Pagers to survey radio listening habitsGlobe and Mail | November 7 2005 If Jim MacLeod gets his way, radio and television stations will soon be able to count how many hours of televised wrestling country music fans watch each week. Or how many English songs francophone drivers in Montreal are tuning into in their cars. To get there, it will take a near revolution in both industries. Using tiny pager-like devices Mr. MacLeod, the chief executive officer of BBM Canada wants to change how the ratings systems in Canada work for TV and radio. The pagers, which can receive signals from radio and TV stations, are able to track the listening and viewing habits of those who carry them. BBM, which tabulates the data used to compile listener and viewership numbers in Canada, wants to have them in widespread use in the next four or five years. “This will change radio and television,” he told a Canadian Association of Broadcasters conference in Winnipeg Sunday. “Radio will be sold differently.” And in the case of radio, the pagers can't get here soon enough, Mr. MacLeod suggested. Though older than television, the radio waves are extremely difficult for agencies to track. Canadian listenership data, which is relied on heavily to set the price of radio advertising, relies on people filling out roughly 260,000 weekly diaries sent out across the country by BBM each year. While those diaries divide the listening day down into 15-minute segments, they miss out on the nuances of radio. Few people tune in exactly at the top of the hour, and not many stay on one station for 15-minute blocks of time, especially when driving. BBM, which is merging with Nielsen Media to form a national ratings tracking company, has seen the number of people willing to take part in the previous surveys drop. Participation has fallen nearly 60 per cent from a few years ago, to roughly 50 per cent now. “Once they find out who we are and we don't want to sell them a vacuum cleaner it tends to be okay,” Mr. MacLeod. Experiments with the pagers in Quebec have proved promising. More than 90 per cent of Montrealers asked to carry the device to track their listening and viewing habits agree to take part. And all of the radio stations in the city agreed to have their signals encoded. The results have made for more accurate measurements of listening and viewership habits and make it possible to compare the tastes of radio audiences with what TV shows they watch. Bob Patchen, chief research officer of Arbitron Inc., which compiles ratings data in the United States, said similar experiments with the technology in Houston and Philadelphia have made it possible to track trends across both mediums for advertisers. For example, when the data from the pagers was compared, Arbitron found the most-watched TV show in Houston by listeners of country music was televised wrestling. “Who would've thought that?” Mr. Patchen told the conference. While some of the data may not surprise the ratings agencies, the goal is to eliminate wide variations in the numbers that have sometimes occurred using older data-collection methods. The Houston experiment has also been able to track consumer habits further. By encoding a signal at department stores, Arbitron has been able to then follow the shopping trips of those same viewers. “It's a bit like Big Brother,” Mr. MacLeod said. While he noted the diary system for tabulating TV and radio ratings needs to be replaced, it remains surprisingly accurate in tracking overall trends. In the near future, radio and television ratings will be tracked on a minute-by-minute basis. Similar U.S. experiments are able to tell stations how much listenership drops when one song is played compared to another. However, Mr. MacLeod doubts Canadian stores will be using the devices to track consumer habits through BBM. “That's way down the road,” he said. “We're just trying to do something simple here, which is measure radio.” Last modified November 7, 2005 |