We have not had a chance to read Jon Gertner’s entire article from yesterday’s Times Magazine on the Nielsens, Arbitrons, and other media-measuring devices—but we’ve enjoyed what we’ve read so far. It comports with some of the bones we’ve been gnawing on around here in recent days.
In two very important ways, these sorts of industrial devices for measuring how people use media can never really be adequate—and for one very big reason. First, even the “People Meter” described by Gertner, now in use by Arbitron in some markets, merely measures a person’s exposure to certain media—it cannot make any qualitative measurement of that person’s reaction to her exposure other than simple duration. You keep watching or listening, presumably you are not irritated enough to change the channel. But you may not be ~able~ to. In other words, if I am in a bar trying to have a conversation with a friend while Brit Hume natters self-righteously in the background, my PPM may tell Headquarters that I watched Fox News Channel for an hour, whereas I spent most of that hour highly irritated by the twelve overhead televisions and their constant lap dance distracting me from a meaningful conversation.
Second, it cannot meaningfully measure what a person’s reaction is to the ~advertising~ she is exposed to in the course of her media day. Thus the advertiser and the media that sold that advertising are inextricably linked—maybe more closely than ever before. Here in the wretched world of print, we are frequently considered the “lowest rung” in the ad world, because we are doing front-line work, trying to educate small business owners about what advertising is and does. Most intelligent people who are potential buyers of advertising want to know what kind of return they will get on their investment—if they sell widgets, they’d like to believe that advertising will increase their widget sales, and presumably they will, if everything falls into place as it should. But there is frequently not as direct a relationship as advertisers would like to see. The only answer seems to be a certain kind of co-branding reasoning: You buy ads with us, you tie your fortunes to us. As the water rises, both of our boats rise with it.
There is an important shadow-dance going on which we’ve described before. In an attention economy, you charge your advertisers for raw exposure, but the more they want to know and the more you can tell them about ~how well~ their ad may (or may not) be working, the more nervous everyone gets. Their are billions and billions of dollars at stake in the media and advertising business, all tied up in ~passive~ consumption of media, with the advertising piggybacking along for the ride. If we suddenly converted to an on-demand attention economy (like, say, the public radio model; in print, it would mean inverting the modern circulation model and charging real money for subscriptions, rather than giving away a lot of deeply discounted inert gas), lots of people would lose lots of money. The only way to prop up a passive-measurement industry is to spend more money, not less.
Even the next-generation technology called “Apollo” has its limitations. This cutting edge measuring device is supposed to close the circuit entirely—first measure the media and advertisments a person is passively exposed to, and then measure her active buying habits. But one can certainly hear both the advertisining and the media industries holding their breath. What happens when we find out that there is actually a complicated, unpredictable agent—a living, breathing person with her own history, self-image, brand loyalties, bad hair days—standing between an advertisment and a purchase?
There is still only a small, frail man behind that curtain—but what a curtain it is!
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