It comes as no surprise to those of us who transact business in the spot television arena that local audience measurement has issues. Despite Nielsen’s use of improved sampling methodologies, we are still dealing with unstable ratings estimates, disappointing post-buy results and decades-old standards of what constitutes reasonable audience delivery. Researchers have long speculated that relative error and non-response bias are critical contributing factors to these difficulties, but have lacked sufficient data to do proper in-depth analyses. That has changed.
