The tracker behind the tube
The referee. Whiting won't miss the spotlight. Unlike the outsize media egos she deals with daily--it's always someone like Leslie Moonves of CBS or Jeff Zucker of NBC on the phone--Whiting is not comfortable being the center of attention. Raised in Lake Geneva, Wis., with what she calls "Quaker values," and now living in the New York suburbs, she is the quintessential gracious midwesterner. Whiting, who is divorced, still has a house next door to her mother to which she returns on weekends. She gardens and collects teddy bears. "It's not my natural personality to be the one out there talking in such a public way to everyone," she says. But her reticence shouldn't be confused with weakness. Whiting is a shrewd negotiator, a skill she says she learned not from her demanding clients but from her 21 first cousins, who were often in need of a levelheaded referee. "She's much tougher than she appears at first," says Brad Adgate, director of research for the buying firm Horizon Media, who has known Whiting for years. "She has to handle all those powerful media moguls, and Nielsen itself is a ruthless place to work. Even so, she's managed to climb to the top of that greasy pole."
Since Whiting, an economics major, began as a management trainee at age 21, Nielsen has changed hands four times. But if the firm's fortunes waned now and then, Whiting's did not. She had a knack for anticipating the next hot area and making money from it. In the '80s, she pushed Nielsen to begin rating cable stations; in the '90s, she oversaw development of the ad-tracking service Monitor-Plus, which keeps tabs on how and where TV advertisers spend money. She has also brought in some very big deals. Last year NBC and Viacom each signed long-term contracts worth between $400 million and $500 million. Nielsen has watched competitors like Smart TV and Arbitron come and go, leaving it the ratings king. "The industry absolutely loves to hate Nielsen for being a monopoly," says a top network executive, who asked not to be identified. "But they'd rather complain about the way Nielsen does business than pay for two companies to do what Nielsen does."
And complain they do about what they view as Nielsen's arrogance and its cost. Nielsen's refusal to slow down the rollout of the meters is just one example critics cite. Last year, the company reported that the number of young men watching prime-time television had dropped by 8 percent, a huge and revenue-busting decrease. When the networks disputed the findings on the grounds that ratings move glacially and that many men could not have disappeared altogether from the TV landscape, Nielsen defended its numbers, blaming the drop on everything from video games to the Iraq war. When the men miraculously appeared a year later, Nielsen chalked up the change to a shift in methodology. But the networks, which lost millions in advertising revenues, remained incensed. "Only a monopoly could publicly challenge the integrity of its clients and get away with it," says David Poltrack, head of research for CBS.
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