The Online Advertising Playbook: Proven Strategies and Tested Tactics from The Advertising Research Foundation

Offline Audience Measurement

The universe of advertising and audience measurement for offline media such as TV, radio, and print is far less bewildering, but it has not always been that way. Whenever a new medium emerges, competing measurement systems are typically launched, with each hoping to become the standard currency for ratings. In more established media those battles played out long ago, and advertisers and media companies have agreed to a single standard to measure audience size, cumulative reach, and ratings. In radio, for instance, Arbitron is the accepted audience ratings standard, used by both advertisers and broadcasters as the basis for setting prices in their media buys. In television, the road to ACNielsen’s dominance is littered with would-be competitors who have tried and failed to offer an alternative: RD Percy & Co., AGB Group, Arbitron, and the $40 million Systems for Measuring and Reporting Television (SMART) TV initiative from Statistical Research, Inc. (Mandese 1999). Traditionally, both Arbitron and Nielsen use a random sample of the population to gather viewing habits using a written diary. Both have also made recent strides using so-called people meters, devices that measure what is being watched or listened to, and by whom.

Whereas Nielsen and Arbitron use random samples to project audience size and composition to measure media, the newspaper and magazine industry uses auditing services such as BPA Worldwide and the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC). ...