PPM’s Convoluted Incentives
PPM’s Convoluted Incentives If a Nielsen PPM panelist wants the cash to keep coming, she or he has to do one thing: Keep the meter moving. The device that panelists carry has an accelerometer just like a Fitbit and other fitness tracking devices. In the same way a Fitbit can count your steps a PPM […]
Nielsen’s Fractured Fairytales
Time Spent per Occasion, TSPO for short. It’s a PPM metric that you have probably never heard about. You won’t find it in any of the Nielsen monthly market reports. It doesn’t appear in any Nielsen literature. To our knowledge the only time TSPO was shared with the radio community was in 2011 when Arbitron […]
Accuracy, Precision, and why Nielsen numbers deliver neither
It’s easy to confuse accuracy with precision. At first glance, they may seem to be similar or at least related. However, they are very different, particularly when it comes to radio ratings. Ratings can be accurate but not precise. Ratings can be precise and not accurate. And unfortunately for radio, Nielsen ratings are neither. To […]
Is Nielsen Picking Radio Format Winners & Losers?
Can a company measuring radio station listenership impact the success of music formats? It’s a question Harker Bos Group raised in 2007 when we learned that the largest 50 radio markets would no longer be measured via diary. Instead, with the new method, the Portable People Meter (PPM), stations would encode their programming with an […]