The tracker behind the tube
When Susan Whiting, CEO of Nielsen Media Research, wants to relax, she watches television. That would hardly be worth mentioning were it not for the fact that TV, or more precisely who's watching it and when, is the single biggest source of stress in Whiting's life.
When Whiting took the top job at Nielsen in 2002, she knew there would be a steep learning curve, even though she had been at the company for 26 years. The television universe is changing rapidly. There are multiple sets in every home, not to mention gyms, bars, and other locations. Devices like TiVo are rewriting the book on tracking viewership. And Nielsen, whose ratings influence how $60 billion in TV ad dollars are spent each year, must try to stay one step ahead of an audience that is getting harder to keep track of at every turn.
Controversy. "I knew there would be more change in the next five years than there had been in the previous 50," says Whiting, 48. "I knew there would be a lot to learn." What Whiting didn't anticipate, however, was that her education would include dealing with a well-coordinated campaign to put Nielsen's latest measuring device, the Local People Meter, and the company itself, on trial.
The meter is an electronic set-top box now being used in cities like New York and Los Angeles to measure local television audiences. The devices are much more accurate than both earlier boxes and the written diaries that have been used since the 1950s to record viewing. The TV industry favors the technology behind the meters because it produces more-detailed information on audiences. But minority groups and some networks charge that the meters undercount minority viewers, which leads to lower ratings on certain shows and lower ad revenues for networks, such as Fox and Spanish-language Univision, with large minority audiences. They have come together in Don't Count Us Out, a group funded in part by Fox that represents more than 100 advocacy groups for minorities. And they have been making life miserable for Whiting, who has been on a nonstop public-relations mission, at a time when she expected to be boosting Nielsen's fortunes by selling new products for measuring TV audiences.
Former Democratic presidential candidate Al Sharpton, for instance, barreled into her office recently, flanked by a CNN camera crew, to accuse her of "racial insensitivity." Rupert Murdoch went berserk at the mention of Nielsen's name and ripped Whiting in front of network executives. And she was grilled by a Senate subcommittee trying to determine whether Nielsen, a monopoly, needs government oversight. The controversy has put Nielsen, a company little known outside of TV, onto the front pages. "I never thought I'd see the day when we would be picketed," says Whiting. "This has been a damaging and unexpected attack."
Now, after months of defending the meters in forums across the country and working with minority groups to refine the sample, Whiting is winning some converts, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, and Black Entertainment Television. And with advertisers embracing Nielsen's new ratings, Whiting may finally be able to shift her focus back to measuring audiences instead of appearing in front of them.
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.
Now Whiting is gearing up for the next big push. She plans to double the number of Nielsen "families" in the national ratings sample to 10,000 from 5,000 to better cover today's 500-channel universe. Nielsen has also begun measuring product placement and is working on capturing viewing experiences outside the home. For example, a TV show might be encoded with a numerical message that could be read by a meter worn on a belt. So, if a person wearing one of Nielsen's meters walked into a bar and Will & Grace were on TV, the pagerlike device would take note of it.
But perhaps nothing is more important for Whiting right now than to get Nielsen in tune with the age of digital TV. Today's meters can't measure programs recorded by digital video recorders like TiVo. Nielsen is working with TiVo to study how TV viewers use their DVR s and how they might be counted. "We have been talking to our clients about how to report this viewing for several years," she says. "And people still aren't sure quite how to think about it." Whatever standards Nielsen settles on, they are likely to be as controversial as the people meter, if not more so. "No matter what we decide, someone is going to be unhappy," Whiting says. Sounds as if she will need a lot of television time over the next year.
This story appears in the November 8, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.