PPM commercial audience estimates offer insight about consumers' avoidance of tv commercials. Total commercial avoidance, an average 7%, is composed of nearly six- tenths channel switching and four-tenths due to other 'interruptions'. Program content appears to be the strongest predictor of avoidance. Gender and age exacerbate commercial avoidance with men, teens, and younger adults showing above-average churn. There is also variation in the relationship of exact, commercial-minute audience levels to average-minute audience. High-churn formats produce lower indices with even lower levels for men. In other words, there is potential for bias against particular media formats and particular targets in today's currency-based 'proxy' measures of commercial audience -- average minute and AQH. PPM and Apollo estimates would help identify sources of bias and alternatives going forward. These results represent progress toward quantifying the mechanics of commercial avoidance for buyers and sellers. They also demonstrate the value of PPM's near-passive, direct, and precise capture of persons'-level media exposure.
Arbitron's Portable People Meter (PPM) results provide 'real' cross-media duplication between radio and television. PPM differs from present currency-based estimation of random duplication between independent sources for local-market radio and television. This investigation, employing a variety of schedule variations for a variety of demographics, finds that random estimation generally overstates PPM's unified radio and television capture. Results show variations by target demo as well as by the scope of the plan itself. As PPM measurement is deployed beyond Philadelphia, its passive capture of cross-media flow promises a better basis for estimating the value of media-mix schedules.
This paper presents early cross-media results from Arbitron's 2002 portable people meter (PPM) panel in the Philadelphia (United States) market. Previous results from the small-scale PPM panel in Wilmington (Delaware) in 2001 suggested important variations in cross-media duplication between radio and television. The present results build upon the earlier findings, extending the learning from PPM's capture of both television and radio via a single, unified measurement platform. This unified cross-media panel method provides insight into the consumer target's media behavior and to various effective strategies to maximize target reach and efficiency.
This paper examines the problems and pitfalls of today's sample-based media measurement services with particular reference to television. The author suggests that sample-based measurement is rapidly becoming defunct in its ability to reflect what is truly of importance to the advertiser: return on investment. This is driven by changes in the broadcast environment, in the ability of research companies to recruit representative samples and in new technologies allowing viewers to personalize their television experience.New technology offers a solution in the form of the set top boxes now installed in the vast majority of television households in the United States. Opposition from those with vested interests in keeping things as they are will, however, make any change difficult.