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: 2) by jcross on Saturday July 08 2017, @02:40AM (1 child)
It seems like it wouldn't be hard for Nielsen to find out whether misspelled show names are more likely to have lower ratings than correctly spelled ones, since they're still harvesting the same ratings data, just not grouping it together with the correct spelling. Break that stat out by network and it should be pretty clear who's gaming the system and who just can't be bothered to check their spelling.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday July 08 2017, @04:28PM
Alternative Theory: lots of people time-shifting these programs (DVRs) do so by name. Put it in the schedule wrong, and it won't match the DVR's auto-recording, so it gets missed.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.