Harker Asks, 'Did Nielsen Just Throw Arbitron Under the Bus?'

Nielsen Pointing Fingers?

On its latest "Radio Insights" blog post, HARKER RESEARCH writes, "while NIELSEN’s prepared remarks at the BROADCAST ENGINEERING SYMPOSIUM revealed nothing new, ARUN RAMASWAMY’s response to a question from the audience sure did." Here’s the question followed by the response:

Question: "We’ve asked multiple times (whether PPM worked). We’ve always felt PPM did not work, especially in talk environments. We were always told we were wrong, so I find it interesting that finally another broadcast vendor comes out with a product that many of us owned and purchased, and saw extraordinary results with. A lot of us -- and I speak for many of my friends -- believed NIELSEN was the most capable of fixing this. We didn’t want another vendor, or another box, or more cost associated with it. We wanted NIELSEN to fix it. We’re personally very glad to see NIELSEN work on this and come out with enhanced CBET. What do you do to make broadcasters feel good about turning off Voltairs and eliminating them after you’ve told us so long that there weren’t any problems. And how do we... I have to go back to my people and tell them this really works and we don’t need this other $15,000 box."

Answer: "I can’t really speak to what ARBITRON did prior to acquisition. From a NIELSEN’s perspective I can say basically we have demonstrated continuous improvement mentality. We have made changes in the TV industry. We’ve overhauled the watermark in there several years ago and we actually made new investments in the meter. And that’s really the philosophy we’re bringing to the audio. So you will see a sense of continuous improvement cycles; tranferancy, showing what we’re working on in the R&D pipeline. That’s really the philosophy we believe in and we have assets to do that. We have the best technologies to do that. That’s the assurances I want to give you. That will happen."

HARKER notes, "keep in mind that NIELSEN announced that it was acquiring ARBITRON on DECEMBER 18, 2012. It closed the deal on SEPTEMBER 30, 2013."

Read the full post here.

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