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TV Networks Hide Bad Ratings With Typos, Report Says (cnet.com)
A report Thursday in The Wall Street Journal details how networks are taking advantage of that fact to disguise airings that underperform with viewers. From a report: It's described as a common practice in the world of TV ratings, where programs with higher ratings can charge advertisers more to run commercials. When an episode performs poorly with viewers, the networks often intentionally misspell the show title in their report to Nielsen, according to the Journal. This fools the system into separating that airing out as a different show and keeping it from affecting the correctly-spelled show's average overall rating. The report says the practice was initially used sparingly -- for instance, when a broadcast would go up against a major sporting event.
Networks deliberately messing with facts to suit their agendas? Who'd have thunk it?
And they haven't employed technical solutions to correct for typos and collect the correct data?
This doesn't sound right.
and doesn't really matter what the networks do to overcompensate.
The Sinpsoms stopped being funny years ago.
With the advent of streaming Nielson ratings are going to mean next to nothing anyway. Netflix, Hulu and Amazon will already know what shows/episodes/movies are popular just by hit counts.
Seems like the nets and ratings firmshould be criminally charged with fraud and conspiracy. Possibly wire fraud and mail fraud too. They intentionally lied to advertising firms to get more money. That's a crime.
I remember a couple episodes of "Third Rook from the Son" that were really quite terrible.
#DeleteChrome
Ok, may sound crazy, might be a bit over-the-top...but...
How about using a drop down box on the fucking submit form?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Shows are broadcast on a predetermined schedule.
A show gets a zero until something is submitted.
that will get the spelling right.
Anyways it is pretty dumb that Nelson has not been able to vet this out.
This is FRAUD. Simple as that. Just another example of criminal culture run amok in corporate America, but no one goes to jail. There is no respect for the law in the USA left.
Many times, the network advertising rates are based upon rating shares. A deliberate deception, which raises the apparent share, and therefore ad rates, is fraud - plain and simple. The advertisers should be up in arms about this.
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
While they don't actually use punch cards, a lot of the data seems like it's from that era - fixed width, all caps, space padded... feels very mainframe-y.
That said, Nielsen also has networks report TV programs with unique numeric "program codes", so it's not like they (or other people using their data, like me) rely on the program strings to group by program.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
A regular person does this and it's fraud and off to jail. A rich person allows their company to do this and it's considered brilliant accounting. And even if it does get called fraud, the company will get a slap on the wrist with a fine less than what they fraudulently gained. Hard not become cynical in such a world.
I like watching Dancing With the Scars, Better call Paul, and Breaking Dad.
,also known as weaponized advertising, get deregulated and the drooling masses return to consumption only television.
So like only if you time travel back to the 80s/90s and into the universe of Max Headroom :)
Don't have the networks type in the show's name. Instead, have them fill out a form that has the show names already entered on it.
Instead of someone from ABC typing "Wrld News Tonite" followed by audience numbers, the ABC person should bring up a web page that has the show names on it. Next to "World News Tonite", the person would type the number for that show.
That's a PHB non-response response if I've ever seen one. It says nothing concrete and doesn't explain the cause. It sounds like it's from a canned excuse template. "Microsoft Alibi for Azure"? And what is a "touch point"? That's either a new-fangled biz buzzword, or a way to get sued for harassment.
How about a more honest statement: "We got cost-cutting-happy and slacked on data inspection. We apologize and will shape up and spend more on data validation like we should have from the start."
You'll almost never hear that from a corporation. Would that kind of response really hit their stock harder than the first? I would think honesty would be more effective with stock-holders/purchasers. But egos get in the way and instead they produce flavorless fluff responses.
To be fair, if they admit fault, lawsuits would be easier because the judge/jury has a direct written confession. Without it, they can confuse the court, for example, by claiming the Flux Capacitor, built by a far-off vendor, was at fault.
Table-ized A.I.
You should see the ratings for Tramp and Obomba!
It has been the Truth That Dare Not Speak Its Name for decades: The Nielsen ratings are just one or two ticks above throwing darts, blindfolded, when it comes to both accuracy or picking real winners. But too many people within the TV industry make their living based upon the "Dailies" for any one of them to want to upset the apple cart. Tip of the Iceberg, here. I suspect whoever wrote that will be SethRich'd shortly, if he hasn't already been...
After working a few years at Nielsen (in data-heavy development roles), this sort of issue is what prompted me to leave. Trying to convince them that ensuring data integrity is worthwhile was an uphill battle. Sure, they have lots of valuable data... but it's all dirty as heck. Now they think they can just throw some machine learning on top of it to fix everything right as rain. We can all guess how well that will go!
Non reported shows = 0.
Non submission/bad spelling hurts their rating more than submitting with the correct name each week.
Problem solved.
Disclaimer: I work with similar data sets...there is a lot you can do to keep them honest!
No, that was not Windows Vista, that was Wndowes Vista.
Somehow Home Shopping Network is worth 2 billion dollars even with Amazon in the arena. I imagine people throwing money at the screen when any commercial airs; somebody must be buying. I can't understand why.
Inertia and habits play a large part in it. The average age of a QVC shopper is 53 and 95% of their sales come from repeat shoppers. So we're mostly talking about older people who got discovered QVC before the internet was a thing continue to shop with them because its an old habit they are comfortable with. It seems unlikely that younger shoppers will come on board so the days of QVC are likely numbered but not for a few decades more.
Network programmer discovers this weird trick for hiding low rated shows. Advertisers hate him!
For the quality of those episodes, and for teh typoes.
The networks will air whatever the people that pay them air... I can't count how many times I have seen what looked like a promising show cancelled before a dozen episodes, or after just one intriguing season, on an alleged claim of "poor ratings" when a cursory look at the actual ratings shows that the show had actually performed quite well.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
folks know this is going on. You think they didn't notice those typos in their spreadsheets? It was allowed as a quick and dirty way to account for occasional low ratings. The story is they're using it to cover up dropping viewership. Probably from Streaming, video games, folks who can't afford cable after the last big economic crash, etc, etc.
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QVC has actually done a lot to keep up technologically. They make a good deal of revenue from purchases made by people watching their streams via their apps on mobile, Roku, AppleTV, Facebook, and their website.
And yet the average age of their shoppers is still quite old and nearly all of their customer (95%) are repeat customers. So that implies that they are capturing the more technologically savvy of the customers they already had. Even my 98 year old grand mother has an iPad. It's easy enough to advertise an app to facilitate purchases so QVC realizing a lot of revenue though app purchases doesn't actually surprise me much.. They're just making it easier for their existing customer to do business with them which is smart. I'm not being critical of anyone - if QVC has an audience and they make their customers happy then good for them. I don't get the appeal of shopping that way but lots of people do weird shit I don't fully comprehend.
I'm willing to lay odds that QVC doesn't move a heck of a lot of product through Roku purchases though...