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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.
And they haven't employed technical solutions to correct for typos and collect the correct data?
This doesn't sound right.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
Hand the closest intern a pair of scissors and a hole punch, tell him to go sit on a bucket next to the fax machine. Then go have a coffee.
Network programmer discovers this weird trick for hiding low rated shows. Advertisers hate him!
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'