Now that Arbitron has officially failed in its initial attempt to get PPM accredited by the MRC in Philadelphia and New York, it just repeats the whole process again. And if that doesn’t work, it can try again…and again. "We have no limitation on this. Denial of accreditation in no way impacts a rating service’s ability to continue to seek accreditation in the future," MRC Executive Director George Ivie told RBR. In fact, the only paragraph in bold in the MRC’s statement regarding the accreditation denial encouraged Arbitron to keep trying: "The MRC believes that electronic measurement such as Arbitron’s PPM technology can represent an improvement over existing non-electronic audience measurements, and encourages Arbitron to continue in its extensive good faith efforts to achieve accreditation of the Philadelphia and New York Services."
With two markets rejected, Arbitron is not near reaching such a point, but still we asked Ivie at what point the MRC ends market-by-market accreditation and gives a general thumbs up. "The MRC seeks to develop a level of comfort in the uniformity of implementation of new markets from a quality perspective and the ability of new markets to comply with our standards. When a measurement service establishes a history of quality and compliance, we can audit multiple markets at once if markets are implemented in groups. Each new market requires some audit effort. On an ongoing basis, since our audit and evaluation is an annual process, we do group markets together and can audit previously accredited markets as one group," Ivie explained. Again, we would note that is only a theoretical question as far as PPM is concerned right now.
Read the entire MRC statement, click the pdf download link below.
