Arbitron Fixes Houston PPM 'Glitch' With Revised Data

Houston Numbers Revised

ARBITRON has addressed the HOUSTON PPM data error, first reported in ALL ACCESS (NET NEWS 8/21), with the release of new weekly figures that includes the missing data from the HOUSTON survey.

In the revised data provided by ARBITRON, the real average weekly (unified, 6 day out of 7 day) sample for AUGUST Week 1 in HOUSTON was 880, which is better then the equivalent in-tab numbers for the first two weeks in JULY (the survey weeks which straddled the JULY 4 holiday week) and the third week in JULY.

"The in-tab measure that really matters is average daily in-tab," ARBITRON SVP/Press And Investor Relations THOM MOCARSKY said. "This is the number that is used to calculate all the AQH ratings. ... The average weekly (unified, 6 day out of 7 day) in-tab sample is used to calculate only the weekly cumes. As JOHN SNYDER demonstrated at the PPM Consultant Fly-In today, the cumes for an in-tab based on the partial sample that was improperly processed was just about the same as the full properly processed sample."

One PPM client told ALL ACCESS that even with the 880 in-tabs this week, it's still another 3% drop from the 910 during the last week of JULY, and noted that the weekly in-tab is less that half of the 1800 that ARBITRON has quoted as being the sample size for HOUSTON.

What sparked the flurry of activity was that ALL ACCESS had seen some weekly numbers from the HOUSTON PPM that showed in-tab rates from AUGUST Week 1 were off dramatically, as much as 33%. There are 2,078 installs in HOUSTON, and in AUGUST Week 1, there were only 683 in-tab for persons 6+, and for persons 12+ there were 620 in-tab. By comparison, in JULY Week 4, there were 910 in-tab for persons 6+, and for persons 12+ there were 811 in-tab.

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