As radio evolved into quite a different medium after the introduction of television, Arbitron was best able to provide a relatively inexpensive method, the personal diary, for measuring radio's listening audience. Radio stations strove to provide a continuous, distinctive sound, composed largely of music but also including news, talk, sports, and community bulletin information. As radio became more portable and available in cars, more of its audience was away from home.

     Arbitron splits the field of radio measurement with Statistical Research Incorporated, whose RADAR service measures radio networks. Thomas Birch's Radio Marketing Research provided major competition for the radio marketplace before Birch left the field in 1991. Arbitron measures 276 local radio markets today by means of an open-ended mail-in personal diary developed by James Seiler (originally an improvement over C.E. Hooper's multimedia diaries). Each member of a household who is over 12 years of age receives a personal diary with a page for each day of the week without printed time divisions.

Origins

     Begun by James W. Seiler in Washington, D.C., in 1949 as both a national and local television ratings service, the American Research Bureau (ARB; now known as Arbitron) succeeded because of the inexpensive method-the viewer diary-that it used to measure radio and television audiences. The diary method pioneered by Seiler met broadcasters', advertisers', and agencies' needs for more comprehensive information about the television audience, especially viewer demographics.

     Seiler realized that the Federal Communications Commission freeze (1948-52) had artificially restricted television development to East Coast cities and that when the freeze was lifted, stations and the need for measurement would spread to the West Coast. On a trip to the West Coast, Seiler discovered a local service, Tele-Que, that also used a diary method to measure one-week periods. Rather than duplicating the Tele-Que service, Seiler offered to consolidate, and ARB merged with Tele-Que in 1951, which put ARB in a strong position on both coasts. Known for a time as ARB Tele-Que, by 1954 the company was known simply as the American Research Bureau.

     Like all services during that period, ARB originally tailored its methods to the nuclear family, which served as the target for enormous volumes of merchandise from manufacturers and advertisers. At that time, the entire household was used as the unit of measurement. Both the diary and the meter were tailored to a lifestyle in which the family gathered around a single console radio or television and listened or watched en masse. Only one diary (called a household diary or set diary) was sent to each family, and the assumption was that the housewife would record listening for the entire family. In an era before multiple sets, only the family room console required a meter, and it generated what were known as household ratings. Diaries allowed other information desired by advertisers and broadcasters to be included, such as the number of color television sets and whether the sets had ultrahigh-frequency receivers.

     ARB's first major success was with national television reports, introduced in October 1950. Without national or network ratings, Seiler would later remark, ARB would have been lost in the crowd. Only ARB, Nielsen, and a much smaller rating service called Videodex represented a national cross-section in its sampling. Although the Nielsen network service, the Nielsen Television Index, was Audimeter based, Nielsen supplemented his meter method at the local level for his Nielsen Starion Index with a diary to provide demographics. The development of a meter-plus-diary service was necessitated when, in 1954, ARB introduced an electronic instantaneous meter service, called Arbitron, to supplement its diary method. Videodex, a diary-only service, was discovered to be making up numbers from a discontinued sample of warehoused diaries; this came to light during a 1963 congressional investigation into rating services and their practices. The diary provided data on both gross (or duplicated) and cumulative (or undupli­cated) audiences, and data were projectable to estimates of all U.S. television homes.

     The ARB diary keepers were randomly selected from telephone directories of all U.S. cities within a 50-mile radius of the television signal. Diaries, mailed to those who agreed to cooperate, were kept for a one-week period. Field personnel made two subsequent calls to ensure continued cooperation. ARB drew new samples for each one-week period. The ARB grew rapidly throughout the 1950s. Following Hooper's death in a 1955 boating accident, ARB took over his local market reports.

Arbitron

     By 1959 Seiler had added a multicity rating service that used the same method as his archrival Nielsen, an electronic household meter. He called his meter service Arbitron. This meter service offered a distinct advantage over Nielsen's mail-in Audimeter and over its own hand-tabulated diaries in use at the time, because Arbitron's data were collected instantaneously. As part of the service, each station was represented by a row of electronic lights on a display board. As viewers switched from one station to another, the lights blinked off in the row for one station and lit up in another row for a different station. Arbitron did not succeed as a national television service owing to a number of factors: stations and networks balked at the cost, Nielsen entangled Arbitron in a lengthy patent litigation suit that drained it of financial resources, and the better-capitalized Nielsen undercut the cost of ARB's station reports.

     Arbitron produces estimates for three areas: the metro area, the Area of Dominant Influence (ADI), and the total survey area (TSA). The metro area is short for metropolitan area, the standard metropolitan statistical area as defined by the U.S. census, although it is occasionally more loosely employed. The ADI is an exclusive geographical area consisting of all counties in which the home-market commercial stations receive a preponderance of total viewing or listening hours. The ADI concept divided the United States into more than 200 markets, assigning each station to only the one market where it captured the largest share of audience. The ADI was the first standardized means of defining a market, because previously, media planners had used their own definitions. The ADI paved the way for demographic targeting, because with a boundary for each market, a market's performance could be related to demographics. The TSA is a nonexclusive marketing area that indicates a station's viewing or listening audience regardless of where the station is located, including areas where stations overlap. Thus, a station could be assigned to more than one TSA if listening occurred in neighboring counties or markets. Unlike television, most radio buys are based on metro areas, because radio competes primarily in the local market against such media competition as newspapers. In 1982 Arbitron switched from 4-week to 12-week measurement periods in order to reduce the influence of promotions, giveaways, and other gimmicks used by radio stations to increase listenership. Advertising rates are based on audience size.

Radio Ratings

     Arbitron entered the local radio marketplace in 1963 after the Harris hearings, a congressional investigation into the ratings services that resulted in Nielsen's exit from the radio marketplace that same year. ARB's new emphasis on the field of radio audience measurement over television was also partly motivated by RKO Radio's request that Seiler conduct a study that same year of the best way to measure audiences of all media, especially radio. The outcome was the recommendation that the personal diary-a small booklet designed for each individual in the household to carry with him or her throughout the day-be used to measure radio. This was an improvement over the household or set diary previously in use, because for the first time since the mass exodus to television, radio stations were able to report a measurable audience. Radio had shifted from a mass medium where people listened around a single set to a more portable medium because of such technological innovations as the transistor. Now radio's largest audience was its out-of-home listeners, as people listened in such places as at work, in the car, and on the beach, a phenomenon that had not been recorded by the previous method, the household set diary, which conceptualized viewing as occurring at home and as a family.

Ratings Innovator

     Arbitron has typically been more technologically and conceptually innovative than its competitors in responding to the marketplace. Dominant firms such as Nielsen find it more profitable to pursue a "fast second" strategy whereby they allow small pioneers a modest inroad before they respond aggressively. Arbitron's research and development, as a result, have led to a significant number of new features in product design. Seiler developed both the all-radio diary, which measured the radio audience separately rather than as part of the television sample, and the personal diary, which was sent to each member of the household.

     Seiler began the practice of using a four-week ratings period (rather than the previously used one-week period). Television still uses this four-week period as the basis of its ratings, although radio now uses a 12-week period. Seiler provided the first county coverage studies, which determined station viewership on a county-by-county basis by actual measurement rather than the previously used projections.

     Seiler also began the practice of "sweeps" periods, or the simultaneous measurement of all markets based on actual coverage areas. In 1966 ARB developed new survey markets, or ADI, which, in addition to the metro and total survey areas used by rating services during the period, became the industry standard for exclusively defining the geography of local markets. The ADI geography largely replaced the previously used metro areas in television. In failing to copyright the idea, however, ARB opened the door for Nielsen to introduce a somewhat similar concept, the Designated Market Areas. Much of this additional information was made possible by ARB's switch from hand-tabulated methods to use of an electronic Univac 90 computer in 1959. By 1961 ARB was measuring every U.S. television market and had twice produced national sweeps.

     By the 1960s Arbitron led the other ratings services in its inclusion of age and sex demographic information; it was able to do so because of its use of the diary method, which asked specific viewers about their viewing. Arbitron's innovation offered advertisers and agencies finer and more discriminating tools to cherry-pick audiences. These innovations, together with its national sample, resulted in Arbitron's quickly emerging as a leader in local market measurement.

     After merging with the Committee for Economic and Industrial Research (CEIR) in 1961, ARB expanded its computer facilities. By 1964 many members of the original ARB management, including Seiler, Roger Cooper, and John Landrith, left, citing basic differences between ARB and CEIR policy. CEIR hired new management who were not well received by major agencies. In 1967, faced with agency and station cancellations, CEIR sold Arbitron to Control Data Corporation.

     By the mid-198os, Arbitron radio audience measurement had grown to 420 markets measured four times a year, and the personal diary had become the standard tool for radio. For studies of the radio audience, Arbitron was testing a portable pocket "people meter," a passive sound-measuring methodology, for radio, television, and cable audiences. Adoption of this device was stalled because of a 199 3 patent infringement suit filed by Pretesting Company of Tenafly, New Jersey, which had developed a prototype similar to Arbitron's that it had shown to Arbitron in 1994. The device is the size of a handheld beeper. It is worn by respondents and is able to detect, decode, and store signals encoded in television and radio sound transmissions. A recharging base unit collects daily data and feeds them to a central computer. Audio encoding is located at each participating radio and television station. In 1998 Arbitron moved its Portable People Meter system out of the lab and into testing in Manchester, England. By 2003, the People Meter system was being test-marketed in Philadelphia. Arbitron had negotiated an agreement with Nielsen Media Research that gave Nielsen the option to join Arbitron in future deployment of the PPM system in the United States.