Monday, November 11, 2013

While You Are In A Giving Mood, Mr. Nielsen...

Thank you so very much for the wonderful gifts last week at the Affiliates' Advisory Country meeting.  More stable data, larger samples, allowing all online-terrestrial simulcasts to show up and not just subscribers as well as better in-station monitoring of PPM encoders all have to cost you money and are all long overdue and appreciated!

May I respectfully suggest you do one more thing that will actually save you money?

Stop suing and thus alienating your prospective customers and instead resume the practice of making 6+ and/or 12+ top line data for all of the radio stations in your quarterly "top line data" releases.

Yes, if a rep is dumb enough to ignore the copyright notice and walk into a client with a print out, trying to sell their station using it, go ahead and take them to court.

But, if someone is simply tracking format or station trends with no intention of profiting from the info, please lend a hand to students of radio and start releasing ALL of the top line data to the trades.

That way, both we and you can see the benefits of your very positive moves on everyone's sample.

And, if someone wants to pay a bonus for performance based on 12+, what's the harm?

There is so much info available to any subscribing station both for programming purposes and for sales, a station ignorant enough to try to get business off of a 12+ ranker and nothing more is going to be punished on the streets and you don't need to pay expensive lawyers to rub salt in their wounds.

Thank you, your friend,

-Jaye

1 comment:

Tom Taylor Now said...

Lynn Martin’s LM Communications was accused by Arbitron of asking “industry consultants to obtain and provide it with reports, databases and estimates for the Charleston, South Carolina market.” Now the federal judge in charge of the case in Kentucky has ordered a February 11 teleconference to talk about scheduling the trial “and the possibility of a settlement conference.” The other cases will presumably also provide windows for settling before going to trial. So far, all Nielsen seems to have done in these cases is to notify the court that it’s the new parent of Arbitron. But there could be more going on behind the scenes, and of course if there are settlements – we’ll never know the terms. The potential penalties for piracy of Arbitron data are steep. The original suits asked for damages of “no less than $150,000 per act” on one claim, and “not less than $500,000” on another count. We know that Arbitron took four different companies to court this year and has already settled the one against WKYC television in Cleveland. Nielsen Media Research doesn’t seem to have filed any federal suits since about 2006. How does the company feel about the new radio industry that it’s now a key part of?