In the framework of a conference held in the ballroom of the Yale Club in New York, Robert Elder , a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), presented an invention that promised to scientifically measure human attention, something unprecedented until that moment . Specifically, it measured the attention people paid to the radio. His invention was called “audimeter” and it was the year 1936.
Its operation, on the surface, was very crude, as described by the American lawyer and professor Tim Wu in his book Creators of attention. The epic fight to get inside our heads :
“The raw prototype had two rolls of paper in an open spool and was connected to a radio. When the radio was on, a needle marked a line on the roll, which turned slowly, and after a while it indicated which stations had tuned to the radio and for how long. “
Until then, there was no reliable way to know what the audience was in real numbers for a radio program, which was quite a problem when contracting advertising: for a long time, in fact, many programs were sponsored by commercial brands , and the content hardly differed almost from advertising.
As in its day with the radio itself, the invention of the audimeter hardly caused a sensation . However, among those present in that ballroom was a man who was immediately fascinated.
His name was Arthur Charles Nielsen , who at the time ran a market research company that expanded its business in 1932 by creating a sales index that tracked purchases of food and medicine. This was the first measurement of retail sales, and it was dedicated to measuring the market shares of brands, so Nielsen saw much more in that device than others did.
The principle of hearings
Nielsen detested any data collection system involving human elements, such as telephone surveys, as he believed that this produced biases and distortions. Nielsen preferred direct results. For that reason, Nielsen was quick to acquire Elder’s invention .
Six years later, Louis Woodruff would develop a functional equipment that could be installed in the home of a family, which was paid for the inconvenience caused, to measure with perfect accuracy the radio station that was tuned in at any given moment.
These artifacts were sent a thousand homes, and they began to be called “personometers”, as Wu points out: “Each one of them was like a nerve that ended in the public body and was slowly creating a vast network that would tell you exactly how they passed the late Americans. “
This data was then sold to companies interested in the popularity of the programs and demographic information about listeners for advertising purposes. The first Nielsen radio audience ratings would be published in 1947 . Its success was such that, in 1950, television audiences began to be measured in the same way, when television was beginning to spread throughout the United States.
In 1953, Nielsen began issuing booklets to a smaller sample of households (popularly known as “Nielsen families”), in which the family was required to record the shows it had watched. These data were then contrasted with the information from the audimeters, to obtain a more precise demographic breakdown.
It was the first time that huge amounts of data, the closest thing to what we now call big data or big data, served to obtain more reliable information from the environment. The multimedia field, from Nielsen on, would never be the same again , as content would begin to be produced or discarded more based on what people decided to see than on a kind of intrinsic value. Elder himself even came to deny his invention then with these words: [Broadcasting] suffers a lot from the misuse [of audience ratings], so in that sense I’m not very happy for having contributed to putting the system running “.
