Trying to Clean Up Sweeps; Are any alternatives ready for prime time? - Statistical Data Included

American Demographics, May 1, 2001

This past January, NBC began airing commercials to promote a guest appearance by Ellen DeGeneres on its popular sitcom Will & Grace. In a classic bit of stunt casting, the network hired the comedienne and out-of-the-closet lesbian to portray a nun, showing her cavorting wildly in the promo while dressed modestly in a clerical habit. Outrageous? Absolutely. Senseless? On the contrary, the move made perfect sense. Producers timed her cameo to air during the heart of February sweeps.

weeps, those special, month-long ratings periods in November, February, and May, represent the silly seasons of television programming, when no audience-luring gimmick, watch-and-win sweepstakes, or blockbuster miniseries is too salacious, provocative, or bizarre for public consumption. They're the months when Nielsen Media Research measures the viewership of local stations in all 210 U.S. television markets, to determine what rates advertisers must pay for spot and local TV commercials. With an estimated $24 billion in ad revenue at stake, network executives and their affiliate stations unleash all manner of programming mayhem in an effort to increase the size of the coveted 18- to 49-year-old demographic in individual markets. "To television producers, there's Christmas, there's Yom Kippur, and there's sweeps," says Jay Kernis, a veteran producer at CBS's 60 Minutes. "You prepare for it like a religious experience. You either lose or save your soul depending on how successful you are during sweeps."

But the hoopla surrounding sweeps masks a dark side to audience measurement. Many researchers view the current method of counting local viewers as flawed, outdated, and inaccurate. Nielsen, which has dominated TV ratings at the national and local level for more than three decades, measures the audience size of network shows via its so-called people meters, electronic set-top boxes that are placed in 5,000 homes around the country. To monitor the demographics of local stations, however, Nielsen goes low-tech, distributing paper diaries to 2 million volunteers over the course of a year, with requests that they record the programs watched during one week of a sweeps month. (Additionally, the company installs 400 to 500 set-top meters in the top 53 markets to help determine which households watch what programs, though not which people watch what shows inside those homes.)

But sweeps and the diary method remain a demographics problem. Because local and spot advertisers need the demographic data to make sure stations are delivering their target audience, the antiquated diaries remain the measurement tool of choice in all 210 markets. And the extraordinary programming and promotion efforts during sweeps throws off the validity of audience measurement for the rest of the year. Networks and their affiliates design their stunts to pull in extra viewers for local stations during sweeps. Yet those exaggerated figures are the ones that stations use to charge advertisers for commercial time year-round - long after the fickle public has reverted to its old habits. One CBS study found that the overall audience for the four major networks drops 10 percent to 15 percent between periods of original programming and the repeats that dominate non-sweeps months. "Sweeps programming hurts us and hurts the public," says David Poltrack, executive vice president for research and planning at CBS. "Television viewers dislike having to decide which of two major movies to watch in February while finding only repeats on in March."

What's bad for viewers is even worse for advertisers. Media buyers have no way of knowing how many viewers stick around during the nine dreary months filled mostly with reruns. And the issue is about to get more complicated as the arrival of digital technology creates alternative ways to watch TV, and more accurate methods of counting viewers. "Sweeps are a travesty," says Susan Nathan, senior vice president and director of media knowledge at Universal McCann, and chair of the media research committee for the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA). "Advertisers buy time on stations 365 days a year, yet we have no idea what ratings are for most of the year when there aren't those hyped, big-event programs." Nathan speaks for many in the advertising community when she concludes, "Sweeps should be done away with."

Dispatching sweeps to the dustbin of TV history is hardly a new idea. Advertisers initiated broadcast ratings in 1930 in order to count radio listeners for the shows they produced and sponsored. The term sweeps dates back to the 1950s, when Nielsen began mailing diaries to households and reporting the results, first with East Coast markets before sweeping across the country. As TV networks gradually took control of programming, they needed better demographic numbers to calculate how much they could charge for commercials on specific shows. Local stations couldn't afford to track overnight ratings year-round, as the networks do, so they settled on the four monthlong sweeps (another occurs in July, but is less important due to relatively few summer viewers).