Nielson Media 2 comments


The Modulator family received a card today from Nielsen Media Research telling us

…that your household has been chosen to be a “Nielsen Family” …for a one week TV survey.

Cool. We’ll probably do this. We appreciate that they contacted in advance and, of course, their positive response rate is probably much higher than if they did not send the card.
For instance, I did not respond well to the outfit that called a couple weeks ago asking me to participate in a survey about current issues. They called while we were eating dinner and wanted to ask 80 questions. Yea, I’m going to sit there and answer 80 questions for a complete stranger and they didn’t even offer any compensation for my time.
I’m not going to ask Nielsen to pay for our time. However, their customers are not going to be real happy when our TV viewing habits are projected nationally. In the past week TV has garned 5 hours of my time and 2.5 of those were watching the PBS showing of The Grateful Dead movie a couple nights ago, .5 for the Canadian version of Antique Roadshow, 1 for 2 editions of Jeopardy and the rest for portions of the NBA finals. By the time we get set up for their survey the NBA will be done and, well, we probably won’t watch much.
On the other hand the Tour de France will have started and we’ll watch a couple hours/day.


2 thoughts on “Nielson Media

  • Allan

    I did the same sort of thing for Arbitron a few years ago.
    At the time, there were still a few independent stations on the air around here, and I usually listened to them instead of the conglomerate owned ones.
    It didn’t seem to help, though. They were all eventually assimilated by the Borg.

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