minute meter counts provide useful actionable information with which they can make more informed programming decisions.

Yes, it would be great if we could use minute-by minute to fine-tune our programming.

Unfortunately we can’t, despite Nielsen’s assurances.

A decline in meter counts does not prove listeners dislike what they are hearing. An increase doesn’t mean they like what they are hearing.

The unfortunate truth is that minute-by-minute is astrology for programmers.

Those who believe in astrology are absolutely convinced of its value and accuracy. The true believer will cite instance after instance where his or her astrologist was spot on.

So it is with programmers who trust minute-by-minute. They know its right because they’ve seen it with their own eyes.

Minute-by-minute provides just enough seemingly accurate information to assure radio people who want to believe that it works.

The reality is that PPM was never designed to be accurate at the minute level.

It was designed to provide monthly rating estimates with an acceptable margin of error, error on the order of what diary measurement produces.

That’s it.

It was never designed to produce accurate audience estimates over smaller increments of time.

As you look at successively smaller increments of time you are looking at more and more randomness and errors in the numbers.

Weeklies are less accurate than monthlies, daily numbers are less accurate than weeklies.

And most assuredly, it was not designed to be accurate at the minute level.

At the minute level the noise and randomness overwhelms what little useful information might be there.

Yet radio programmers want to believe it is accurate at the minute level. They want to believe that there is something useful there.

And Arbitron wasn't going to pass up the financial opportunity to exploit this vulnerability.

The chance to squeeze a little more money from radio was just too tempting, so minute-by-minute was born.

“But it works,” you say.
“I can find hits with it,” you say.
“I can flag bad bits with it,” you say.

A trap that decision-makers too often fall into is what’s called Confirmation Bias.

We tend to look for information that supports what we already believe.

Confirmation bias is why Conservatives mostly watch Fox News while Liberals watch MSNBC.

We also tend to unconsciously discount new information that’s contrary to our views.

Conservatives who watch MSNBC will tend to dismiss more of what they see there than what they see on Fox.

We are all wired this way.

Radio programmers have to make a conscientious effort to avoid falling into the trap of Confirmation Bias if we are to make better decisions.

And looking at what appears to be objective data like meter counts makes it all the more difficult to resist falling into the trap.

What do we find when we objectively look at large data-sets of minute-by-minute?

We’ll show you in a future post.

If you use minute-by-minute, be sure to watch for it.

Fatal Flaw(s) in Nielsen's PPM Minute by Minute

Are you making programming decisions based on PPM minute-by-minute? You may want to rethink that.

Minute by minute meter counts give the illusion of granularity, an impression that you are looking at virtually real-time actual behavior of your listeners.

But it is only an illusion.

PPM measures and reports aggregated audience behavior. PPM estimates how many listeners you have and how long they listen, but that’s pretty much all.

If you want to improve your radio station and grow your audience, audience behavior data won’t help you.

You need to understand listener behavior, what we call respondent level data.

You may think that Nielsen’s minute-by-minute is respondent level data, but it’s not.

It is aggregated audience numbers, no more useful than PPM ratings.

Here’s an illustration to show you why minute-by-minute can be misleading.

Let’s say Nielsen’s minute-by-minute shows that at :00 you had five panelists (listeners), at :01 you had two, and then at :02 you had five again.

What have you learned about listener behavior? Not much.

Meter counts can’t help you fine-tune your product because they are just net counts.

Yes, you can see the so-called “switch-in” and “switch-out” numbers and even identify stations, but you can’t track actual listener behavior over time.

By the end of the three minutes are the same panelists in the count or have they been replaced by all new panelists?

You don’t know.

Take a look at two scenarios shown above that produce identical net listening reports.

In the first case the station begins with five meters and ends the period with the same people listening. We lost Jack and Jane for a minute, but they returned.

(We’re ignoring editing artifacts like lead-in minutes in these examples to keep things simple. We’ll address editing in a follow-up post.)

If the pattern continued we could conclude the station had good quarter-hour maintenance.

Now look at the second scenario. We have the same pattern of five meters dropping to two meters in the second minute, and returning to five meters the next minute.

Notice the big difference, however.

We lost all five original meters in the first minute, replaced two of them in the second minute, and replaced them all again in the third.

In the first scenario we had five panelists. In the second we had twelve. Yet our switch in/switch out report hides the critical difference.

That’s just in three minute’s time. Imagine the possibilities over an entire daypart let alone a full day.

Minute-by-minute panelist counts are not respondent level data because from one minute to the next you don’t know who’s who.

Remember that study Arbitron produced that claimed that people sit through long commercial breaks?

It was based on comparing meter counts at the beginning of a break to meter counts at the end of the break.

It’s the same problem. Net meter counts do not track panelists. And it is what people do over time that matters most.

Here’s a variation of the above example that illustrates how misleading minute-by-minute can be over longer periods of time.

Let’s say you’re looking at your minute-by-minute over a quarter-hour and it is rock solid. Most minutes you’re right around five meters, maybe one additional meter from time to time, maybe one less meter from time to time.

Nothing to worry about there. Clearly you’ve been able to engage those five panelists over an entire quarter-hour.

But how do you know that?

What if in truth no panelist stuck around for more than a minute, maybe two? What if the counts totaled five each minute but they weren’t the same panelists?

Your seemingly solid minute-by-minute actually is hiding the fact that you suck. None of your panelists liked what they heard and they all left soon after they arrived.

This may seem far-fetched, but it happens all the time. Take spot-breaks, for example.

If you trust minute-by-minute to make programming decisions, then you have to believe what it tells you about spot-breaks.

Look at a day's worth of spot-breaks and you'll find that around half your breaks have meter counts higher at the end than at the beginning of the break.

Maybe your breaks are compelling and a great way to keep listeners glued to the station, but a more likely explanation is that you are churning through panelists.

The panelists at the end of the break are not the same panelists that were listening (exposed) at the beginning of the break.

The only way to tell what’s really going on is to know which panelists were there in the beginning of the break, and whether those same panelists were there at the end.

Nielsen won’t tell you that. They won’t even sell you that information.

Aggregation and using net meter counts is just one problem trusting what minute-by-minute is telling you. We’ll be discussing other problems in future posts.

 

Nielsen's Enhanced PPM Encoder. Is it Voltair-Lite?

We’re seeing the first results of Nielsen’s enhanced PPM encoding and it seems to confirm Nielsen’s prediction: Ratings go up.

As the graph shown below illustrates, the Baltimore AQH rating index increased 4% with enhancement.

The odd thing, however, is that the Baltimore AQH index increased nearly 9% the month before the enhancement!

In fact, the Baltimore AQH index has increased for seven straight months, an unprecedented string of listening gains, the longest since Baltimore became a PPM market in 2009.

Take a closer look at the graph.

If the graph looks familiar, you may have read an earlier Radio Insights post documenting unprecedented national AQH growth.

Each month’s data point is an index based on the same month the previous year. An index over 100 means listening increased over the same month in the previous year. An index below 100 means that listening declined over the previous year.

The six months prior to May 2015 are all below 100. That means for every month between November 2014 and April 2015 Baltimore radio listening declined. Every month.

Feel free to check out the months prior the point where the graph begins. You will find that Baltimore radio has been declining for quite some time.

Something magical happened to Baltimore radio in May 2015.

After months of decline, total listening in May pulled even with the previous year. Since then listening has steadily grown, now standing 25% higher than at the same time last year.

How do we explain this miraculous turnaround?

We know that a third of Baltimore stations were using a Voltair during Nielsen’s enhancement tests. We have no way of knowing when the stations put them on the air, but given the ratings turn-around in May we would guess installations were underway by April.

Because Baltimore radio started growing in May—well before enhanced encoding—it is going to be difficult to determine how much enhancement is boosting ratings.

Individual stations are going to be able to determine the impact to their numbers, but aggregate market numbers won’t be very useful in determining the impact of Nielsen’s new encoder algorithm because market numbers include both stations that are only using the enhanced encoders and those using both Voltair and enhanced encoders.

In truth it doesn’t matter.

Radio benefits if AQH ratings go up regardless of whether the gains come from enhanced encoders, Voltair, or some combination of the two.

If a flawed measurement system was missing ten, fifteen, or twenty percent of radio listening as it now appears, it means that radio is worth more than PPM said it was worth.

And it proves that local radio listening was not declining at the rate PPM said it was.

No station is willing to publicly address the question of Voltair with the updated encoder, put privately we have been told that the enhanced encoder is like Voltair-lite. It does improve the reliability of encoding, but not as much as Voltair.

It will be several months before the full impact of enhanced encoding is reflected in the ratings. We hope Nielsen will then analyze PPM numbers across all markets to tell the industry what the new more accurate national numbers are.

That’s worth a press release.

 

Look What Traditional Nielsen Measurement Misses

Radio isn’t the only medium that Nielsen is under estimating.

As reported in Variety, NBC research chief Alan Wurtzel recently showed that traditional Nielsen TV ratings missed a lot of non-traditional viewing from things like DVRs, gaming consoles, and devices like Roku.

Mr. Wurtzel determined that Nielsen missed a minimum of 27% of one show’s premiere audience. (See graphic below.)

The problem is that both Nielsen’s radio and television audience measurement technologies have not kept up with the new ways people listen to radio and watch television.

Radio listening is now across multiple devices and delivery platforms, yet local radio is measured as if this were still the 1970s.

We’ve annotated the Variety graphic to illustrate the point that we really don't know total radio listening because of these unmeasured digital alternatives to analog radio.

The majority of listening is still by way of analog radio. However, other alternatives are growing.

Office workers listen to streams on their computers. Others listen on their mobile devices.

Consequently, a growing proportion of local radio is not being measured.

We’ve now learned that PPM is sensitive to content and that the nature of content can have an impact on how accurately PPM captures radio exposure.

The problem is that this missed listening is on top of these other issues.

According to Triton Digital, listeners consumed over 240 million hours of streamed broadcast radio in September, and that’s only counting fifteen radio groups.

Yet were Nielsen PPM estimates to be believed, fewer than a dozen stations in PPM markets had enough on-line listening to qualify for the September book.

Nielsen encodes the streams of broadcast radio stations, but that does not mean that the service can accurately measure exposure to these encoded stations.

Streaming and HD Radio both depend on digital algorithms (codecs) to compress content in order to reduce bandwidth. Compression essentially lowers content density.

Less dense content translates into less masking material to allow the encoder to insert codes.

Nielsen acknowledges this by warning broadcasters about aggressive compression. The company’s streaming guidelines warn that excessive compression poses:

Risks from both the streamer and the listener that may detract from the efficiency of the stream’s PPM encoding.

“Efficiency” is an interesting euphemistic term. What Nielsen is saying is that streaming codecs can prevent the encoder from encoding.

It’s an admission that on top of PPM’s programming dependent deficiencies, there can be digital compression deficiencies that reduce the accuracy of PPM estimates.

Do this simple test to better understand what’s happening.

Replace one of your songs with a MP3 copy and watch your Voltair meter. You’ll see all those green bars turn to red. That’s how PPM reacts to a codec.

But the problems don’t stop there.

Over 70% of streamed listening is consumed on mobile devices.

Remember those famous words: “If you can hear the station, the meter can hear the station”?

Is that really true with mobile devices?

To be continued.

 

Can PPM Accurately Measure Streaming?

If Nielsen’s PPM captured and credited only 60% of your listening, would you consider PPM good enough?

Independent estimates put online radio listening at close to 80 million listeners in PPM markets, yet according to Nielsen, streaming listeners total less than half a million.

On top of that, only one quarter of PPM markets have even one station with measurable streaming numbers.

Three-quarters of PPM markets lack a single measurable streaming station.

Can that really be true? Can it be true that essentially no one is listening to the streams of encoded radio stations?

We don’t think so. And a few calculations back up our doubts.

Nielsen publicly releases monthly PPM estimates for all subscribing encoded AM, FM, HD, and streaming radio stations that reach a “minium reporting standard” threshold.

What’s the minimum standard to be rated?

In a PPM market a station only has to achieve a 6+ cume rating of 0.495. In other words, a station only needs a cume audience of one half of one percent of the metro’s population to show up in the book.

If Nielsen is to be believed, out of thousands of broadcast stations that stream, there might be a dozen streaming stations that reach half of one percent of a metro’s population.

Is that reasonable?

Is that likely if PPM really captures and credits streamed listening accurately?

To better understand the extent of the problem and estimate how much radio listening might go missing we decided to look at one small New York Nielsen Audio subscriber, New York Public Radio, operators of WNYC AM/FM and WQXR.

Theoretically Nielsen measures both the analog and digital audiences for the group’s stations. However, the station’s streams don’t show up in the book, suggesting that none of the stations meet Nielsen’s minimum standard.

Fortunately, New York Public Radio also subscribes to Triton Digital to measure the group’s digital properties.

Nielsen and Triton release different metrics, but using a technique Radio Insights first introduced in 2010, we can compare the two company’s ratings.

We convert both service’s ratings into “hours-tuned” a measure that reflects total consumption of a radio station or group.

New York Public Radio is not a client of Harker Research so we don’t have access to complete ratings data for the group, but fortunately the publicly released data is sufficient.

The accompanying table shows a dramatic difference in digital listening:

If we combine New York Public Radio’s PPM estimate of 4.5 million over-air broadcast hours of listening with Triton’s 3.0 million digital hours, we arrive at a total of over 7.5 million broadcast hours total listening to the group.

PPM managed to capture and credit only 60% of the organization’s listening. Or more to the point, PPM might have missed 40%.

Admittedly, comparing the two methodologies are problematic, but Nielsen has demonstrated it’s own willingness to combine disparate methodologies (PDF) to arrive at a single number, so we feel comfortable doing it too.

(The same exercise could be done with any of the commercial groups that subscribe to both Nielsen Audio and Triton Digital, an exercise that we’ll leave to the groups to do themselves.)

How could PPM miss so much streamed listening?

It is considerably more difficult to capture and credit online radio listening than it is to measure analog broadcast station listening.

If PPM misses some listening to analog broadcast stations, it goes without saying that it is going to miss a higher proportions of digital listening.

The fundamental problem is that the digital stream of a broadcast contains much less masking content than the same material broadcast over the air.

Less masking content means fewer opportunities to encode, and a greater chance that station listening credit will be lost.

We’ve heard a great deal about “enhanced” encoding lately, and how it will solve the problem of content dependent PPM decoder capture and crediting.

Nielsen, however, has only addressed this from the standpoint of analog radio. We haven’t heard anything about solving measurement problems unique to streaming.

If radio’s future is digital as everyone seems to agree, the first step is to make sure digital is being measured accurately, and that stations get full credit for their digital audiences.

Next post we’ll explain why digital is so hard to encode. Stay tuned.

 

 

Nielsen to Radio: You Can Keep Your Voltair

It was a rare moment of bravery in the Voltair saga when Nielsen’s Arun Ramaswamy invited audience questions during the recent IEEE Broadcast Technology Symposium.

After months of Nielsen’s stone-walling silence, non-statement statements about Voltair, and the company’s representatives refusing to answer any questions during their three previous presentations, Nielsen’s Chief Engineer opened the floor to questions.

Question:

What do you do to make broadcasters feel good about turning off Voltairs (given Nielsen’s “enhanced” encoding)?

As we reported here earlier, Dr. Ramaswamy first seemed to dodge the question, assuring broadcast engineers that Nielsen was watching out for them, that Nielsen was committed to continuous improvement.

It is debatable whether that’s true given that there’s no evidence that the company’s engineers took any interest in improving PPM’s accuracy until Voltair demonstrated that PPM encoding was flawed.

However, it was when Dr. Ramaswamy finally got around to actually answering the audience member’s question that we heard frank candor.

Here’s how he answered the question:

The technology improvement that we are bringing to the table essentially addresses some of the improvements that were needed: introducing the data validity despite fairly liberal editing and crediting rules.

And in my opinion (there is) always the risk if you add more amplification to something that is leveraging the masking energy you will certainly start distorting and then you cross a boundary.

And you may find out you don’t need all the detections, going from two detections to four detections you may not need it.

So that’s where I will leave it at, that we’re not publically endorsing (Voltair). That’s our position.

It appears Voltair is safe for now.

Nielsen’s Chief Engineer, the technical face of PPM, says that you may not need it, it could create problems, but Nielsen is not banning Voltair.

Unfortunately, this is not the end of the story.

Until more Voltair users upgrade their encoders we won’t know for sure whether Voltair and “enhanced” encoding really do play nice together.

Beyond Voltair there remain many questions about PPM. Nielsen has thus far refused to explain the specific changes that were made to “enhance” encoding–-even during the technical presentation.

Is the patch an interim solution while Nielsen looks for more effective improvements, or is this it?

If this is it, that Nielsen considers the problem solved, does that mean PPM is now truly “format blind?” In other words, does PPM now work equally well across all formats and programming material?

And why, if the solution fits on a USB memory stick, has it taken Nielsen two years to fix it?

There’s also the question of a review of PPM’s editing rules.

Nielsen continually reminds broadcasters that PPM is not just a meter. It’s an entire ecosystem.

There are a whole host of other components that impact ratings including editing rules, how listening credit is handed out.

During its first client presentation regarding Voltair Nielsen mentioned that the company would be reviewing PPM’s editing rules. We’ve heard virtually nothing on the subject since then.

Is Nielsen still looking at changing the rules?

And this list is just a portion of issues that remain.

While Nielsen’s willingness to tweak PPM encoders is encouraging, Dr. Ramaswamy promised broadcasters transparency, continual improvement, and a steady pipeline of PPM innovation.

So what’s in the pipeline?

Did Nielsen Just Throw Arbitron Under the Bus?

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.

Nielsen Brings Knife to Gun Fight

When Nielsen accepted an invitation to appear at this year’s IEEE Broadcast Technology Society Symposium, we thought at last there would be a technical discussion of PPM encoding challenges, Voltair’s impact on PPM, and an explanation of the new “enhanced” encoding.

It was not to be.

Nielsen’s Arun Ramaswamy showed up last Friday with the same well-worn PowerPoint stack we’ve seen before and delivered a virtually identical defense of PPM that Nielsen first delivered to its clients on July 21st, again on October 1st at the NAB Radio Show, and a third time on a client call October 8th.

There were a couple of new “eye candy” type slides (see below), but the message was the same as before, as was the continuing absence of specifics regarding missed listening or how “enhanced” encoding solves the problem.

At a technology symposium with topics such as “First Field Testing of Proposed ATSC 3.0 Physical Layer Technologies” and “Using an Improved Two-Ray Calculation to Determine the Source of Fresnal’s Constants,” Dr. Ramaswamy’s presentation was out of place full of empty vague generalities.

Dr. Ramaswamy spent the first 14 slides of his 19 slide presentation explaining the basics of encoding–-this to an audience of well-versed broadcast engineers.

Finally four slides from the end he brought up “enhanced” encoding and then showed the same test results slide from the July client-only presentation.

It’s clear from four virtually identical presentations that Nielsen believes that there is nothing more to add regarding PPM’s performance, accuracy, or reliability.

It’s always worked as designed. Stations got all the listening credit they deserved. Nielsen is now making it even better, and we don’t need to know anything more than that.

And one more thing. The success of Voltair had nothing to do with any of Nielsen’s actions. The encoder enhancements were just a natural evolution of PPM.

In the past Matt O’Grady, Nielsen’s managing director for local media, has reminded radio that Nielsen owns PPM, and that apparently means radio doesn’t need to know anything other than the happy news that the company is willing to share.

The one difference between this presentation and the previous three was a brief opportunity for questions.

Based on the tone of those questions and Dr. Ramaswamy’s defensive responses, we weren’t the only people who thought the presentation failed to address the issues that radio engineers had hoped to learn about.

It begs the question: why did Nielsen show up at all?

Was it because Dr. Barry Blesser, the creator of Voltair was there to speak on the challenges of watermarking?

Did Nielsen want to blunt any impact that Dr. Blesser’s message might have on radio engineers? If that was the goal, Ramaswamy’s pitch did just the opposite.

Dr. Blesser’s talk offered a much more detailed and nuanced technical explanation of watermarking as it applies to PPM. He raised issues that should alarm anyone who’s career depends on PPM.

We’ll cover those points in a coming post.

In announcing the “enhancement” roll-out Nielsen O’Grady declared that Nielsen would be open and transparent about the changes to PPM. If Dr. Ramaswamy’s talk at a technical symposium is any indication, O’Grady’s idea of openness and transparency makes Kim Jong-un look like an open book.

Nielsen's O'Grady to Radio: "We Own PPM."

During Nielsen’s PPM presentation at the Radio Show Nielsen’s managing director of local media Matt O’Grady made one comment that caught our attention. He declared, “We own PPM.”

Why would he need to remind broadcasters Nielsen owns PPM?

It was reminiscent of a comment that then Arbitron CEO Steve Morris made to the Arbitron Advisory Council during a contentious meeting over the roll-out of PPM.

He declared:

I’m not going to let a bunch of radio people tell me how to run my company.

The Advisory Council was concerned about how PPM was going to be implemented but Morris was determined to impose PPM on radio his way regardless of what the council thought.

And he did.

Perhaps for a moment O’Grady was channeling Steve Morris.

As we write this no independent organization or group has signed off on enhanced encoding.

The Media Rating Council has not made a public statement. The Nielsen Audio Advisory Council has been silent. The NAB’s Committee on Local Radio Audience Measurement (COLRAM) is MIA.

No large radio group has endorsed the enhanced encoding.

Why is there only industry silence regarding Nielsen’s plans?

Is it because no one outside of Nielsen has any idea what the “enhancements” are or how they work?

All we have are assurances from Nielsen that the new and improved encoding works great and is much better than the “legacy” encoding.

How do we square these assurances against previous assurances?

As recently as Nielsen’s July webinar where the company’s chief engineer asserted that Voltair enabled stations to receive credit for unintelligible listening we were assured that the PPM ecosystem was fair, accurate, and unbiased.

In the context of these recent and past assurances, O’Grady’s reminder that,“we own PPM,” takes on a more ominous meaning.

It has been eight years since PPM rolled out and prior to Voltair there had not been a single upgrade to the encoder.

Eight years.

Why the sudden urgency to upgrade every station in a month’s time?

Radio waited eight years for an encoder upgrade, but now Nielsen insists that all stations must be upgraded by the end of November.

It took them four years to develop the eDiary–and then they killed it!

Can we really believe that in the past couple of months Nielsen dissected Voltair to figure out why it worked, developed a firmware update to emulate it, lab tested the new firmware, and completed a thorough field test?

A day does not pass without some major software/firmware upgrade failure making the news.

The stock exchanges, every major airline, AOL along with every other web business, and virtually all hardware/software dependent businesses have been disrupted when “well-tested” upgrades fail.

How often has even Apple needed to patch an iOS update?

Why should radio stations believe that Nielsen’s patch is going to work any better?

If Nielsen is correct and the legacy encoder works well for the majority of stations, why not give stations the option to wait on the upgrade?

Yes Mr. O’Grady, Nielsen does own PPM, but you should understand that without the cooperation of radio stations Nielsen wouldn't have a business.

We believe that the radio stations that allow Nielsen to encode their programming should be told more about changes to the encoder. Nielsen should come clean about why encoding had to be enhanced--and why so quickly?

Radio stations should be the ones to decide how encoding is implemented and when to upgrade.