Television executives are increasingly concerned that paper diary measurement, a method from the 1950s to track TV viewing, excludes significant segments of the U.S. population, thus producing inaccurate ratings.
Diaries were never problem-free. Participants are asked to write in once a day what they watch on TV and when. The issues include inaccurate self-reporting, absence of households that should be represented in the samples, households declining to answer and long wait times for the data. The effort to analyze the diaries is massive: Nielsen uses diary measurement in 154 markets and processes two million diaries a year during “sweeps” periods.
Council for Research Excellence (CRE), a group of media measurement researchers including Nielsen executives, highlighted the biggest problem to date affecting diary data: a shortage of Blacks, Hispanics and young people among the participants.
How effective are diary measurements?
CRE addressed the issue at a “mini-summit” last week Tuesday in New York City. Based on 11 years of Nielsen data collected from 31 diary markets, CRE showed random errors have steadily increased.
Over time, local broadcast and cable ratings adopted a 10 percent margin of error that has become the acceptable standard used in advertising negotiations.
One of CRE’s research studies found only 11.3 percent of diary entries in a day fall within the accepted 10 percent error margin. For primetime viewing hours, the accuracy for entries is somewhat better, with 26 percent within the acceptable range. For evening and late night newscasts, accuracy fell within the acceptable margin at 18.1 percent and 20.7 percent, respectively.
I like the guy, but his face is a bit TOO familiar in scifi to me now. I get it that it's Canadian television and all, and it's great that he is "all in", but in this particular show he is just not an integral character. In fact, besides Henry in Sanctuary, the emo werewolf, I cant for the life of me think of a truly memorable character he has played. This show is about Kiera, Carlos, Alex, Kellogg, Sonya, Travis and Dillon. All the other characters are redshirts, including Ryan Robbins' character.
