Television Audiences Across the World. Deconstructing the Ratings Machine

Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Jérôme Bourdon and Cécile Méadel 2014Individual chapters © Contributors 2014

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of thispublication may be made without written permission.

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmittedsave with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.

Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publicationmay be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The authors have asserted their rights to be identifi ed as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published 2014 byPALGRAVE MACMILLAN

Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world.

Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.

ISBN 978–1–137–34509–7

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fullymanaged and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India.

Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–34509–7


v

Contents

List of Tables and Figures ix

Acknowledgements x

Notes on Contributors xi

Deconstructing the Ratings Machine: An Introduction 1Jérôme Bourdon and Cécile Méadel The rise of the people(meter) 2 Critical approaches to ratings 6 A sociology of quantification 12 Procedural truth and substantial truth 13 Time-bound truths 14 The guarantors of trust 15 Qualifying to quantify 17 Qualifying by compromise 20 Joint and competitive interests 21 Trade and politics 25

Audience ratings and globalization: the new faces of the national public 27

PART I INVENTING MEASUREMENT

1 The Politics of Enjoyment: Competing Audience Measurement Systems in Britain, 1950–1980 33

Stefan Schwarzkopf What does it mean to ‘measure’ audiences? 33 Origins of television audience research in Britain, 1936–1955 35 The BBC–ITV audience measurement controversy, 1955–1975 40

Compromises and performances: audience research after 1975 46

2 Still the British Model? The BARB versus Nielsen 53 Marc Balnaves The BARB structure 54 The new BARB panel – consensus threatened 56 ‘All a twitter’ over ITV 58 The US structure 61 Conclusion 66



vi Contents

3 Canada’s Audience Massage: Audience Research and TV Policy Development, 1980–2010 69

Philip Savage and Alexandre Sévigny Audiences and policy 71 Scholarly work on Canadian audiences 72 The audience massage model 74 ‘CanCon’ regulations 77 CBC-TV KPIs 79 Citizens as audience 81 Conclusion 85

4 The Monopoly that Won’t Divide: France’s Médiamétrie 88 Jérôme Bourdon and Cécile Méadel From administrative service to commercial monopoly 89 The ‘neutral’ organization 93 The ‘neutral’ machine 95 The ‘neutrally’ observed and observing subject 98 Conclusion 100

5 Pioneering the Peoplemeter: German Public Service 102 Susanne Vollberg A short outline of the German television landscape 102 Early audience measurement for public broadcasters 104 The first ‘peoplemeter’ 105

Involving private broadcasters in television audience measurement 106

Increased measurement panel 108 Conclusion 109

PART II APPROPRIATING AUDIENCE FIGURES

6 Power Games: Audience Measurement as a Mediation between Actors in India 113

Santanu Chakrabarti Industry measurement of audiences and the academy 114

The societal influence of audience measurement systems: the debate 116

Marketplace critiques of existing audience measurement 118 The defence in the marketplace 122 The power struggle in the marketplace 123 The marketplace and the state 125 The voices heard and the voices ignored 127 The end of an era? 129



Contents vii

7 Imagining Audiences in Brazil: Class, ‘Race’ and Gender 132 Esther Hamburger, Heloisa Buarque de Almeida and Tirza Aidar Television in Brazil: early start, slow development 133 The emergent field of audience research 135

Ibope and the social scale controversy: revenue and ‘race’ biases 137

Interrogating class, sex and age 141Television audience research, women and consumerism:

gendering the audience 144Further research: on the workings of specific transnational

constructs of television audiences 147

8 From Referee to Scapegoat, but Still Referee: Auditel in Italy 153

Massimo Scaglioni The necessary referee: Auditel arrives 155 Technical use: pars destruens and pars construens 157 Public use: the apocalyptics and the integrated 159

9 Domestication of Anglo-Saxon Conventions and Practices in Australia 164

Mark Balnaves Establishing the convention 165 Distortions in audience measurement 170

Challenges to the convention: from sampling to (apparent) census 174

Conclusion 177

10 Market Requirements and Political Challenges: Russia between Two Worlds 179

Sergey Davydov and Elena Johansson The Russian TV industry and market 179

1992–1999: from the first measurement system to the first TAM tender 184

The second TAM tender (2003–2004) 187 The current measurement system 189 Conclusion 192

PART III CONFRONTING CHANGES

11 The Role of Ratings in Scheduling: Commercial Logics in Irish Public Television 199

Ann-Marie Murray RTÉ: public but also commercial service 200



viii Contents

Organizational ‘reform’ 202 Defining the audience 211 Redefining service 213

12 The Local Peoplemeter, the Portable Peoplemeter, and the Unsettled Law and Policy of Audience Measurement in the United States 216

Philip M. Napoli The introduction of the Nielsen local peoplemeter 217 The introduction of the Arbitron portable peoplemeter 219 The unsettled law and policy of audience measurement 222 Questioning the speech status of audience ratings 224 Toward a definitive speech status for audience ratings 226 Conclusion 230

13 Challenges of Digital Innovations: A Set-Top Box Based Approach 234

Tom Evens and Katrien Berte A multifaceted mass-media instrument 236 The Belgian peoplemeter approach 237 Reluctance towards innovation 239 Tracking on-demand and time-shifted viewing 240 Using accurate set-top box generated data 242 Reconfiguring the value chain of audience measurement 244 Conclusions 246

14 Thickening Behavioural Data: New Uses of Ratings for Social Sciences 248

Jakob BjurAudience measurement data – the real versus the

constructed 249 Thickening behavioural data 251 Reading the longitudinal (time) 252 Reading the social (space) 256 The outcome of thickening 258 Thickening as a key to closed territories of human action 259

Bibliography 264



1

After spreading out from the West, on-going television audience meas-urement (TAM) now prevails in many countries as the main yardstick against which both professionals and, to a certain extent, the general public measure the value of programmes. These evaluations, from one season, one week or even one day to the next, along with the careers of professionals, the value of firms and their turnovers, all depend closely on these indexes. TV audience ratings are moreover used way beyond the field of broadcasting itself, or even the cultural market. The mainstream media also consider them as interesting material to which they devote articles and programmes. Any crisis concerning these rat-ings has repercussions much further afield than the audio-visual or even the advertising economies. The public authorities in all countries are involved, in many ways, and they use, quote, debate and question ratings.

By virtue of an agreement within the profession on the definition of a TV viewer, these indexes have become measurements of audio-visual activity, which are used to set prices, evaluate programmes and profes-sionals, and even devise political arguments that can be used in public debates. It is through them that a key activity of social life is objectified in terms of time and involvement; an activity that is now central in the daily life of the majority of the world’s population: viewing television.

Is it really necessary to emphasize the obvious, ubiquitous nature of these audience data? In developed, and some developing countries, audience ratings have been a guideline for all broadcasting professionals. They are nowadays the figures that ‘land’ on the director’s desk every morning; a power device for TV professionals, who know that the future of their programmes depends on the audience ratings. They are used not only by producers, but also (since the creation of this profession) by

Deconstructing the Ratings Machine: An IntroductionJérôme Bourdon and Cécile Méadel



2 Deconstructing the Ratings Machine: An Introduction

programmers, who prepare future programme grids based on past rat-ings, and more extensively by all professionals trying hard to get a repre-sentation of this evasive figure: the viewer. Even beyond the ‘makers’ of audiences and their immediate sponsors and clients (advertisers, broad-casters, producers), these figures are of interest to the public at large. This is evidenced by the fact that audience survey institutes have chosen to make certain statistics public, in the form of more or less regular commu-niqués showing the best audience shares and so on. These communiqués are, in turn, widely quoted by the non-professional media and general press. Here, again, the phenomenon is transnational and disregards the diversity of statuses and of professional organizations.

In this introduction, we first briefly rehearse the history of the tool which is at the centre of this book, the peoplemeter (PM), to show how its present status as (still) the state-of-the-art instrument for audience measurement cannot be taken for granted. It is the product of a long, convoluted history where, remarkably for the contemporary history of communication, the United States did not play a central part: the peoplemeter has a very international history. We then move to a review of the available academic literature on the analysis of ratings. Apart from the administrative research discussing the merits of statistics and technology from the practitioners’ point of view, the vast bulk of this literature adopts a quite critical stance on ratings, on the way they are used by the industry, on their supposed ‘effects’ on television. We will claim that, overall, academic research has failed to grasp and explain the design, the success and the dissemination of television audience measurement. This can be explained at least partly by the fact that it does not examine the construction of its object: researchers do not go ‘inside the ratings machine’, inside numbers and panels, they do not unpack the institutional/technological/professional arrangements which explain the potent efficacy of audience measurement – despite all the criticism it receives, and not only from academic quarters. We will then elaborate on the theories which have inspired this book; we rely on social studies of sciences, and on actor network theory, especially one of its branches: the sociology of quantification.

The rise of the people(meter)

Although this book focuses on a specific way of measuring audiences, it is crucial to understand the global rise of the peoplemeter as a new way of both measuring populations and giving them voice. As we will see, academic research has all too often considered the study of ratings as a



Deconstructing the Ratings Machine: An Introduction 3

chapter in the critique of the media industry, especially the commercial, US media. Measuring audiences, however, is an activity which must be understood in terms of a much broader, long-term history. Most obvi-ously, it is about the history of market research and capitalism. In that sense, it is true that the history of ratings started in the United States. In the early years of the twentieth century, the most vigorous seekers of a science of opinion were US commercial researchers (Igo, 2007: p. 109). However, market research cannot be separated from the rise of technol-ogies that made the public visible, and visible in numbers, which made public opinion research a way of theorizing democracy, and a branch of political sciences as much as communication sciences. This, of course, started with opinion polls, a technology born in the United States in the 1930s (Didier, 2009), but quickly exported to Europe (Blondiaux, 1998). At different paces, opinion polls made the public visible to itself. ‘Market researchers deposed their data behind closed doors, defining the consuming public for a private corporate audience. Opinion polls, by contrast, were placed in the plain view of the public they measured’ (Igo, 2007: p. 105). It is not coincidence that the same people who worked in the field of opinion polls were also linked to early broadcast ratings. Gallup, both the person and the company, has been involved in audience research for cinema from the 1930s (Ohmer, 2006). The two professional groups also share a common professional ideology, a claim to ‘represent the public’, and a sense of performing a mission which is not only about the market but also about the public. If, as Johnson claims, the modern concept of democracy ‘requires that the social body be broken down into numeric units’ (2006: p. 49), then opinion polls and ratings both answered requirements of ‘modern democratic poli-tics’ (Igo, 2007: p. 108).

Of course, there are also differences between the measurement of broad-casting audiences and that of political publics. A major one is the necessity to provide continuous measurement to broadcasters. This has made the production of ratings, from the start, a major technological challenge.

As this book shows, alongside the professionals of modern, com-mercial media, public service broadcasters (which are also state bureau-cracies) were very busy with representing and measuring the public. Of course, they did this with an uneasy relation with ‘pure’ numbers, always trying to find other ways to appreciate programmes, or to make the audience speak in favour of programmes they themselves favoured. Still, they could not escape this specific source of legitimacy. And they quickly joined the technological and statistical fray, in order to produce the ‘right’ way of representing audiences.




In order to understand the peculiar international dynamics of tele vision audience measurement, let us focus on the history of the peoplemeter. It starts in 1929, when the basic principle of the Audimeter (then for radio) was first described in a patent application in 1929 by Claude E. Robinson, a student at Columbia University. It is worth quot-ing the third paragraph:

The relative popularity of programs being broadcast from different broadcasting stations will be recorded. The record will show the length of time during which each set is tuned to each wavelength, the hour of the day during which each set is operated and the various programs that the set is tuned to receive.

(Beville, 1988: p. 17)

The audimeter was developed by two MIT professors in the 1930s, and in 1936, the patent and the existing stocks were acquired by Arthur Nielsen. The first commercial use for radio dates from December 1942. The data had to be collected in each home, every week, by Nielsen’s fieldworkers. Still in the United States, the Audimeter had been used for TV as early as 1949 in the region of New York, and progressively extended to the national US market. Delivery of data was made faster by simultaneous transmission over a separate additional telephone line in 1959 (Bjur, 2009). However, ‘Nielsen’s great stride occurred in 1973 with the introduction of the Storage Instantaneous Audimeter (SIA)’ (Beville, 1988: p. 72), with features which are still relevant today: the data is col-lected at night, processed by a central computer, and made available to clients the next morning.

Nevertheless, it took a long time for the audimeter to be used outside the market of national US television. For other national markets, but also in the US markets with fierce competition between Nielsen and other companies (Beville, 1988, ch. 3), other technologies were used; phone surveys and viewing diaries, with well-known advantages and disadvantages – briefly: quasi-instantaneous results for phone surveys, exhaustivity and precision for diaries. In the 1970s, at the time Nielsen was introducing the SIA in the United States, most major European broadcasting organizations surveyed television audiences by computer processing of diary data. The two richest television markets, the United Kingdom and Germany (see, in this volume, Chapter 1 by Schwarzkopf and Chapter 5 by Vollberg) were the first ones to pioneer the Audimeter.

The next big step was the introduction of a new version of the audimeter, first called the ‘push-button Audimeter’. To the Audimeter




was added a special remote control, with individual buttons for all household members, which allowed for the individual identification of viewers (before that, measurement companies provided the demo-graphics later, by combining Audimeter data with viewing diaries data). It was pioneered in Europe, by public service organizations. In 1975, the German ‘Telescomat’, relying on Swiss technology, was the first version of a push-button audimeter. As the model did not spread, it is commonly stated today that the peoplemeter was ‘invented’ by the British AGB in 1984. As often happens, such an invention is more the result of a global (or, in the mid-1980s, European) convergence than of a single initiative. In the mid-1980s in Europe, other versions of this technology were developed, including in Italy and Switzerland. In the United States, the main player Nielsen uneasily and partially converted to the PM, under the pressure of intense competition during the long ‘peoplemeter war’ (1984–99) (Buzzard, 2002). In each country, one can find specific reasons for the rise of the peoplemeter: requirements of public service broadcasters (see Chapter 5 on Germany by Vollberg), new audience taste and demographics because of segmentation (United States, see Buzzard, 2002), arrival of the technologies at a time when change was needed, and a compromise over audience measurement between old public and new private broadcasters (in Western Europe as a whole). Finally, as television became increasingly globalized, espe-cially through sales of formats (including audience data), and as audi-ence measurement involved increasingly international companies, the PM ‘naturally’ became the state-of-the-art technology, although, as we will see in detail, the sense of a common yardstick with which to meas-ure television audiences still hides many differences (see Chapter 6 by Chakrabarti in this volume).

By 2009 more than 80 countries1 had adopted this technology. In all the countries discussed in this book, a single company or institute manages (or supervises the management of) a national panel of house-holds equipped with peoplemeters, which provide a single ‘currency’ (in reference to a widely used metaphor) to measure the audience for the different actors of the television industry. Although other experimental methods are being tested (see, in this volume, Chapter 12 by Napoli and Chapter 13 by Berte and Evens), notably the PPM (portable peopleme-ters), the peoplemeter is still gaining ground. It is relevant here to remind that, for all the talk and writing about the end of television, at least in the West, the medium, from a global perspective, is alive and growing.2

With the rise of the PM in Europe, television audience measurement reached a new level of publicity, as it long had in the United States, and




the company (or institute) which produced the statistics became – by a metonymy characteristic of the language of brands in the world of late capitalism – a synonym for the statistics themselves. The French Audimat or the Italian Auditel, as for Nielsen3 earlier, are nouns that have often gone from proper to common, and from professional com-mon to everyday language as a measure of popularity. We argue that this shows a correspondence between audience statistics and the politi-cal culture of the countries concerned, which needs to be set against the history of their globalization. To sum up in a few words, these profes-sional indicators not only determine the price of a service, they are also a poll (reflecting public opinion) and a vote (they confer legitimacy on certain cultural content, certain personalities – TV hosts, journalists – and certain institutions – TV channels).

Critical approaches to ratings

Audience ratings are part of a 200-year-old effort to quantify the world. This effort was part and parcel of scientific reasoning, which, from the eighteenth century, enthusiastically embraced the programme of rigour and clarity found in the objectification of phenomena through statistics (Porter, 1995: p. 18). Yet this partiality for figures almost immediately triggered contradictions and irony: ‘The argument that statistical knowl-edge is inherently superficial, if not ridiculous, was already a common one in the nineteenth century’ (Porter, 1995: p. 84). The same applies to audience ratings, which, although universally employed, are not accepted unchallenged. Critique of these objects flourishes everywhere, in the professional world and the public sphere alike. Do such critical approaches provide us with the analytical tools needed to understand how ratings function as instruments used to objectify TV viewing?

Internal critique between the actors involved in the system is found mainly during major changes affecting TV systems. Such changes may be legal and political, like the exit from a monopoly situation; techni-cal, like broadcasting on new media or the altering of measurement technologies; cultural, with the internationalization of the programme market; and so on. They open a space for debate on the measurement tool, its methods and its authors, but then very quickly close it when, as we will see, the disagreement implies costs for all concerned. This type of critique is found in all the countries examined here, including where audience ratings have enjoyed the most stability: not only in the United Kingdom but also, a fortiori, in Brazil, Italy, France and India, among others.




Such protest shows that the equilibrium that ordinarily allows for the production of such measurements is still fragile, due to an unstable balance in two respects: first, between partners with interests that are both common (all of them need the same stable, on-going and imme-diate measurement) and divergent (a measurement that puts them in competition and that they do not necessarily need to define in the same terms); and second, between the necessity to continuously produce sta-tistics comparable to those that preceded, on the one hand, and desire to use the technological tool with the best performance, which could break that continuity, on the other.

We will interrogate these professional debates, which are so valuable in furthering our understanding of the socio-technical foundations of the audience rating system. It is important to point out, however, that our intention is by no means to hand out good scores or to rate the systems used according to their relative quality. As we will see, in this field it is difficult to find the indicator of continuous progress, for any change implies both gains and losses (depending on the requirements of the day, the equilibrium between the various actors involved in meas-urement, the current definition of ‘television viewing’, …).

External critiques from academia analyse the role and impact of audience ratings on television and its programmes, even on culture per se. In a TV system where commercial channels financed by adver-tising dominate the scene totally (the United States and its cultural satellites) or partially (Western Europe with its public service that has been repeatedly metamorphosed and undermined, but maintains its specificities (Bignell and Fickers, 2008)), audience ratings are often considered as both the symptom and the cause of the mediocre qual-ity of programmes. The advocates of a non-market culture and the representatives of high culture and the world of the fine arts (as well as certain first-generation public service professionals who have been their spokespersons on television) readily accuse the ratings of causing dete-rioration in the quality of TV programmes. A corpus of studies supports this critique, attributing the cultural deterioration of television at least partially, if not entirely, to audience ratings.

Although he joined the debate at a late stage, Pierre Bourdieu, with his acclaimed book On Television (1998), is the most oft-cited proponent of these approaches. He made the ‘ratings mentality’ a cornerstone of his denunciation of this medium in an approach that is both elit-ist and critical. His book, which was not on the whole well received by the academic community (Corner, 1999) yet, nevertheless, much cited, criticized the effects of commercial competition on journalism




in a very general way. Audiences were taken as a given. Like many researchers, Bourdieu did not question the significance of ratings or their object; he considered them – with a somewhat unusual naivety for the sociologist – as instruments capable of reflecting the public’s activity faithfully, almost photographically: ‘It is now possible to pinpoint the audience by the quarter-hour and even – a new development – by social group. So we know very precisely who’s watching what, and who not’ (Bourdieu, 1998: p. 27).

From this perspective, audience ratings are not (we’re tempted to say not even) a representation of the public; they are the public, they speak on its behalf. This standpoint disregards the various successive devices designed to make the public talk, and which have sometimes coexisted. It confuses the viewing logbook that measures habits, the Audimat that records presence, the telephone survey that looks at behaviours, and so on. It is aligned with an index (like the audience share), when actually it is only one of the outputs of these instruments. Bourdieu attaches little importance to this as he reduces the statisticians’ knowledge and practices to the wielding of a system of domination – a comment that he had already made with regard to the statistics of consumption, long before his attack on ratings: ‘The absence of preliminary analysis of the social significance of the indicators can make the most rigorous-seeming surveys quite unsuitable for a sociological reading. Because they forget that the apparent constancy of the products conceals the diversity of the social uses they are put to, many surveys on consump-tion impose on them taxonomies which are sprung straight from the statisticians’ social unconscious’ (Bourdieu, 1984: p. 161).

This radical critique led to the world of audience ratings being contrasted to the previous age, defined with imprecision yet often idealized, that had not known them. Even though he judged pub-lic service TV harshly, as ‘educational-paternalist’ (Bourdieu, 1998: p. 55) – reminiscent in this respect of Raymond Williams (1962: p. 90) – Bourdieu nevertheless suggested that there has been a time in history when the artist/creator did not depend on the public; even better, more normatively, he contended that the artist could create only if he or she did not know what the public wanted. This was somewhat surprising for the sociologist who analysed the constraints weighing, for example, on Homo Academicus. In the field of contemporary media, the radical critique fails to describe an alternative landscape with any clarity. What would a high-quality television channel indifferent to ratings be? On what would it rely? We remember Bourdieu, in 1988, demanding that advertising be banned from public service so that it would no longer be




subjected to audience ratings. The example of the United Kingdom (see Chapter 1 by Schwarzkopf and Chapter 9 by Balnaves in this volume) or that of the history of public service TV channels without advertising show that absence of advertising does not mean the disappearance of audience constraints.

Other academic works, also critical, transcend this perspective and propose a more substantial analysis, first from a neo-Marxist perspec-tive, primarily but not only in Europe. The most famous author in this respect was the Canadian Dallas Smythe. He suggested that we take seriously the time devoted to consumption and more generally leisure, which Marxist ideology distinguishes from work (first manual labour and then, with changes to the industrial world, services – but always remunerated work as opposed to ‘free’ time). In his 1977 article, Smythe famously argued that audience activity should be considered not as lei-sure or free time, but as a category of work. This allows him to consider the audience as a commodity, which is, in turn, sold to advertisers by the media. Smythe also suggested that, basically, the media content is secondary here. The main task of the media is to produce audiences for advertisers, to make the audiences work by putting them in front of the advertisers’ screens. There’s no certainty, however, that the word ‘work’ is not functioning as a metaphor here; or better still, as a political slogan for the viewers’ benefit: you think you’re having fun, but you’re actu-ally doing something very different, that’s serving a commercial system. In more Marxist terms, you’re alienated. This links Smythe to a more classical Marxist theory than he himself claimed (Allor, 1988: p. 219).

As far as we are concerned, here audience ratings are taken seriously, since they are at the heart of the system: they are the device that makes it possible to transform viewers into financial transactions. Yet Smythe does not discuss the production of the statistics themselves, the actors’ shared faith in these figures being considered as ‘natural’. He does, of course, emphasize the key role of producers of statistics as a ‘sub-industry sector of the consciousness industry’, whose role is ‘to determine the socio-economic characteristics of the delivered audience readership and its size’, this being the ‘business of A. C. Nielsen and a host of competitors who specialize in rapid assessment of the delivered audience commodity’ (Smythe, 1977: p. 5). Surprisingly for an analysis intended to be materialist, the technologies used to produce this com-modity (i.e., audience ratings) are neglected and have been omitted by his successors (e.g., Jhally and Livant, 1986).

We can add that, like most critical audience studies, this approach was confined to the system prevalent in the United States and its satellites.




In 1977, Smythe noted that the monopolistic capitalism on which he focused his analysis was busy spreading to Europe; yet his interest in audience indicators remained limited to its relevance with regard to the needs of the advertising market. Most of Smythe’s critics did likewise, totally disregarding the multiple applications of these measurements, including in systems that had no advertising and therefore did not sell their audiences (Méadel, 2010). Meehan (2002) took up the theme of the commodity audience in a more contemporary perspective. She re-examined the question of the measurer’s exact role. Criticizing Smythe, she noted: ‘His belief that the ratings monopolist exercised no agency misled him. The political economy of ratings […] demonstrated the key role played by the market for commodity ratings and traced the struc-tural forces that constructed ratings as truly manufactured commodities whose content depended on changing power relations within the mar-ket’ (Meehan, 2002: pp. 311–21). These structural forces will be central in this book, which proposes in-depth analyses of the institutional and technological arrangements that allow for the production of statistics.

In a perspective that is also profoundly critical, albeit closer to domi-nation theories than to Marxism, Ien Ang (1991), combining Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, analyses the use that broadcasters make of audience ratings. Her book was the first to take the difficulties of the television industry seriously:

information (about the audience) is indispensable for the industry to operate, but there is constant agony in industry circles about the adequacy of the information they get from audience measurement – adequacy defined, of course, from an institutional point of view. In other words, the control sought after is never completely achieved, and has to be continuously pursued by accumulating ever more information.

(Ang, 1991: p. 8)

However, Ang’s critiques, surprisingly, criticized the inadequacies and shortcomings as if from the inside, using professional press and control studies. Thus, she failed to understand why the system was and, for all its shortcomings, still is effective. Citing the results of one of the first control studies on the peoplemeter, she wrote that ‘half of the people aren’t cooperating and only 75% (of those) offer good information each day’ (Ang, 1991: p. 81). Why was the system failing? Under those cir-cumstances were the measurements meaningful? Ang seemed to think they could not be when she explained that it was impossible to reduce




the infinite diversity (judged highly positively) of audiences’ practices to a few figures. As Porter (1995) has noted, this kind of general critique can be applied to many attempts to quantify social reality. Would it not be better for communication scholars to try to exploit the wealth of data produced by professional measurement, as Bjur suggests in an original way in Chapter 14 in this volume?

Ang also argued that the inadequacy of measurements stemmed from the publics’ ‘refusal’: the audience refused to play a game proposed by the media; it even revolted, as the title of her tenth chapter on channel-switching, ‘Revolt of the Viewer? The Elusive Audience’, suggests (Ang, 1991). Yet 20 years after her book was published, little trace of this revolt remained. On the contrary, audience ratings are constantly spreading, and the peoplemeter is the main technology used for producing them. Throughout the world, professionals from diverse backgrounds rely on this machine for their work: television professionals of course, adver-tisers, television experts, including some critical academics, as noted above, all cite audience statistics as a reflection of reality. This remark-able, worldwide acceptability needs to be explained.

While Ang did talk about Foucault’s power technologies, her perspec-tive was far closer to that of Bourdieu. In Foucault’s work, power has no precise location; under no circumstances can it be equated to a domi-nant system. Yet with Ang, institutional knowledge is considered as a major part of a localizable power, that which the broadcasters and, more generally, the TV industry wield over the public. The metaphor of colo-nization found throughout the book bears witness to this: ‘Television institutions need to know the audience because the latter is, in a man-ner of speaking, the wild savage which the former want to tame and colonize’ (Ang, 1991: p. 25) – this being rapidly qualified, however, as ‘the wild savage seems so willing to surrender to the colonizer’.

We will also try to understand exactly why this ‘colonization’ has encountered so little resistance. In order to do so, we need to see that the public is also vividly interested in these statistics that are supposed to ‘domesticate’ and ‘colonize’ it, and in which it probably recognizes one of its faces – which will contribute to totally ruining the metaphor of colonization, and to suggesting others.

Ang’s book nevertheless had the distinct merit of being the first to compare the different audience rating systems: the US system and the European systems, based on public service. In particular, she explored the way in which, during the 1980s, the public service was ‘colonized’ (again) by audience ratings. She criticizes this paternal system (as Raymond Williams (1962) called it), but clearly emphasizes the differences, marked




by the use of quality indexes. Traces of this struggle between diverse audience cultures can be found in our book (see Murray in Chapter 11 on Ireland). At several points, we return to the contrast between the US and the European systems, to review it in relative terms. In our opinion, the slow growth of audience ratings is explained by more than just the deregulation of television or the domination of commercial enterprises.

To sum up, the various critical approaches to ratings cannot help us since they consider them either as a transparent fact (Bourdieu) or as ran-dom datum with little relation to actual viewing (Ang). Ratings are not simply ‘facts’, but neither are they totally arbitrary; any statement such as ‘this programme had a 35% audience yesterday evening’ is the result of the myriad social, technical and scientific operations, and visualiza-tion tools (Maxwell, 2000) carried out so that a reality, which cannot be entirely random, may exist. This question of the creation and function-ing of measurement tools is precisely the one that has been asked since the 1980s by the authors of a pioneering research field, the sociology of quantification (see, in particular, Daston, 1995; Desrosières, 1993 and 2008; Espeland and Stevens, 1998 ; Hacking, 1990; Porter, 1995).

A sociology of quantification

Working first on the establishment of statistical tools by states, this approach analyses operations of quantification as the deployment of a ‘cyclical dynamic in which statistics are alternately the translation of stabilized conventions and the institution of new procedures, new devices which, pushed to their limit, destroy the first conventions and trigger the search for others’ (Armatte, 2009). Quantification is, then, a complex, socially situated operation which compares different entities to a common metric and demands the mobilization of the networks of actors, knowledge and technologies that have to be ‘held together’ to produce figures (Espeland and Stevens, 1998). These are then appropri-ated by the actors and serve as references on which to base concrete decisions. The sociology of quantification has frequently been associ-ated with a historical approach, which makes it possible to denaturalize statistics, by comparing the different regimes of statistical (and techno-logical) truths at different times. For the same reasons, a whole section of this book is devoted to history, while many authors feel the need to give some historical background to their analysis.

As Schweber (1996) notes, even statisticians can worry about exert-ing methodological control over the construction of their object, by reconstituting the steps of the historical construction of their analytical




tools. Let us note that explaining how some facts have been historically constructed does not necessarily mean being relativistic. In other words, recognizing that social forces are ‘intrinsically linked’ (Miller, 1994: 58) to the construction of truth (or a certain truth) means assessing that truth better, not denying it. But as Porter writes: ‘Let us suppose for the sake of argument that scientific investigation is able to yield true knowledge about objects and processes in the world. It must nonethe-less do so through social processes. There is no other way’ (1995: p. 11). Hence, there is no question of playing out the constructivism/realism debate around quantification, but instead, understanding how the con-struction of quantified data can speak in the name of the truth that it describes and, by way of this very operation of description, transform it.

Procedural truth and substantial truth

So how then should we deal with the apparent paradox in which we challenge metrological realism (according to which audience ratings pro-vide an exact description of TV audiences), while simultaneously chal-lenging the approach which sees them as pure artefacts (Champagne, 1994, 2004)? Audience ratings clearly speak on behalf of those they are measuring; they make it possible to act on what they observe precisely because they say ‘something’ about them (and it is this ‘something’ that has to be specified) which explains, at least in a certain way, that which is, that which the actors experience. Consequently, the notion of truth becomes plural, as Paul Ricœur put it: ‘The spirit of truth means respect-ing the complexity of orders of truth; hence, the acknowledgement of the plural’ (1955: p. 76).

Along with substantial truth, peculiar to scientific reasoning, there is procedural truth, a concept borrowed from jurists. In law, the question of truth is central: for a long time its determination was synonymous with life or death, and it still has crucial implications. But the truth in court has very particular characteristics (Kerchoves, 2000): the type of reasoning used is less a form of constraining and impersonal dem-onstration than more or less convincing argumentation intended to obtain adhesion. Of course, the facts are not absent from procedural truth, and certainly not inexact, but they derive their meaning from the adequacy of the discourses that describe them in relation to the test of the trial, the rhetoric of the jurists, their adaptation to penal poli-cies, and so on. These discourses do not remain purely rhetorical; they have a performative value whose most direct effect is, for example, the fact that they put people into jail – or release them. Procedural truth is




obtained by complying with this constraint of adaptation to the proce-dure through which it was produced and to the objective.

The two forms of truth, procedural and substantial, do not oppose one another; on the contrary, they work together. The former (procedural) absolutely needs the latter (substantial) not as an absolute, but as a goal to aim for since the conditions of felicity of the trial demand that it seek the truth, which is also that which is just. The quality of the trial there-fore depends on a sound balance between the two. What was said of procedural truth is also relevant to audience ratings, for they are based on impersonal demonstrations (the truth produced should not vary according to the agents or actors concerned) and constraints (through the application of statistical and technological knowledge) which seek to obtain the parties’ adhesion. This is therefore a matter of adjustment to the obligations and demands of the world concerned, which is why we can talk of ‘just’ results rather than true ones.

Time-bound truths

In both cases – legal and statistical argumentation – the demonstration has a performative nature: the measurement of audiences determines the indicators which, in turn, contribute to determining the price of an advertising space, the value of a broadcasting firm, the popularity of a host, and so on. By acting on the world that they measure, ratings also give this world the words to speak about itself. Or, in other words, rat-ings are both performative and reflective: they define the world that they measure (or, more exactly, they contribute towards defining it), that is, what will be denoted as ‘TV audiences’, and in so doing they give this world (the various actors that will speak as ‘the TV audience’) the tools for it to think about itself, to form a representation of itself. Audience data, disseminated widely by the media, contribute to defining for all, among professionals and in the public sphere, the fact of viewing television not as the activity of an isolated individual, but as a shared, common, social activity – and one that is historically situated in a given period.

Indeed, when it comes to measuring, continuity does matter, both for setting norms and for adjusting them over time. In the case of audience ratings, it becomes a key element in the process, used to assess their accuracy; for accuracy is measured precisely by series and routines, by comparison, in time, of quantified results and ways of doing things.

It is effectively through comparison over time that we judge. Audience ratings are evaluated by comparison not only with rivals’ scores but also with the results of preceding measurements. In his seminal article, Miller




(1994) highlights the fragility of custom studies which, precisely, do not allow for comparative evaluations, and which trigger reactions among cli-ents such as: ‘all that seems very nice but what do I do with the preceding (or concomitant) study that contradicts yours?’ Variations in time have to be able to be explained by the actors, or the methods may be called into question. Routines can be one way of avoiding this.

Yet establishing what is just also requires a sequential analysis: routines are challenged by innovation. Any change of the survey methods cre-ates a break in the data series, which challenges the method even if it is claimed to offer ‘progress’ (which remains to be shown) in the ways of calculating. As we see in several examples in this book, every system, every new method, has its flaws, its pros and cons. For example, there may be a gain in speed but a loss in precision and the possibility of con-trol. There is always a compromise: ‘The more quality controls built into the system, the more the operations will be found to need repair and thus not operate smoothly or on time. The more effort respondents are asked to put into measuring themselves, the less accurately they will do so over time and the more likely it is that their measurement obligations will affect their behaviour’ (Miller, 1994: p. 67). The truth of audience ratings is not the truth of mathematical laws: they proclaim truth only for a par-ticular period in the history of ratings. As Miller says: ‘Pyramids of truth can be erected and knocked down so as to create others’ (1994: p. 65).

This is not a specificity of TV audience ratings. The same attention to time, to sequentiality, is found in national statistics on the popula-tion or on cultural practices; they also need continuity, and this makes them prisoners of their model, of their way of defining their objects. But, there, audience ratings have a peculiarity, which differentiates them from these other series of statistics: their definitions are the result of on-going confrontations between the actors involved. Their model of calculation is constantly subjected to stronger pressure than that of the large surveys of the national statistics institute, because when it comes to commercial TV, they function in a commercial and competi-tive world where the multiple actors all have an interest in there being measurements – but not necessarily in the same results. What may seem to be a drawback (the system is constantly in tension) can also become an advantage, for it is far more controlled.

The guarantors of trust

As a rule, we will find that numerous controls are implemented on the production of ratings, both from inside the organization in charge,




and from outside. Checks are done on the choices of sampling, the recording techniques, the functioning of machines, the calculation of algorithms, the panellists’ behaviour, etcetera. These means of control vary from one country and period to the next, but everywhere, all the time, the surveillance of the rating system is at the heart of the survey procedure; controls are omnipresent, within or outside the measuring organizations, and even within public authorities. The famous Harris hearings by the US Senate in 1963 are an excellent example of a major challenge to the survey procedures made by the public authorities, not by commercial actors (Buzzard, 1990: pp. 99–123; and Chapter 2 by Balnaves in this volume). According to historians, and the professionals’ actors, they changed the face of audience measurement (Beville, 1988).

The use of control, the sense of being controlled, will help us explain why the actors involved, first and foremost the ‘makers’ of ratings, but also their prime users, rely on the ratings, even though nobody can con-trol the whole hybrid package of competences and knowledge at work there. Inside the organization which measures audiences, statisticians who establish the reliability of the sample and process the figures, engi-neers who sometimes make, and at any rate adapt, the machine – the type of peoplemeter – used, and social scientists who make sure of the quality of the fieldwork (panel recruitment and surveillance), all have to trust each other. The continuous controls (described, e.g., in Chapter 4 by Bourdon and Méadel in this volume) and the occasional controls triggered by crises serve, in many ways, to establish and continuously re-establish this mutual trust, inside the audience rating industry, but also vis-à-vis its clients. Audience-rating professionals are neither naive actors who all totally believe in the figures that surveys supply them with, nor cynics who sell the figures that they consider to be perfectly random and highly approximate, to say the least. But actually, the ques-tion does not need to be asked; it is taken care of by the continuous series of tests to which the surveys are put by the control bodies. This does not mean that such cynical (or naive) actors do not exist, and that researchers do not occasionally meet them during their fieldwork, but the system is not regulated by this type of behaviour.

The feeling that ‘true’, ‘hard’, ‘reliable’ knowledge is there, available, is clearly expressed by a metaphor circulating from one country to another, on the ‘good measurers’, especially those who know how to create new tools: they are called ‘wizards’. Examples include the Swiss Mathias Steinman, creator of the Telecontrol machine, the most success-ful version of the peoplemeter, and the Panamanian sociologist Homero Sanchez, appointed in 1971 to head the new survey department at




TV Globo in Brazil (see Chapter 7 by Hamburger, Buarque de Almeida and Aidar in this volume).

Brazil, as analysed in Chapter 7, provides us with a remarkable example of TV professionals with a simultaneously trusting and distant attitude to this knowledge on ratings which is supposed, above all, to provide answers to practical problems. The measurers knew very well that there was a considerable difference between the population of Brazilian TV viewers and the population of TV viewers measured by the methods they use. These methods consisted in classifying households according to their TV sets and VCRs, even though this put the inhabitants of favelas and the middle classes into the same social category, thus producing a distortion in comparison with the socio-economic representation of the country provided by other indicators. Yet, as Esther Hamburger and her co-authors show, disregarding this distortion was more efficient than taking it into account. By mixing social groups that market studies tradi-tionally (at least in other countries) distinguish, television measurement flattened out a highly unegalitarian society, which is considered by the actors to have beneficial effects on the TV market itself (and on society as a whole as well, from the government’s point of view). The ratings professionals did not produce ratings that they knew were inexact; they adjusted their methods to the most efficient representation of the world for the people who rely on these representations.

In general, we could say that the actors most directly involved in the fabrication and consumption of ratings trust the guarantors to whom they have entrusted the production and control of the figures, and they accept ‘momentary suspensions of disbelief’. In other words, they give up using their critical capabilities for a period of time that is never more than temporary and can always, with every crisis, every technical con-troversy or market transformation, be activated again. The main crises appear when it comes to defining the foundations on which the ratings are to be based: the characteristics of the object to be measured; that is, the audiences.

Qualifying to quantify

The professionals of audience ratings, and those who have to use the ratings daily for years, are more sensitive than anyone else to how abstract it actually is talking about ‘TV audiences’ – a public whose indispensable translation into hard figures they see as the result of a very costly device, and a vulnerable one at that. In other words, they fairly easily accept the idea, to paraphrase Bourdieu on public opinion,




that the public of television does not exist other than as a projective entity which can be mobilized, for example, in the public sphere. That public has to be made bodily present every time by devices which have been multiplied in countless versions by the broadcasting media. Survey results and ratings figures do not suffice. Take a few examples: the audience, in fact we should say an audience, is made present by the organization of contests (in the form, for instance, of contestants in talent shows), by spokespersons who express themselves in a street interview, by summoning ‘typical TV viewers’ for live questioning of a politician ‘on behalf of the people’ and, last but not least, by differ-ent embodiments of the average TV viewer, ‘invited’ at different times of broadcasting history, usually feminine, provincial, ill-educated and supposed to be the best spokespersons for the popular audience. These multiple trials ensure that the media have close proximity with what they define as their audiences.

However, production of audience figures involves a different kind of representation. There is a common point, though. At the stage of elaborating the devices which allow for the production of figures, the public has to be qualified before being quantified; that is, given iden-tifiable measurable attributes, valid for all stations, all programmes, all types of viewing (Maxwell, 2000). We find ourselves here at the heart of the work of any market: endowing the goods or services proposed with a set of qualities; that is, characteristics that are more or less stabi-lized and that will enable the customers to choose (Callon, Méadel and Rabeharisoa, 2002). These properties are gradually defined in such a way as to be able to penetrate the consumer’s world and attach it to the goods or service. The work of definition is accomplished by a multitude of actors, from the producer to the final consumer, through a long chain of intermediaries (advertisers or survey managers being the main ones, of course). Their task is not to embellish the good and make it more appealing, but, as Chamberlin (1946) showed with regard to advertisers, to adjust the product to the customers and to individualize it; that is, to establish significant differences for the consumer.

How are such qualities defined? As Callon and Muniesa (2003) explain, there is no question here of differentiating between those which are intrinsic to the good (that is, with no relation to the world in which it moves) and those which are extrinsic (which could be reduced to the capacities that consumers endow it with or to their representa-tions of it, following the approach proposed for example by Baudrillard in his System of Objects, 2006). ‘The purchase is not the result of an encounter between a subject and an object, outside of each other, but




the conclusion of a process of attachment which, from qualification to re-qualification of the product, leads to the singularization of its proper-ties’ (Callon and Muniesa, 2003: p. 202). We posit that audience ratings have become one of the means (the most visible and the most powerful) of determining the elements constituting the TV public in such a way that it can be adjusted to the professionals’ demand, at the same time as it adjusts the demand to its own definitions.

Measuring audiences therefore consists in obtaining agreement between the actors involved on the qualities likely to produce an operational and realistic definition of the public. In addition, in order to allow for a lasting commercialization of the data, these characteristics have to be clarified and above all, stabilized in the form of what the actors themselves call ‘conventions’. The word is interesting because in the legal sense it denotes the agreement reached between parties and, by extension, the clauses in that agreement. But it also means, especially in the plural, conformity with established usage, to better underscore, even denounce, its ritual and formalistic nature.

It is not as easy as it seems to determine the conventions allowing one to affirm that the statistics produced relate to this reality, so simple in appearance: someone is watching television. We can understand this activity in multiple ways: as that which is watched and as that which can be watched (watching the only channel is not the same thing as watch-ing one channel among others); as the others with whom one watches (collective viewing, that constant headache for audience ratings); as the medium through which one watches and the place in which one does so; as the socio-demographic characterization of the people, the com-position of households, the demand for programmes, and so on. This book endeavours to clarify these conventions and to understand their meaning through geographical and historical comparisons.

These conventions, which evolve very gradually, are disrupted by technical change. Ien Ang mentions the ‘revolt’ of audiences in the United States, with regard to the switch to cable TV and multiple channels. But one could also say that the television itself revolted, by proposing characteristics that did not correspond to the ‘old’ meas-urement systems. Today, the switch to digital technology provides us with a new example of a phase in which a measurement system that reigned for many years on the audience market has been deposed (see Chapter 13 by Berte and Evens in this volume). This has required a redefinition of the system, by revisiting a process of qualification of the public, with a new definition of what constitutes the activity of ‘watching television’ (all the more radical in so far as we now watch on




a terminal that is not necessarily a TV screen, but a computer screen or a mobile phone).

Qualifying by compromise

A set of conventions implies an agreement between the parties, in a necessarily collective process. As we have said, there is nothing immedi-ate about qualifying the public; it is the product of a series of compro-mises between multiple actors who have to make choices from among the different characteristics that matter for them. And as we will see in all the chapters of this book, the audience-rating professionals are involved along with their clients, primarily the TV channels and their space brokers, their advertisers and their advertising agencies, in both the private and public sectors.

The list of actors engaged in this operation has evolved with time, just as it varies from country to country. Not only advertisers and ‘traders in audiences’ (buyers and sellers, space brokers and advertising agencies) need these quantified data. Political actors, regulators, and public-service TV channels – without advertising – organizers of shows, non-audiovisual media and others, all need TV audience ratings. This specific market is therefore not entirely at the service of the purchasing of advertising space. This gives us some idea of the diversity of interests at stake in audience ratings, economic considerations aside.

This intense collective work is particularly complex in so far as it has to be done by actors with contradictory or competing interests. The contradictions between some are well known, for instance between advertisers on the one hand, who worry about overestimating audiences or about access costs, and then TV channels or, more precisely, space brokers, on the other, who are concerned with the opposite. The actors are, moreover, rivals when competing for the same market. Private channels will demand more precise figures, as opposed to the qualita-tive concerns of public channels. Small channels will demand a more accurate measurement and balk at the extra charge that this entails. The choices of the actors evolve with time, along with the general organiza-tion of broadcasting, the channels and the viewers. For example, the question of age: should children be taken into account from the age of four, six or eleven? For a long time public channels showed little inter-est in very young children, who have, on the contrary, become crucial from the advertisers’ point of view.

For these same advertisers, consumers’ buying power compared to the price of the goods praised on television has become an essential variable.




In the so-called developed countries, the entire population is taken into account in the rating system, even if social fragmentation is given some consideration: France attributes more value to the ‘CSP+’ (higher socio-professional categories), the United Kingdom to the ABCD1, and so on. There is also a political dimension to this. In countries with huge gaps between rich and poor, where audience ratings have not developed from a powerful public service subjected to the constraints of political control (especially that of parliamentary representation), we see that not all the categories are concerned with audience ratings to the same degree. In India (see Chapter 6 by Chakrabarti in this volume), the focus is on a small fringe of the social categories initially proposed (the ‘A’, under 10 per cent of the population). Thus, the masses, the general public that the French, German and British advertisers are looking for (they are even prepared to pay extra for one-minute’s prime time advertising to reach the said masses), are not measured; they are not allowed to exist in this respect. Moreover, the tools are incapable of accounting for the extreme fragmentation of Indian society, which partially corresponds to the social hierarchy and the public’s taste for certain channels. Thus, certain Hindu casts, or the huge Muslim population, are overlooked in the existing rating system.

Let us assume that the partners agree on what ‘the public’ of tele-vision actually is – or at least what will be measured hic et nunc as such. The question will remain of how to grasp it. Will it be the individuals who tick the boxes, quarter-hour by quarter-hour, in their viewing log book, to report their TV viewing? Or those who press a button to signal their presence in the room where the TV set is located? Or, soon, those whose electronic bracelet indicates their proximity with a coded sound corresponding to a particular programme or channel? And so on. How can such compromises be reached, on the definition of the object to measure, the audience and the methods capable of grasping it? For a balance to be reached between the parties, and a value to be attributed, relations of trust have to be fostered between the actors, even when their specific interests clash.

Joint and competitive interests

The forms of organization capable of producing this work of qualifica-tion and compromise have at least two characteristics: their monopo-listic situation and their subjection to outside control, mainly but not exclusively by the public sector. Let us start by looking at the constitu-tion of these organizations.




From a historical point of view, the institutions in charge of audience ratings have had significantly different forms of organization over time. In the United States, the company Nielsen, a pioneer in market studies, conquered the audience-ratings market and is still the dominant player in the field of national TV audience ratings. In most European countries the first audience ratings were carried out in-house, within the public service bodies themselves. The emergent private channels and the advertisers undertook their own surveys, with varying aims and meth-ods. They insisted on qualifying the public, whereas the public chan-nels were more concerned – each in their own way – about the viewing ‘quality’, the audience’s interest in programmes, and so on. This all took place in a context where there was at first only one channel, then two, although not competing directly, or at least not initially (Bourdon, 2011). In the 1980s, after intense negotiations, audience ratings were generally outsourced to private companies. The first was Audits of Great Britain (AGB), now a partner of Nielsen.

Almost everywhere, audience ratings are carried out by specialized organizations representing the advertising industry and the media. An original feature of the audience rating market is its tendency to be a monopoly whenever there is a TV advertising market. Advertisers cannot deal with systems that quantify, and thus evaluate, audiences differently. Meehan noted this with regard to US broadcasting: ‘From 1929 to the present, advertisers and networks had typically purchased ratings from a single provider’ (2002: p. 314). What is this organization? Here, the differing national situations have produced various solutions. A professional author proposed a typology of those organizations: JIC (the Joint Industry Committee: an industry grouping of advertisers, agencies and broadcasters, which manages and renews contracts with the private data supplier); MOS (the Media Owner Contract: ‘One or more media own the contract with the data supplier’); OS (Own Service – research performed by a private enterprise owning multiple contracts with various clients, as Nielsen does in the United States); and TRCC (the Tripartite Research Company Contract: the data sup-plier is a research company owned by media, advertisers and advertising agencies, as in Sweden and France). However: ‘although 4 categories of contractual organization have been identified, there are many shades of grey […]. The labels […] do not by themselves define varying levels of control over TAM research by client users, or the extent to which the wider interests of the industry as a whole are taken care of as opposed to the interests of particular parties’ (Syfret 2001: p. 57). Interestingly, Syfret does not include in his typology the situation that had once




prevailed in Europe; that is, research performed by the media them-selves, in-house. In short, in each national situation, the partners have to find their own way of ensuring credibility and neutralizing ‘particular interests’. For television, in all the countries mentioned here, except for the United States (Media Owner Contract), Sweden and France, the JIC prevails, as it does internationally.

Let us therefore consider the JIC for a moment. It seems that the term and the method were introduced in the 1970s in the United Kingdom for various media (Baker, 2002), but the JIC as an international acronym spread in the 1980s and the 1990s, with commercial television and the rise of PMs. A working paper by the World Federation of Advertisers4 underlined the advantages of JICs over other methods such as purely commercial operations or ‘in-house’ ratings, arguing that the JIC model provides ‘good value for money’ since all users share the costs, and that it is ‘the most reliable form of research since it has the largest number of interested parties who examine the technical procedure’ (WFA/EACA, 2008: p. 5). The WFA is willing to accept the relatively slow and cum-bersome character of the JIC model, as it claims that ‘reliability’ has to come first. This organization is entrusted with reaching consensus over the terms of reference for audience surveys. However, it does not do the surveys itself; it outsources it to a service provider which is selected via a call for tenders and has to comply with certain specifications. The JIC is, then, responsible for quality control and for disseminating the results. Yet, even within this ‘model’, or supposed model, wide variations are allowed. As we will see, the JIC’s interest may be, first, to allow for an evolution of power relations without, at least in appear-ance, changing the organizational model, and second, to maintain a feeling of institutional stability. The consensual nature of their task is not enough to ensure the stakeholders’ trust, or one could say this trust is also subjected to a series of recurrent, routine, or ad hoc, internal or external controls, which include two more radical modes of regulation: crisis, generally accompanied by public denunciation and exceptional measures to restore trust; and government intervention through the courts, parliament, the authorities in charge of competition, or others, either at the time of creation, or as a contribution to crisis management, which brings us back to the preceding mode of regulation.

Note in passing that while there has been a lot of talk about the so-called Americanization of the broadcasting market, from the point of view both of programmes and of market organization, audience ratings seem rather to be Britishized, as their organization is now predomi-nantly (if not exclusively) around a JIC. While the British model has




triumphed, it seems that this relates to the history of television outside the orbit of the United States, in countries where it has been built as a national, public media (if not a public service), a tool for access less to a market than to a public that it intends to train or consolidate as a nation, following from the celebrated missions of the BBC charter: inform, educate and entertain. In this framework, when the private channels arrived on the market they did not transform this conception – or at least not totally. The regulatory authorities, which were public bodies, maintained their interest in the public service channels (including in the very rare instances where public channels were privatized). It was therefore necessary to find a locus of negotiation, but also a social form that institutionalized the necessary compromises. This was to be the JIC, aptly named or not, for it was indeed a committee (with often mod-est proportions despite its key role), but a committee of an ‘industry’ that retained its public status. This was patent in those countries in which the state remained strongly involved and kept a close eye on the economy. The Russian case is once again a perfect illustration here (see Chapter 10 by Johansson and Davydov in this volume): extreme not so much in the relationship between the public authorities and the audi-ence rating agency, as in the severity of the methods of intervention and control, for the JIC was subjected to the domination of a single actor attached to the state, the public TV channel.

The JIC is thus an unusual institution, which has the advantage of giving a sense of consensus, but also the drawback of freezing a certain image of the balance of power between the actors, depending on the state of the market and the technology available to measure audiences. It also has difficulty reacting to change and introducing innovation, a particularly acute question in times of intense and rapid change within the media sphere. Hence, the term ‘conservative’ is easily attributed to the JIC by entrants into the market, those that want to smash the indis-pensable, precious and comfortable routine that puts the measurement of audiences on the partners’ tables every morning.

The measurement of audience, in the singular: almost everywhere, as soon as television has been organized with channels competing for advertising, the organization in charge of audience ratings has been given a monopoly. As we know, the coexistence of several measure-ments invalidates the measurement, not only because the results differ, but also because of their chronological or spatial discontinuity, and the divergences between their respective conventions. Yet the audi-ence rating market regularly witnesses the emergence of rivals who challenge the measurer’s monopoly and seek to impose themselves




(see above about the ‘peoplemeter war’). In France, the introduction of the peoplemeter was the first opportunity for a struggle, but this time between Médiamétrie and the advertising industry, which relied on the (once again!) British AGB model (Méadel, 2010). The monopoly has sometimes been lastingly defied by rival systems. In this book, we find two examples: India and Australia, where two systems coexist (or coexisted), with different methods (questionnaires versus diary). For Australia, Balnaves (Chapter 9) argues that each of these systems relied on the other one, based on their differences (of methods, but mainly of measured objects: attention versus memory).

The fact remains that in most cases, the ratings are produced by an organization that has the monopoly, and that no court action (see the example in Chapter 8 by Scaglioni in this volume) has managed to undermine this situation. The monopoly firms are profoundly worried that pluralism would be disastrous for them, because it would under-mine the very foundations of their tool; that is, the trust that their partners place in it.

Trade and politics

As we have seen several times with regard to questions of monopoly and the definition of conventions, audience ratings are not only a statistical tool catering to industrial interests. Contrary to the arguments of the critical approach, which portrays them as the tools of a blind subservi-ence of television to advertising, these measurements are far more than purely commercial indicators. The public authorities in various guises have never been indifferent to them, as we have already pointed out. This is evidenced in the scrutiny under which audience rating systems have come at different points in time.

The research reported in this book highlights three forms of applica-tion of audience ratings by public authorities seeking to lay the founda-tions of a metrology of populations, markets and communities.

1. Audience figures are mobilized by the public authorities as a ‘metrology’ of the public; that is, of a television public which is never very far from the public that votes, the public of citizens. Politicians are attentive to measurements of audiences, to that which (and those which) obtains the public’s vote. This is particularly, but not exclusively, true of the audiences of political programmes, which make it possible to meas-ure the success (or lack thereof) of various personalities, along with the competition between them and between political parties. These




audience figures are naturally compared not only to the votes cast in elections, but also to popularity polls.

2. The state as a regulator is a consumer of statistics, as soon as there are several channels, and even more so with the advent of private chan-nels accompanied by the function of governance entrusted to spe-cific authorities. Although, admittedly, this was also true well before the age of regulatory authorities. In the United Kingdom, it was a parliamentary report (the Annan Commission Report in 1977, about the creation of Channel 4), which recommended the unification of audience ratings under the aegis of a JIC (see Chapter 2 by Balnaves). The state as a regulator also became a consumer of statistics to regu-late concentration. At this point audience shares, along with other indicators such as percentages of ownership of the capital, started to be found in the texts of national laws. Finally, the regulatory authori-ties, which are often in charge of checking the application of laws (especially anti-concentration measures) using audience indicators, among others, are therefore also consumers of statistics (examples in Lunt and Livingstone, 2012).

3. The public authorities draw on audience ratings to build a repre-sentation of citizens. The proliferation of channels, their diversifi-cation and above all, their specialization lead to the definition of specific publics around particular cultures or collective belonging. This spawns new uses and a new political reading of audience sta-tistics. Being present in statistics means asserting one’s collective existence, and that could be a way of obtaining specific rights, either directly through regulations, or indirectly via the market. When a section of the audience is overlooked by ratings, it makes it more difficult for a channel or a programme that caters specifically for it to thrive. This politicization of audience ratings is particularly sensitive in countries where minority rights and multiculturalism are taken into consideration and therefore freely debated, such as the United States. In 2004 the advocacy of the organization Don’t Count Us Out, protesting against the underestimation of minorities by the peoplemeter, led to an official reaction by congresspersons (including New York Senator Hillary Clinton) and then to a com-plaint lodged with the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission. Even though the FCC rejected the petition, this episode did compel the company Nielsen, in charge of these ratings, to amend its procedures (Napoli, 2005). In another area, disabilities, policy makers use audience ratings as a measure-ment of the presence of disabled persons in the public sphere. This




is, for example, the case of audience thresholds over which obliga-tions to provide ‘translation’ (or adaptation of programmes for dis-abilities) are becoming effective in a number of European countries. Audience ratings are therefore considered to provide accurate and operational representations of the way in which certain categories of citizens are present in the public sphere.

Audience measurement, just as voting, quantifies a behaviour which politicians are eager to know about and to interpret. In both cases, the tool’s legitimacy depends on the capacity granted to it to speak on behalf of an individual or a group. Accordingly, in the United States, for example, the question has been raised whether ratings are not a form of commercial speech that should be protected by the first amendment (see Chapter 12 by Napoli in this volume).

To represent minorities, talk on behalf of the people, and back up public action, audience ratings are invested with a particular form of legitimacy that Pierre Rosanvallon (2008) calls the legitimacy of impar-tiality. This is what operates when the state entrusts the general interest to authorities in charge of control, arbitration and regulation that are neither state organs nor private actors. In the case of audience ratings, legitimacy depends neither on acknowledgement by the state nor on the legal standard that gave them their authority and guarantees their independence (or is supposed to). It is in a sense the product of the role that the state attributes de facto and not de jure to the ratings by recog-nizing them as the television audiences’ legitimate spokespersons (see Scaglioni in Chapter 8 in this volume).

Audience ratings and globalization: the new faces of the national public

This role of the state is found in most of the examples studied, except where its role as a regulator of the media is reduced to very little, due to the weakness of the public-sector media (as in Africa) and the influ-ence of transnational investors and broadcasters. Yet, with very few exceptions, we can acknowledge the relevance of the national level for the analysis of audience ratings. As mentioned above, the state (includ-ing in the new guise of a regulatory authority) remains an actor that is involved, and the television market remains a national market. With the exception of certain global or continental media events, especially sports events (Olympic Games, Football Cups), virtually all TV pro-grammes are intended to be broadcast nationally (or regionally in large




multilingual countries such as India), whether they are purely national, imported series, or adapted formats.

How can we interpret the spread worldwide of quantitative audience ratings around the peoplemeter, a technology that still prevails, from the perspective of studies on cultural and media globalization? Through the research presented in this book, the globalization of tele vision strongly resembles the viral spread of models of professionalization adapted to the deregulation of broadcasting that stretched outwards from Europe in the 1980s. This is an aspect of globalization about which relatively little is known, and that we illuminate here. The researchers have focused first on the definition itself and then, partly in reaction to the global diffusion of reality shows (Mathijs and Jones, 2005), and more generally of TV formats (Moran and Malbon, 2006; Oren and Shahaf, 2012). Yet this globalization of formats cannot be explained without an understanding of the format that includes an appreciation of its value, in other words, a ‘record’ of audience statistics deemed to be reliable. From this point of view, as Chakrabarti writes in Chapter 6 on India, the TAMs are used as ‘isomorphic currency across geographic barriers’. An audience share in India is understood as an audience share in France or in the United States, despite the variety of ways the statis-tics are produced and used.

It should be noted, however, that globalization has implied, as in other fields, and despite the hope of global marketing (if not a global market), a renewal of the nation as the best framework for organizing the market (for commercial and public stations, advertisers and agen-cies). Audience figures accurately provide an integrated, daily view of the national public. Here, the book will suggest that ratings are not only about economics but also about politics, not only because they are tools of management in the industry, but also because they pose key questions about democracy and culture, inclusion (or exclusion) of cer-tain audiences. It will show how this has affected broadcasters, notably public broadcasters, who have tried to function with different logics, without ever completely ignoring quantified audiences (Murray on Ireland in Chapter 11 and Savage and Sévigny on Canada in Chapter 3 in this volume).

In this book we see the appearance of this globalization through the spread of peoplemeters, themselves introduced by what would become major global entities: Nielsen-AGB, TNS Taylor Nelson Sofres and GfK. These entities responded to calls for tenders locally, often choosing first to set up local subsidiaries that would enable them to have the knowledge they needed about the market, and thus to ensure they were




selected. The inequalities between countries are striking here. France has succeeded in setting up an original company with its own technol-ogy, but not in exporting the model or much of the technology. In addition, countries differ with respect to the struggle for public appro-priations and presentations of audience data, and the respective place of commercial actors, public actors, but also spokespersons for different sections of the audience. In the American tradition, Meehan (2002) points out how, depending on their interests, the commercial actors have tried to favour sub-indicators which do not represent the entire TV-viewing public, but simply the portion of it that is significant from the market’s point of view. In the countries presented here, the prevail-ing presentation is in the form of quantitative indicators that represent television audiences as a whole, from a minimum age, which refers us back to the political implications, lato sensu, of the indicator. But other struggles can be envisaged, especially for countries divided not only according to income but also according to language and ethnicity (see Chakrabarti on India in Chapter 6). In short, here as in other areas, the study of audience indicators should not be left up to administrative research only, or reduced to its role in the commercial system (irrespec-tive of how justified this may sometimes seem).

In sum, the kind of sociological research involved here is not meant to allow a judgment of the ratings industry from within, but to take one step backwards and to understand the kind of world (and the kind of television world) we belong to: a world which cannot consider the pub-lic (the public of culture, but also of politics) without figures. The need for figures is such that the machines which produce figures, at a high cost, with different kinds of expertise (technological, statistical, social), have to be relied upon, and have to be trusted in a highly routinized way. The close examination of television audience institutions gives us a rare opportunity to unravel one of the ways we construct and naturalize this ubiquitous entity: the public of television.

Notes

1. According to EurodataTV Worldwide, the annual survey of global TV con-ducted by Médiamétrie, the French TAM Institute.

2. According to Global TV 2010, Markets, Trends Facts and Figures (www.idate.org/en/Home/): in 2009, the worldwide television market included 1.22 million households with at least one television, an annual increase of 1 per cent. Countries below 50 per cent are mainly in black Africa and, to a lesser extent, in Central Asia. Regarding viewing time, out of an average of 26 European countries, the daily viewing time per individual in 2010 was estimated at




228 minutes, against 216 in 2008, so it is still rising. In the United States, it was 283 minutes in 2010 against 281 in 2008. Source: IP Network and RTL, Television International Key Facts 2011, available online on the Ip-network site. The same source indicates, as an example of global broadcasts, that the Vancouver Olympic Games in 2010 were broadcast in 220 countries, with a potential audience of 3.8 billion individuals (out of a total of 4.5 billion TV viewers worldwide).

3. ‘In many circles of the television business, ratings are still frequently referred to simply as “The Nielsens”’ (International Herald Tribune, Obituary of Arthur C. Nielsen, Jr., 06/10/2011).

4. WFA/EACA (2008) Guide to Organizing Audience Research. http://www.wfanet.org/pdf/med_documents/WFA_EACA_Organising_Audience_Research_2008.pdf (last viewed 25 October 2012).



Television Audiences Across the World. Deconstructing the Ratings Machine

Documents

Transcript of Television Audiences Across the World. Deconstructing the Ratings Machine