Nielsen, the television ratings monopolist, finally made its way to my mom. She called me, THRILLED that she had been selected to be a Nielsen family! When I think Nielsen, i think set-top boxes that measure your every channel surf, so I asked if they were going to help her with the installation of the box. She said that she was supposed to just write down what she’s watching every minute of the day. WHAT? I assumed she was embroiled in some mail-in phishing operation, but when I got there and looked at her paperwork — it was legit. Nielsen sent her $15 and a little paper diary so that she could record what she watched, exactly when she changed the channel, when she channel-surfed, where she ended up and for how long, etc. I simply could not believe that that is what was behind the billion-dollar advertising decisions that marketers make.

I’ve since looked into it, and it’s true. Nielsen uses set-top boxes for national prime-time TV ratings, but for the thousands of local markets across the country, TV and radio, these hand-scored diaries have been used for nearly 20 years. (Some images on people’s Diary Packs on Flickr, in case, like me, you find this hard to believe). Recently, Nielsen has tried to move to a more automated collection methodology for local markets as well, but the ratings were SO drastically different from the hand-scored methodology of the past (no surprise, I’d say), that Nielsen has taken major flack from both advertising networks and audience groups (such as minorities) whose favorite shows’ ratings dropped drastically in the conversion. A good overview of the saga is in Wired magazine.

I asked my mom a week later how she did on her little assignment. Of course, she said she kept forgetting to write things down, so she had to back-fill — trying to remember at the end of the week the things that she had watched and when.

So, Nielsen has a few issues.

1. The accuracy of the data issue — my mom is trying to watch TV while she mosaics her whole house and puts (the golf kind) in her living room — she doesn’t have time to journal. Not even for $15.
2. The representative sample issue: is my mom — who is the only hard-core Republican in Santa Cruz county — truly a representative sample of the pot-smoking college town by the sea? Well, now that she’s a Nielsen family, maybe she does finally get her voice heard.

We at Scout Labs certainly believe in more listening to customer feedback that is already naturally occurring, and less contrived research scenarios and abstract and laborious user tasks. So good job, Nielsen, pushing to automate — better later than never!