Honours even in TV ratings war

05/June/2001

As reported here in March, controversy began after the January TV audience figures issued by AGB Australia, which trades under the name ATR (Advanced Television Research), showed declines of up to 500,000 viewers compared with data produced by ACNielsen.

For ten years ACN was the sole source of TV viewing figures in Australia. However, ATR beat it to win the TAM contract, beginning this year, from a new body, OzTAM, owned by the three big commercial TV networks, Channels Seven, Nine and Ten.

ATR's figures, based on a panel of 3,000 homes, made particularly disapppointing reading for Kerry Packer's Channel Nine, which had previously topped the ratings. As a result Nine continued to buy TAM data from ACN, which has kept its 2,500-strong panel going.

ACN has a number of other subscribers including regional and pay TV stations. This makes Australia one of the few countries in the world with two competing full-service TAM services.

After allegations that ATR's figures under-represented older viewers and that ACN's did the opposite, the two sides agreed to call in an independent audit or in the person of Professor Peter Danaher, of Auckland University, who for six years has been New Zealand's Television Auditor.

Among his main findings, now published, are the following.

1. Because of a late change in the panel targets set by OzTAM, the ATR panel at first did under-represent older people and people living on their own, and over-represented homes with children. And the ACN panel does indeed tend to over-represent older buyers.

2. Since the beginning of the year ATR has made considerable progress in balancing its panel. Partly because of this the ratings published by the two agencies have, from March onwards, been much closer to each other.

3. ATR uses a weighting scheme with a larger number of age categories than ACN's. This leads to greater ratings variation or "bounce".

4. Since ACN's panellists have been doing the job for longer than ATR's, they are more in danger of showing "fatigue" and neglecting to use their people meters. Such fatigue tends to affect younger viewers rather than the over-55s.

ACN does not accept this finding, arguing that 50% of its panellits have been so for less than two years. However, it welcomed Danaher's report.

Ian Garland, Managing Director of ACNielsen Media International, Australia, described it as "a resounding endorsement of ACNielsen’s TV ratings surveys over the last 10 years."

He added: "We are pleased to note Professor Danaher has recommended a number of changes to the ATR service that are already part of the existing ACNielsen operation." These included simplifying ATR's weighting system along lines used by ACN.

ATR, however, said that the report had given its TAM service the "thumbs up" and that the service would "continue to be the standard for Australian television audience ratings for the next seven years, including the introduction of digital free to air broadcast."

Warwick Hoare, CEO of ATR Australia, declared: "We have introduced the world's most advanced television audience measurement system and we look forward to continuing our supply of accurate and timely data to OzTAM, its shareholders and customers into the future."

Channel Nine remains critical of ATR, even though it has recovered its ratings leadership. David Leckie, Chief Executive of Nine, said that it would "not accept the ATR ratings system until issues previously identified by Nine and now supported by Professor Peter Danaher's independent report have been addressed."

OzTAM's Chief Executive Ian Muir stated, on the other hand, that the Danaher report "justifies the decision the industry made to change to ATR as the industry supplier."

It is widely believed in media-buying circles that the row over ratings undermined advertisers' confidence and significantly reduced the amount they spent on TV during the first few months of this year.

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