The ratings game

EVERYONE knows what the TAMs are, but from this week on we're going to have to get used to the Neilsens. The contract to provide television ratings to RTE and the Institute of Advertising Practitioners in Ireland has been won by the American company AC Nielsen, replacing the previous providers, AGB TAM.

The new system promises a more accurate, representative survey of the viewing preferences of the Irish television audience, but the figures which the public sees form only a small part of the information made available every day to RTE and advertising companies, based on the viewing habits of 600 households around the country.

Each household participating in the Nielsens has a meter on top of the television, and a handset with a button for each member of that household. When the television is switched on, the set puts up a message on screen, prompting the viewer to check in. Every now and again a light comes on, to remind people to record if anyone has entered or left the room. Everybody over the age of four has a number. "Children are often the best police of the system," says Paul Mulligan of RTE's sales and marketing division. "They make sure their parents check in and check out."

It all sounds pretty comprehensive. If there are guests in the house, they are also asked to log on, and give details of their gender and age range. If you record a programme for later viewing, the set stamps that fact on the videotape and notes when the tape is played. Any period of more than 15 seconds spent watching one channel is registered.

At three o'clock in the morning the set automatically downloads all the details from that day's viewing through the phone line. About 20 per cent of Irish homes don't have telephones, but in those cases a dedicated line is installed to retrieve the data. The information is processed and available to RTE and advertisers by nine o'clock that morning.

With the new service, 20 per cent of the panel is rotated every year to minimise the possible effects of "conditioning", which might warp the results. There's an ongoing survey of about 3,000 homes each year to establish broader changes in viewing habits. From that survey, people are also asked if they'd like to participate in the full system.

The panel must be absolutely representative. "The single most important test of representativeness is channel availability," says Mulligan. For example, the current survey shows that 30 per cent of homes have only RTE 1 and Network 2, while 47 per cent of homes have satellite and cable channels. Age, gender, size of household, geographical location and socio economic situation are the other factors considered.

Advertisers will have a specific budget to spend on a certain campaign, and every spot they buy has a projected target figure. The structure of the panel affects the quality of information. "It allows our programme people and the advertisers to target where their audience is. They can use it to target, say, ABC1 housewives between the ages of 25 and 40."

Nielsen's panel is 50 per cent larger and, crucially, more geographically spread than the previous TAMs, which were concentrated in clusters around the country. It also records for the first time those households with satellite dishes (about five per cent of the total). "It was an open tender," says Mulligan. "There aren't a lot of companies in the world which have the expertise to do this. Nielsen's proposal for an unclustered panel was crucial. Also, looking down the road to a digital, 200 channel environment, we felt that they had the best technology to cope with that, and also the software to analyse the data.

With increased coverage of the media and entertainment industries, information which used to be confined to insiders is now regarded as legitimate news in its own right. In Britain, the BARB ratings of the four terrestrial channels are widely published and commented on in the national press. Here, the RTE Guide publishes the figures for RTE 1 and Network 2, but not for its British based competitors, and the ratings have tended to make the news only as part of internal Montrose rivalries (most notably between Gay Byrne and Pat Kenny) or in the context of record breaking figures for sports events.

THE ratings are a commercial service paid for by RTE and the Irish advertising industry, and there is no reason for them to make the more detailed results widely available to a general audience (although it might be interesting). RTE covers all channels, including satellite, in a monthly commercial report on audience share which goes to the advertising industry. "The industry at the moment is RTE and the advertising agencies, but there is a more complex broadcasting environment here than in the UK," says Mulligan.

While in theory RTE is the sole player in the Republic's advertising market, the reality is that UTV, with 60 per cent penetration south of the Border, carries a considerable amount of advertising which is not just targeted at the North. A lot of large companies look at both parts of Ireland as a single market for advertising purposes but, according to Mulligan, "RTE schedules against UTV, but the ITV network doesn't schedule against us. The reality for a company like TV3 coming into the market is that starting a new channel in a country where cable and UK channels are widely available is going to be very difficult." He expects that Telefis na Gaeilge will participate in the system when it begins broadcasting in November: "They are a minority service, but they'll still need this information to schedule against the other channels."