{"id":45135,"date":"2014-09-11T18:28:47","date_gmt":"2014-09-12T00:28:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2014\/09\/11\/now-it-can-be-told-we-influenced-the-tv-you-watched.html"},"modified":"2014-09-15T08:53:46","modified_gmt":"2014-09-15T14:53:46","slug":"now-it-can-be-told-we-influenced-the-tv-you-watched","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2014\/09\/11\/now-it-can-be-told-we-influenced-the-tv-you-watched.html","title":{"rendered":"Now It Can Be Told: We Influenced the TV You Watched!"},"content":{"rendered":"

BWAH-HA-HA! WE HAD THE POWER!<\/p>\n

Yes, it can now be revealed that for the past two years we were a Nielsen Family<\/b> — our every move on TV (including watching the DVR and the Blu-Ray) being recorded and exerting an influence on TV ratings for the highly critical (to us) demographics we were part of.<\/p>\n

We were actually contractually prevented<\/i> from telling anyone of our Status of Amazing Cultural Influence — unless<\/i> a visitor was over at our house when the TV was on, in which case we were contractually obligated<\/i> to tell them (and to record them in the viewer selection box as a guest).<\/p>\n

For our trouble we got a small sum of money on a regular basis, and a Great Feeling of Societal Power. (Kay, underage, got to pick prizes from a catalog.)<\/p>\n

Unlike the Olden Dayes of Nielsen log books, the current system was actually relatively slick — an octopus of cables in the back of our receiver, with, every input going through to the TV routing through it to note what we were actually viewing at the time (with credit being given to DVR-watched shows, though only within a week or two).<\/p>\n

That was tied into an additional box at the top of the TV, which by remote control we would, every 20-odd minutes, note who was watching the TV (if the viewers hadn't changed, we could just hit OK on the remote). If we had guests, we were to enter for each of them their age and gender.<\/p>\n

All in all, it wasn't all that bad. Periodically Nielsen would call us up to confirm what TVs and devices plugged into them we had in the house (we were supposed to notify them if it changed, but this way they could catch up). When we got our Chromecast, for example, they came out and plugged it into the Nielsen cabling. The service guy in our area was very nice, and managed to work wonders. The folk we talked with on the phone were also very pleasant and good to work with.<\/p>\n

We could have stayed on (we had an offer to extend beyond our two year stint), but the nigh-impossible mares nest of cablng behind the already crowded video boxen above the TV, plus the low-simmer annoyance of keying in who was watching stuff, made it desirable to call it quits, let go of the power, and improve the ventilation around our video equipment.<\/p>\n

So if TV suddenly starts going drastically downhill in quality, blame all those other<\/i> Nielsen families. We're out (and already enjoying the dearth of blinking red lights over the TV).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/a><\/div>\n
\n<\/a>\u00a0\n<\/div>\n

View on Google+<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BWAH-HA-HA! WE HAD THE POWER! Yes, it can now be revealed that for the past two years we were a Nielsen Family — our every move on TV (including watching the DVR and the Blu-Ray) being recorded and exerting an influence on TV ratings for the highly critical (to us) demographics we were part of. … Continue reading “Now It Can Be Told: We Influenced the TV You Watched!”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":45136,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[106,80,69,20,40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-plusposts","category-media-commercial","category-family","category-hi-tech","category-media-tv"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/1973_nielsen_daily_rat_fmt5B15D.jpegimgmax=660.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":133819,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2017\/07\/08\/the-case-of-the-mysteriously-mangled-misspellings.html","url_meta":{"origin":45135,"position":0},"title":"The Case of the Mysteriously Mangled Misspellings","author":"***Dave","date":"Sat 8-Jul-17 3:50pm","format":false,"excerpt":"Concerned that your show is getting dodgy ratings, or is going up against a big sporting event, or even that its ratings are going to go down during reruns? 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His work usually focuses on commercial sites, but he's turned his view onto weblog design mistakes....","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging & Internet"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging & Internet","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45135"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45135\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45217,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45135\/revisions\/45217"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}