Drowing in Data

The biggest adjustment to Local People Meters for me has been the absolute mass of information that is thrown at my head on a daily basis. I'm beginning to learn that too much information can be just as problematic as too little information. With so much data laying in front of you, it is extremely difficult to put your hands on that tiny bit of information that will make a difference in helping your station's news, marketing and sales advance their work.

Most TV research directors are used to delving deeply into four ratings books a year, analyzing and cutting the data in as many possible slices as possible. But with ratings every month, every week, every day, there are simply not enough hours in the day to go into that granular level for every piece of data that comes my way.

My market has been LPM for nearly eight months now. The first few months of LPM were all about understanding the differences in methodology and ratings. The next few months were spent delving into the accuracy of the meter sample, the A/P meters themselves and potential crediting errors. These last few months (and moving forward) are all about establishing regular reports that will pull out the most relevant information to the forefront. I wish I could have done this going in, but its a process that requires the input of news, marketing and sales. What do these people NEED in order to do their job, and what kind of report can I create to communicate the corresponding research for that need.

Time is always an issue. A typical book analysis in the past quarterly sweeps cycle for me would entitle about two weeks preparing for sweeps, four weeks in sweeps, and four-five weeks of post sweeps analysis. This schedule is NOT possible for one person to do on a monthly basis.

Thus, the best RDs in an LPM world adapt and learn to create tools to do the work for them. One RD called them "Excel Widgets". I am a big fan of Excel Widgets, and since I am a self professed lazy Research Director, the more I can make my tools do for me, the less I have to do on a daily basis.

One example of a tool I created was a Meter Sample Monitor. I wrote the excel grid so that I can download the Excel versions of the meter sample characteristics on a weekly schedule, drop the excel file into my Meter Sample Monitoring excel file, and voila! Excel does the calculations for me, tracks the weekly progress of the sample and even highlights in red and orange the areas where the meter is slipping too far off the universe estimates. The whole process takes 30 seconds.