Randy Kabrich On Nielsen Tampa Household Removal: 'Come Clean'

Kabrich

In response to NIELSEN's dropping of a TAMPA market PPM panelist from the FEBRUARY 2017 results when BEASLEY Spanish Contemporary WYUU (92.5 MAXIMA)/TAMPA's streaming ratings appeared to register at an unusually high level, topping the 18-34 demographics, consultant RANDY KABRICH asked in a blog post whether NIELSEN's clients are "now allowed to remove households they object to, as is standard in jury trials" and wondered if "trial consultants" will advise stations on which households to remove. 

He said in the post that he had been informed last week (by "a little birdie") that NIELSEN "had found a 'gotcha' to remove the household after complaints from a major client, under the pretext that one of the respondents was carrying both meters or perhaps another member of the household was not carrying the meter enough (imagine what number that would produce)."  

KABRICH said that "one person carrying 2 meters was the first and logical explanation" but that he noted "there were also distinctive differences in the listening patterns," and asked, "If examining the possibility of one respondent carrying both meters was the first thing I looked at 3 weeks ago, shouldn't it have been the first thing NIELSEN did PRIOR to release of the JANUARY Book?  What changed in 2 weeks?"  He pointed to situations like a 17-year-old female in a top-10 market whose PPM results led to an NPR affiliate topping the ratings for teens for a year, then falling out of the top 10 when she turned 18, at which time the station jumped from sixth to second in 18-34.

"Outliers," KABRICH wrote, "are a fact of all research surveys and to remove outliers because you just don't like their response is, quite simply, bad research. The impact of outliers in a research panel can and should be minimized by an adequate sample. Clearly, that is not the path NIELSEN has chosen to follow here." 

He went on to note a contradiction in NIELSEN's statement about the incident, which claimed that they identified the problem meter in early FEBRUARY yet that time is actually part of the last week of JANUARY's ratings period."  KABRICH added that his source told him that JANUARY numbers will not be re-issued despite the problem, nor will FEBRUARY weeks 3 and 4 and the full-month ratings, and interpreted NIELSEN's actions as being, "We've already processed FEBRUARY and do not want to reprocess it again as we already had JANUARY Week 1 Processing Issues that hopefully everyone has forgotten about. No need to risk any additional Processing Errors."

KABRICH concluded that NIELSEN "needs to come clean and reveal ALL the facts in their case for removal of this Household, not just their most current statement which does not follow the compliance statements in their earlier statement. And are Household visits a Standard Operating Procedure for "coaching" or was it 'different' this time for some reason?.... If NIELSEN does not come clean on this, it is a very dangerous precedent."

ALL ACCESS has reached out to NIELSEN for comment.

Read the post here.

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