MediaPost: Nielsen Takes Wait-and-See Attitude Toward PPM

Mediapost asked some very good questions to the Nielsen people about the relative merits of the new Arbitron Portable People Meter technology versus their own People Meter system.

In their continuing effort to bring traditional media data up to online media snuff, one idea that might have escaped the Nielsen and Arbitron people is the possibility of changing how they measure online media to bring about a cross-media equivalent.

Instead of creating an extremely expensive network of portable people meters to measure outdoor advertising, for instance, they might take online ad data and run a program over them that would sufficiently obscure the figures to make them equivalent to traditional media data.

The algorithm could randomly place a plus-or-minus 10 percent bias on each figure to replicate the sampled nature of surveys. I could then arbitrarily raise the largest numbers up 30 percent and the lower numbers down 20 percent in order to recreate the effect that self-reported data has relative to popular media. I'm sure there are many other processes through which the numbers would have to be processed. This "data" would very likely make Nielsen and Arbitron's broadcast customer as complacent as they were prior to the advent of accurate and instant media metrics.