Splitsider

On Why Nielsen Ratings Are Inaccurate, and Why They'll Stay That Way

I actually registered just to make a comment. Yes, you are right on all of these, but there's also something more sinister in the works. I once worked for a market research company called Cunningham Field and Research Services. Nielsen was one of our biggest clients, and we did movie and TV surveys for them. The problem is that most of the data is sadly all made up by employees. The clients set unattainable quota goals and the management tells their employees "I don't care how you do it, get the numbers." I quit because I could not falsify data, but they were having us tell 10 year olds to "pretend they are 80 and they'll get 5 bucks." When they couldn't find enough people to lie, employees would simply make it up. We called these "TBEs" which stood for "to be entered." This allowed the company to maintain it's client base (Nielsen amongst others) while still meeting those ridiculous quotas. Don't trust market research data. I personally only trust academic research findings which publish their methodology (I'm a researcher, it's what I do!) Thanks for this article, I enjoyed it.

Posted on January 31, 2011 at 10:27 pm 0