By Paul Rule
President, Marquest Research
Two decades of work and money-spending later, Arbitron has launched its Portable People Meter system for gathering audience exposure to electronic media. The technology is up and running in several U.S. radio markets and soon will be the currency used for radio and TV buys in Canada.
Somebody had to do it. Asking people to record their listening and viewing in diaries simply doesn’t cut it for thousands of choices from broadcast radio and TV, cable, satellite, internet, mobile phone, place-based-media, etc., etc.
Several companies were attacking this problem back in the 1980s, including Marquest. I soon saw it would take a much larger company with deeper pockets than ours. We and others besides Arbitron dropped out.
Most of us were exploring the same approach Arbitron uses. A unique identifying code is embedded in the audio of each station, program or commercial. It is inaudible to the listener but can be captured by a device carried by the participating audience member.
Arbitron’s collector is a small pager-like device. The one Marquest was exploring was to be built into a wrist watch. This was my idea. If you use something most people have with them anyway, it would be easier to gain cooperation from survey respondents. Nearly everyone wears a watch, right?
Well, right in the mid-Eighties when I had this stroke of “genius.” No doubt it was inspired subconsciously by Dick Tracy’s wrist radio and wrist TV. As it is, I have worn a watch maybe twice in the past six months. Why carry a second timepiece when I have one in my pocket already – my phone? I’m not going to leave that behind.
And incidentally, the pager business isn’t all that frisky these days. It’s those pesky mobile phones again. That’s why there are folks out there testing audience data collectors that are built into cell phones. I predict Arbitron will move in that direction as its PPM system expands and matures.
Everybody carries a mobile phone, right? Well, right until someone finds a way to implant phones directly in our ears. They could have audio code collectors built in. To assure a competitive marketplace, we could have one in each ear – one for Arbitron and one for Nielsen.
Top that Dick Tracy! Ah, the wonders of the digital media age.
Paul Rule is President of MARQUEST MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT RESEARCH in Beaufort, NC.