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If I mistakenly write "NBC Nitely News," you can probably still tell what program I'm talking about. Nielsen's automated system can't, however, and a report Thursday in The Wall Street Journal details how networks are taking advantage of that fact to disguise airings that underperform with viewers.
It's described as a common practice in the world of TV ratings, where programs with higher ratings can charge advertisers more to run commercials. When an episode performs poorly with viewers, the networks often intentionally misspell the show title in their report to Nielsen, according to the Journal. This fools the system into separating that airing out as a different show and keeping it from affecting the correctly-spelled show's average overall rating.
The report says the practice was initially used sparingly -- for instance, when a broadcast would go up against a major sporting event. But it has now grown fairly common, with NBC misspelling the title of "NBC Nightly News" 14 times since the current TV season began last fall. At one point, that reportedly included an entire week of broadcasts.
[...] Such a practice might be largely for the sake of marketing, with networks typically looking to boast publicly about show performance however possible. Still, it seems odd that Nielsen would allow them to do so with any sort of regularity, given that it ultimately calls the accuracy of its numbers into question.
Source: CNet
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday July 07 2017, @11:04PM (8 children)
If the advertisers are paying more than the show is worth, I'd say they have standing to sue the network.
OT: When I was posting my resume online, it had deliberate misspellings in it for purposes of search engine optimization. For example SBP-2 is the correct spelling for firewire storage, but my resume also had SBP2.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 08 2017, @12:03AM (1 child)
What a surprise, the king of self aggrandizement uses search engine optimization to pimp his resume.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday July 08 2017, @01:01AM
Filter error: parent has his head up his ass.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 08 2017, @01:04AM (1 child)
Uhh, that is one of the underlying tenants of capitalism. Maybe the ad companies can claim they were defrauded by doing the typos, but the networks can equally argue that the companies didn't do their due diligence.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 08 2017, @01:38AM
the companies didn't do their due diligence
Doubt the courts would see it that way. "you should have done your homework you should have known that car would blow up after it left the lot"
Fraud is the word you are looking for. As if this is true (and the rumors are they do not track it that way anyway) fraud is what it would be.
(Score: 2) by wisnoskij on Saturday July 08 2017, @01:38AM (2 children)
How many jobs have you gotten from some Manager of HR person Googling "SBP2 resume"?
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday July 08 2017, @02:22AM
I ported the Apple Firewire Reference platform to Texas Instruments DSP/BIOS.
The client liked my work so much that he gave me two more gigs.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday July 08 2017, @04:51AM
He the would get the same hit rate for searches of sbp2 as he would searches for sbp-2, because Google is insensitive to punctuation and other trash characters.
So crazy man wins again.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 08 2017, @09:47AM
being a bit reactive, huh?
find it hard to chew that nielsen does not validate their inputs?
would you find it terribly hard to believe that this is the way they do business?
and have been, for a very long time.
e.g. its method, not an accident.