People Meter Research Articles

The COVID-19 Pandemic: A Catalyst for Increased Consumption in Television and Social Media Usage in Romania

The general perception is that the COVID-19 pandemic led to significant shifts in social media usage patterns, resulting in increased Internet traffic for communication purposes. This study analyses the use of social media and television by the Romanian population before (in 2018), during (in 2020), and after (in 2023) the COVID-19 lockdown. The results indicate that during and after the lockdown, the most frequently used social networking sites and mobile apps in Romania were Facebook and WhatsApp. TikTok experienced a significant increase in user registrations, surpassing Instagram. Despite the presumption that TV lost market share compared to the Internet, television not only remained the most utilised medium, but TV consumption increased during and after the pandemic. The data was collected by the media agency Dentsu Romania, combining information obtained from BRAT (Biroul Român de Audit Transmedia) and Dentsu Romania, based on a collection methodology involving online and face-to-face interviews, on a representative sample of the Romanian population. BRAT and Dentsu Romania media consumption data was cross-referenced with information on consumption behaviour monitored through people meters by ARMA (Asociația Română pentru Măsurarea Audiențelor).

New Media Adaptation in Sri Lanka

New media has been superimposed by the traditional media including radio, television and newspapers. Along with the penetration of the internet and the popularity of use of the social media, new media has been spread widely by replacing the existing electronic and traditional media. Streaming video is one of the most influential types of media that has been popular among all generations. This has been act as a disruption for the existing traditional media. When it comes to Sri Lanka, which is still using analogue television transmission, the impact of streaming media gets highly impacted. This research has focused on studying of the utilization of streaming media by people who lived in Colombo by using the response of TV BOX which has connected to the internet. The objective of this research is to examine the reason why people used to view recorded live content at the same time as live content on air. This research has been carried out using secondary data analysis of people meter and a primary survey by connecting 100 TV BOX users. Primary survey results has been showed that 86% of subscribers are using live recorded or video-ondemand content. Further from secondary data analysis, it has been depicted that among 298795 users, 30% of them use recorded live or video-on-demand service at the time along with liner TV. The conclusion of this research is that people are using live recorded or video-on-demand content along with linear TV to fulfil their expectations, gratification, and niche overlap.

Exploratory research as a method for making a people-metric panel in the media study of the television audience

The article considers methodological approaches and practical use of the exploratory research for making a people-metric panel for the measurement of television ranking indicators. The main task of the exploratory research is to design a social-demographic portrait of the audience, to assess the contribution to the television viewing of different age groups, and to identify control parameters for the selection of permanent participants in such studies. In 2020, in the Republic of Belarus, the practice for establishing a single national television and radio ranking measuring company was tested. The MediaIzmeritel company entered the media advertising market as using international standards (GGTAM) and research technologies (Kantar, UK). To make a panel of studies’ participants equipped with technical devices for the passive measurement of television ranking (people meters), an exploratory research and a subsequent multivariate analysis of the data obtained are necessary. The article describes the innovative for Belarus practice of creating a single national media measurement company under the few works on exploratory research of the television audience. The author explains the design of such an exploratory study conducted in July-December 2020 with the face-to-face interview and CATI telephone survey; methodological aspects of making a television panel with a multivariate analysis of empirical data; theoretical approaches to the interpretation of the concept ‘audience’, and the design of the panel matrix - the empirical structure of the peoplemetric panel.

Inferring Individual Preferences and Intra-Household Dynamics with Aggregate Data: An Application to Targeted TV Advertising

While many marketing models claim to incorporate individual-level heterogeneity into estimation and subsequent targeting, they should more appropriately be called household-level models due to the typical lack of data availability for distinct individuals. In this research, we aim to enhance targeting intra-household individuals in situations where individual behavior and consumption are difficult to track and observe. We present a model to describe intra-household consumption at the individual level while estimating the model using only aggregate data. The model takes into account factors that are likely at play when individuals are members of households (beyond and including individual-level heterogeneity) such as preference revision, behavioral interaction, and decision power. Methodologically, the model accomplishes this from aggregated data using a novel, but widely applicable, data augmentation algorithm where we impute, within a Bayesian framework, individual-level choices constrained by the aggregate observed choices. We applied our model to a household TV viewing and ad targeting setting using Nielsen People Meter (NPM) data. Our model estimation and counterfactual analysis show that ignoring intra-household dynamics could lead to significant bias in understanding individuals' behavior and that the proposed model would enable advertisers to improve the efficiency of targeting intra-household individuals significantly yielding a greater ROI.

Evolution of Worldwide Cable Television and Rating Systems: A Case Study of Pakistan

All around the world, advertisers select a medium that has higher consumer reach and for this context television and cable, T.V is one of the top priorities. Since the advent of cable television globally, this medium has made this process much more convenient because it has vastly available in almost every household and offers content to all age groups and genders. It contains all sorts of information and entertainment genres such as cartoons for children, food, fashion, and entertainment for women, sports and news for men, and religious channels for people who are interested in religion. The ease of use in its operation and the subsequent rise in viewership have also made it a medium on which competition is stiff. Every channel using this medium is in the race to achieve the title of most-watched television broadcaster and to be in the limelight to attract and air the most amount of advertising which translates into higher income and place for advertisers for their products. This demand and supply have given rise to the TRP wars and start the race of No 1. This research paper discusses the worldwide evolution of television and cable TV, elaborates about TRP, deliberating the rating framework of Television channels especially in Pakistan, also about the institutions that award these ratings, also about People meter and its working.

Tv market and televiewers in Slovakia

In the early of nineties the dual broadcasting system in the young country in the middle of Europe enabled to develop television broadcasting to the scale of what viewers previously even had not dreamed of. Commercial television broadcasting prevailed in five and a half million country. Private broadcasting gained control of the more than forty-year-old state-owned service of TV broadcasting and sent it to the role of a statistical margin. Confidence of the first one - and later followed by other private televisions - has grown faster than the numbers of audience. Directors with the influence of legislators, unbeatable managers determined the transmission time programs from a week to week. This is termed as finding the optimal time based on audience preferences. The result is today's big television chaos for the viewers, who, as a consequence of unpredictable changes in the broadcasting of televisions cease to be interested. For many years the most viewed channel has dropped to the level of underrated rivals and the panic, which it suddenly started, make them produce more fatal changes. All in the name of the audience and excellent numbers of boxes called people meters. The same problem also faces other post-communist country, the second part of the former Czechoslovakia, the Czech Republic. The paper focuses on analysis and evaluation of Slovak television sphere (partly in comparison with the Czech), which seems, after twenty years of dual broadcasting, to gather a real media competition. But not everybody likes it.

Express TV: Competing In a Cluttered World of Media for Consumer Preferences and Viewership Patterns

Express News TV Channel found some reports that their TV channel viewership was declining. In Pakistan, however, the viewership data is managed, still the system is not properly managed and has many loopholes. This can be imagined through the information that one of the most populated area of Karachi, Gulshan Iqbal, TV viewing patterns are evaluated through less than ten people meters. Express news therefore decided to conduct a full survey that included the viewership patterns, the most preferred TV shows, and hosts, morning shows, and anchors. The study revealed interesting facts about the standing of Express News programs and TV viewers’ preferences of the same.

Mobile diaries – Benchmark against metered measurements: An empirical investigation

Researchers seeking to study the relationships between consumers' communications, attitudes, and behaviors could benefit from monitoring consumers over time, across multiple locations and channels, and in a way that reflects consumers' subjective perceptions. Diaries on smartphones (mobile diaries) can be used as a research tool for such purposes. A mobile diary is a self-report instrument whereby people use their mobile handset to repeatedly report experiences of interest. Mobile diaries are increasingly used in psychology, geography, medicine, and commercial marketing. Yet they have rarely been used for quantitative marketing research, and were not benchmarked against best-practice metrics in marketing.In this study, we aim to set the ground for using mobile diaries in quantitative marketing research. We first lay out the theoretical infrastructure for the usage of mobile diaries, and describe possible respondent reporting concerns, including concerns related to non-reporting, reporting over time, and concerns stemming from individual-level heterogeneity.We demonstrate the potential of mobile diaries, as well as the importance of the various concerns, using a benchmark test case in the context of primetime TV viewing. Our benchmark uses a sample of respondents with both mobile diary viewing reports and Nielsen People Meter (NPM) records. Our analysis reveals that averaging across all conditions, 47.4%–64.7% of the NPM records are reported by the diary. The major sources for mismatch are random time periods without alarms, short viewings, and periodic reporting inactivity (pulsing). Concerns such as a decrease in reporting rates over time (e.g., fatigue), smartphone ownership, and demographic variation across individuals have relatively small effects on reporting likelihood. Analyzing the cases in which diary reports do not have a matching NPM record, we find many of them can be attributed to out-of-home viewing and viewing on non-metered devices. This finding demonstrates how mobile diaries can complement metered measurements. Overall, aggregate diary-based ratings have a 0.90 correlation with NPM ratings.We discuss implications for designing and using mobile diary studies in marketing.

Shared Market Competition and Broadcast Viewership in the National Football League

This work evaluates the cross-quality elasticity of related products in the context of Nielsen Local People Meter ratings of all regular season broadcasts from 2010 through 2013 from six National Football League teams in three shared markets. Using a fixed effects panel regression, we do not uncover evidence that viewers are swayed by the success of a rival market team in their aggregate viewership patterns, contrary to what has been found in Major League Baseball. In addition, when within-market rivals play one another, we find that viewership levels increase but in a way that indicates considerable overlap of viewership and possible substitution choices made by consumers. We expand upon the implications of this work for demand estimation in sports economics research as well as the importance of our findings to sport management-related policy.

Capturing Video Stream Audience Over IP Networks

In recent years, the transmission of audiovisual content presented substantial growth in the context of ondemand delivery, made possible through networks based on Internet Protocol, IP. This increase, boosted by internet access omnipresence and new consumption habits of this content, makes this category of communication to be continuously rivaled with traditional broadcasting technologies of Television (TV) signals. Thus, developing techniques to assess the efficacy and risks that the use of IP networks for this purpose imposes becomes relevant. Moreover, while for the named Broadcast TV has technical mechanisms that ensure the quality of this communication are well established, the same does not occur for video stream over IP, or IP Stream. The reason for this is that, for one of them, its technology is equipped with quality guarantees based on a circuit-switching operation in a connection-oriented systematic. While the other, once the web is considered, is unable to ensure quality due to its packetswitching architecture. And this is what sets it as a model called 'best effort' which, besides the features to allow channel sharing and systems interconnection, enables precisely what makes its increase in its use for audiovisual transmission, the applicationoriented provision. Thereby attending the consumer’s desire for on demand content, subsequently amplifies the role of what and who is on the edge, ultimately placing the user as protagonist. In this IP scenario, it is underlined the lack of mechanisms, related to the Internet, capable of recording two technical parameters that influence the commercial chain that sustains this entire ecosystem, they are: availability and audience. Keeping this in mind and with the goal of evaluating this new method for audiovisual offering, this work has developed methodologies to acquire such information at this consumption edge. And this has been accomplished through the construction of a software tool. It was implemented as an extension to one of the most used browsers, Google Chrome, to capture the audience of Internet videos on the leading supplier of videos exists today, Google's YouTube. In this work, the abstractions of considerations around the Quality of Service (QoS) concept, is proposed to be interpreted as a measure of Quality of Experience (QoE) assimilated from time viewed compared against the total time of a video. This justification is founded on the concept that quality translates into a particular subjectivity for each user and their individual expectations, so a measure of time is shown to be an effective thermometer. This effectiveness is justified by a principle consolidated within TV broadcast for decades, audience measurement. Thus, the construction of something analogous to the 'People's meter' in a similar scheme of 'Television Rating Points', TRP, running to capture of information in order to convey assertiveness to all stakeholders involved in this new delivery method. Keywords— IP Stream, Audience, Connection Availability, Quality of Service (QoS), Quality of Experience (QoE), Software Development.

Competition in shared markets and Major League Baseball broadcast viewership

ABSTRACTThis work evaluates the cross-quality elasticity of related products in the context of local market Nielsen Local People Meter ratings of Major League Baseball (MLB) regular season broadcasts from 2010 through 2013 from six teams in three shared markets. We employ a fixed effects panel regression with multi-way error clustering, finding that fans exhibit nuanced behaviour related to the absolute quality and relative quality of the two local teams. Our estimates imply quality-related competition for viewership between teams in the face of large disparities in quality. However, when both teams are of high quality, viewership increased beyond what own-team success would predict alone for the competing team. The competitive effects are largely dominated by the spillover effects. These findings point to complementary effects of team success beyond own-team interest, and bring about an important nuance in the literature on market definition, competition and substitution in sport.

Ratings, the state and globalization: the politics of television audience measurement in Israel

This is a study of the introduction to Israel of a technology for measuring television audiences, the ‘People Meter’ (PM), focusing on its political aspects. It links the new practice to the history of the state, precisely to the emergence of the neo-liberal state, which brought about a new relation to numbers, using an increased quantity of statistics for the regulation of economic sectors. In Israel, the state, in both its old (government ministers, administrators, state-owned/public channels) and new (regulatory bodies) guises, has been deeply involved in audience measurement. Next, the study situates the history of audience measurement in a global context, examining the ways in which both public actors, and private actors associated with international marketing groups have domesticated a new mode of regulation for audience measurement – the Joint Industry Committee (JIC), and the new ‘state-of-the-art’ technology – the PM. Third, it considers the political role played by audience figures in the fight over the representation of the public and of specific minorities in the public sphere: the Arab minority in Israel, the Palestinians and the settlers in the occupied territories, the Jewish minorities from the former Soviet Union (FSU) and from Ethiopia.

Social context and advertising effectiveness: a dynamic study

Consumers of movies, videos, and television programmes enjoy sharing the experience with groups of family and friends. Group consumption or co-viewing of audiovisual entertainment helps make co-exposure to advertisements fairly common across media vehicles and technologies. Research in marketing and psychology has consistently shown that the presence of, and/or the interactions with, others affects cognition. Therefore, co-exposure should sway advertising effects. Still, most media planning assumes that the value of reach and frequency for advertisers does not change over social contexts. The present study investigates co-exposure to programme ‘promos’ as an antecedent of individual consumption of the advertised programmes on people meter panel data. Our findings support and extend those reported in the sparse experimental literature, provide the basis for a theoretical model of social context of exposure, and point to possible research directions for practitioners and academics.

Viewer Ship Choice-A Study on Chilapched Viewers

Television has become part and parcel of the present generation. To attract viewers channels are working hard to bring out new programmes and reality shows to attract them and to increase their TRP ratings. Television Rating Point For calculation purpose, a device is attached to the TV set in a few thousand viewers ’houses for judging purpose. These numbers are treated as sample from the overall TV owners in different geographical and demographic sectors. The device is called as People's Meter. It records the time and the programme that a viewer watches on a particular day. Then, the average is taken for a 30-day period which gives the viewer ship status for a particular channel. The present paper focuses on the viewer ship choice of CHILAPCHED village, Jogipet town, Medak district.

La medición de las audiencias de televisión en la era digital

La introducción de la Televisión Digital Terrestre (TDT) en Chile trae consigo problemáticas nuevas para el proceso de medición de audiencias en televisión. En un contexto multiseñal, con la aparición de nuevos contenidos y enfrentando de lleno la convergencia tecnológica contemporánea, la correcta representación de las conductas de visionado enfrenta un desafío metodológico sin precedentes. Esto propicia las condiciones para desarrollar nuevas metodologías, fruto de la experiencia profesional y de la propia investigación en el campo. En el caso de Chile, en la medición de audiencias de TV se ha optado por un nuevo enfoque metodológico, a través del “Audio Matching”. Con esto, la medición a través de audímetros (people meters) entra en una nueva era, enfrentando el reto de la medición dual –digital y análoga–, en un escenario mixto de emisión de televisión. Además, logra responder efectivamente a las nuevas realidades de consumo de televisión en el hogar, relacionadas al visionado diferido y la televisión grabada. A la vez, este nuevo enfoque metodológico es compatible con futuros sistemas de medición para otros ámbitos y plataformas de consumo.

Tracking the audience: the ratings industry from analog to digital

Introduction: Audience Ratings in the 21st Century: The Digitalization of Media Audiences Part 1: Analog 1. Network Radio Audiences: The Telephone Coincidental, The Telephone Recall and The Household Meter 2. Local Radio and TV Audiences: The Diary Initiative 3. Network TV Audiences: The People Meter Initiative Part 2: Digital 4. Local TV Audiences: The Local People Meter Initiative 5. Local Radio Audiences: The Portable People Meter Initiative 6. Internet Audiences: The Software Meter Initiative 7. Exploring New Digital Currencies for TV, Cable, and Internet Audiences: Digital Cable and Set-top box Data Initiative. Conclusion

Television Co-Viewing in Mexico: An Assessment on People Meter Data

Television co-viewing is a frequent behavior with important social and economic implications. This study proposes a measure of co-viewing on people meter panel data, tests it on a data set in Mexico, and uses it to explore co-viewing. Individual differences in psychographics, program genres and co-viewing of the lead-in programs were discovered as antecedents to co-viewing. Results indicate as well that co-viewing leads to increased watching time and reduced channel browsing, and this effect interacts with group composition. These findings provide further support for the social uses of television theoretical framework, and shed light on the inheritance effects in continuous programs.

Maximizing the power of entertainment. The audience commodity in contemporary radio

This article explores the reconfigurations of the control and monitoring of the audience that take place in concert with the digitalization that characterize contemporary radio broadcasting. Three technologies for the automation of audience research and consumer monitoring are analyzed: MediaScore, used for online media research (in this case music tests); the iSelector for customizing music streams online, and the Personal People Meter (PPM) for the production of ratings. Drawing on analysis from an ethnographic fieldwork at eight music radio stations the article concludes that the work of producing the audience commodity within the radio industry is changing. Research is increasingly becoming a way to bond with listeners, turning audience self-disclosure into a part of media consumption as such. At the same time, as shown in the article, the three technologies distributes the responsibility of the research process to the people researched upon, meanwhile facilitating a more generalized surveillance. The expanded surveillance through digital media seems also to have other objectives than the previous production of audience statistics. This could be characterized as a shift from using quantitative to using qualitative data, in producing the audience commodity.

Cultural Proximity and Audience Behavior: The Role of Language in Patterns of Polarization and Multicultural Fluency

Cultural proximity is a multidimensional concept, most often used to explain media preferences across national boundaries. The present study extends the construct, revealing its power to explain audience formation within a multicultural society. Portable People Meter data from Arbitron, Inc., was used to compare patterns of television and radio use across Spanish-speaking Hispanics, English-speaking Hispanics, and non-Hispanics in Houston, Texas. The results indicate that language preferences play a powerful role in determining audience behavior. Furthermore, while English-speaking Hispanics exhibit multicultural fluency, the other two populations show evidence of cultural polarization.

Diversity of exposure in television viewing: audience fragmentation and polarization in Guangzhou

Chinese television has gone through tremendous growth and change recently. The new media environment has the potential to reshape patterns of television consumption and, in turn, affect the democratic development of Chinese society. This study examines audience fragmentation and polarization, two measures of diversity of exposure, in Guangzhou by conducting a secondary analysis of people meter data. The results show that structural changes have increased the degree of audience fragmentation and polarization in Guangzhou. Most notably, the rapid development of both overseas and local television services has greatly diminished the audience for national, government operated channels in the market. Overall, though, patterns of audience fragmentation and polarization are more limited than analogous audience behaviors reported in the West. Guangzhou audiences still concentrate on popular programs with general appeals and show very little evidence of forming into “enclaves” that confine their television consumption to a limited diet of like‐minded speech.