Portable People Meter
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The Portable People Meter (sometimes mistakenly "Personal People Meter") or PPM, is a device developed by Arbitron to measure how many people are listening (or at least exposed) to individual radio stations and television stations, including cable TV. The PPM is worn like a pager, and detects hidden audio tones within a station or network's audio stream, logging each time it finds such a signal. It has proved to be much more accurate than the old handwritten logs or wired meters, and is immune to forgetful test subjects.
There are several important parts to the PPM system:
- An encoder which inserts the tones (via psychoacoustic masking) into a station's or network's airchain.
- A monitor which checks that the encoder is working properly.
- The wearable Portable People Meter itself.
- A base station for each PPM, where each person in the household places it overnight to recharge the battery and to transmit information to the hub.
- A portable recharger for vacations and other trips away from the home base.
- A hub (or collector) for each household that takes the collected information and has a modem to upload it overnight via telephone.
The system can also be used for other media, such as movies and music which are recorded with a digital encoding. Various venues and retail locations are also encoding their media in the Houston area.
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[edit] History
The original concept for the ppm can be traced back to a brainstorming session at Arbitron in November 1988. At that time, concerns over the forthcoming move to high definition television had engineers concerned that the technology currently in use would be obsolete overnight. Drawing upon his experience in testing labs, Dr. Gerald Cohen proposed embedding an identifying signal in the audio and later decoding it. The rationale was simple. Dr. Cohen argued that audio was less likely to undergo a rapid change in technology as would video, hence, any technology developed is not likely to be obsolete in a few years.
The concept was presented to the company at that time and was also written up in a short concept document. A preliminary investigation was undertaken, however, it was not given serious consideration. Thus, the concept was written off and forgotten as Arbitron had bigger fish to fry in its competition with the Nielsen Company for television ratings. Arbitron lost that battle and went back to its core business – radio ratings.
Dr. Cohen’s idea lay dormant until 1992 when outsiders approached Arbitron with a “new” idea – embed a code into the audio stream and use it to identify what a person watches or listens to. Convinced that that concept, originated at Arbitron, could be achieved in practice but lacking the expertise to do so – outside help from Martin Marietta (now Lockheed Martin) was sought. Facing cutbacks in the defense industry, Martin Marietta was only too happy to take on commercial business even to the point of signing away all rights to the technology they were to develop.
Now a full-fledged project having management support, development focused on improving the encoding and detection methodology and miniaturization into a hand-held device. Additional capabilities such as motion detection were added later on.
Postscript: Later when Arbitron was being sued for patent infringement by the PreTesting Co., Dr. Cohen’s concept document became a cornerstone in its successful defense. As for Martin Marietta, they later approached Arbitron to license back the technology they had developed for use in a defense related project. And the outsiders that approached Arbitron – they were left out in the cold.
[edit] Research reports
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The PPM is beginning to provide new insights into how audiences respond to the various programming elements radio stations offer. Arbitron, as well as other firms that provide research and consulting services to radio stations, have begun publishing numerous studies based on analysis of PPM data.
The PPM is an electronic measurement system that delivers empirical, verifiable audience measurement data. These results are sometimes at odds with the results generated with the diary method in which listeners were asked to note each change of their radio dial. Some minority diarists may have used their diaries as a way to support and show loyalty for stations which targeted their communities[citation needed]. To delay the shift to electronic audience measurement[citation needed], the creator of the PPM, Arbitron, is being challenged by the Spanish Radio Association (SRA) and a number of politicians as to its accuracy in measuring minority listening.
Arbitron has been sued by the attorneys general of several U.S. states over the PPM's effect on minorities.[1]
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ "Arbitron Releases Miami PPM Data After Florida Lawsuit". FMQB. July 15, 2009. http://www.fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=1414081.
