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.

Comments

Why do we care?

[ausekilis]

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.

easy idea to solve the fraud.

[computerchimp]

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.

Fraud

[Sooner Boomer]

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.

Re:Nielsen hasn't figured this trick out by now?

[Tablizer]

And they haven't employed technical solutions to correct for typos and collect the correct data?

Imagine if Slashdot was like that, producing duplicate story entries. We'd think terribly of them and defect.

PHB Response

[Tablizer]

[TFA:]
Nielsen issued the following statement to CNET:

"With participation and input from clients, Nielsen maintains a rigorous set of policy guidelines for how network clients can and should receive program and commercial ratings credit for their programming. Nielsen takes these Policy Guidelines very seriously and if we find a network working in contrast to this agreed-upon policy, we address the issue in a direct fashion as a way to maintain fairness and balance over all of our clients and the industry as a whole. We have many touch points with clients throughout the season to ensure guidelines are being adhered to."

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.

I worked at Nielsen

[muninn]

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!

Re:Nielsen hasn't figured this trick out by now?

[EvilSS]

Let me explain how commercials generate revenue: Ad companies pay money to show ads during prime time. Bamph! Revenue. Commercial ad rates are based on the only rating that really counts: C3. This is the measure of live + 3 days of DVR viewing of the commercials (not the show). So media buyers have a pretty good idea of how many people are viewing the commercials. C3 ratings are rarely public but the live overnights are a pretty good substitute for how a show is doing, and the key factor sites like TVByTheNumbers and TheTVGrimReaper use to predict renewals/cancellations.

That said, they are pushing back and this year ad buy revenue has been flat for most networks compared to last year (usually goes up a bit each year). They are aware that the market is shrinking.

This is also why you are seeing more and more carriage disputes between cable/sat providers and the owners of the local affiliates (or the networks themselves if they are O&O stations). Carriage fees are a massive part of their revenue now, and they are using that as a bit of a buffer against falling viewership numbers. The affiliate owners keep pushing to increase the fees each contract.