“The View From the Phlipside” is a media commentary program airing on WRFA-LP, Jamestown NY. It can be heard Monday through Friday around 7:30 AM. The following are scripts which may not exactly match the aired version of the program. Mostly because the host may suddenly choose to add or subtract words at a moment’s notice. WRFA-LP is not responsible for any such silliness or the opinions expressed. You can listen to a live stream of WRFA or find a podcast of this program at wrfalp.com. Copyright 2013-18 by Jay Phillippi. All Rights Reserved. You like what you see and hear? Drop me a line and we can talk.
Programs from week of February 5, 2018
This Week’s Podcast
My name is Jay Phillippi and I’ve spent my life in and around the media. TV, radio, the movies and more. I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion. Call this the View from the Phlipside.
The Ratings Don’t Care
Over the last couple weeks, I’ve been hearing a lot of people saying much the same thing. And it’s simply wrong. So I thought I’d take a minute or two to lay out the particulars of the subject.
It inevitably begins with something on television that people don’t like. They don’t like the politics in football, or they don’t like the State of the Union address. The event under discussion is irrelevant to our discussion today. The statement I’m concerned about is when people talk about lowering the television ratings by not watching.
So here comes the bad news. Unless you are a very special person, nothing you do will have any effect on the ratings of a television show or event. None. Let me repeat that for the folks in back. Unless you are in a very elite minority, watching or not watching a television program will absolutely no effect on its ratings. At all.
I’ll let that sink in for a second.
I know that conventional wisdom says otherwise, but it’s wrong. And here’s why. Television ratings are expressed in a variety of ways. The most common is a simple number. The show scored a 3.4 rating as an example. So what does that number mean? Each rating point equals one percent of the total number of households in the U.S. with televisions. For the 2016-17 program year, the folks at Nielsen estimated that there were 118.4 million such households. So our example rating would mean just over four million homes were watching. Easy right?
Except that the ratings folks aren’t actually paying attention to all 118.4 million homes. At Nielsen, they are actually watching just five thousand homes and basing all the ratings on those numbers. Because televisions are passive receivers, generally speaking, there’s no way to track watching patterns.
So it comes down to this, are you a Nielsen family? No? Then you aren’t being counted. Viewing online is a different beast with different rules. With viewing habits changing rapidly, finding a reliable way of tracking all viewing is the biggest challenge of the moment for the media companies, the ratings companies, and the advertisers who rely on the ratings for their purchases. While the process is better than it was, it is still in the growing phase.
Ratings companies like Nielsen can explain that their five thousand households are carefully chosen to represent the larger audience. It’s a standard statistical process.
In the end, it all comes down to this. Watch or don’t watch. That’s entirely up to you. But it’s not likely that you’ll have any effect on that rating, no matter what you do.
Fake Followers
While it may seem that social media has been around forever, it’s good to remember that this is all still pretty new. Twitter is only about 12 years old, Facebook is fourteen. If you want to really reach back (and stretch our current concept of social media a bit), then AOL Messenger debuted in 1997, and Bulletin Board Systems go back as far as 1980. But social media as we know it today, as a central driving force in communication and information sharing is only about a decade old. Because it has been such a disruptive force in the media, many of the old rules simply don’t apply. That makes for a bit of a free for all until some new shared values jell.
Which makes issues like the one exposed last week in an article by the New York Times essentially inevitable.
The standard of success on social media is simple – how many followers do you have? Advertisers will judge the value of sponsoring your feed by that number. If that number is high enough you are classified as an “influencer”, and companies will pay you to be a spokesperson for their product or service.
What a team of reporters working with the Times discovered is that a lot of that “influence” is an illusion. Turns out there is a whole black market out there where you can “buy” followers. Except that like the influence you will supposedly have, these are illusions as well. Through the use of bots and stolen identities, you can purchase a whole lot of fake followers. The names of folks who have made those purchases listed in the article range from fashion designer and model Kathy Ireland to journalists. The problem is that the problem is so new that few if any companies have policies concerning the practice. So while embarrassing, there isn’t a lot that can be done to the folks making the purchases.
That doesn’t mean this isn’t a problem. While no measurement will be perfect, we need to be able to trust the numbers. In an environment where the numbers are often more important than the content, it becomes ever more important. When you add in the declining trust in the media that is already underway, anything that further erodes the audiences belief in the honesty of the faces of the media has the potential for disaster.
Modern media is changing so quickly that it will be impossible to get ahead of the curve anytime soon. But with each new avenue, the institutions of the media need to be actively working to maintain the highest levels of transparency and credibility.
Who Decided?
Long time listeners may have noticed that I did not do my usual round-up of Super Bowl commercials this year. For whatever reason, I just wasn’t all that wired about the game or the commercials this time around. On Super Bowl Sunday I just wandered in and out during the game. As it turned out, the game was great. None of the commercials I saw made the cut. There were some good ones, but none of the blow me away category.
There is one spot that is getting a lot of coverage this week. That’s the Dodge Ram/Martin Luther King spot. I only saw it once but it made me uncomfortable right off the bat.
This was an “image” ad. By that I mean, a commercial designed to make us feel good about the product rather than directly trying to sell a product. The other image ad that I saw was also for a car company. Hyundai ran a spot about their support for pediatric cancer research and treatment. The difference between the two comes down to a simple choice, I believe. Hyundai decided to make the spot about helping kids. There were no Hyundai vehicles anywhere in the commercial.
Dodge, drawing on one of Dr. King’s last sermons, was trying to present an image of their support for service. Most of the spot was video of people helping, firemen, rescue teams, whatever. Nice concept. But they decided that they had to have a RAM truck in the spot as well.
At which point the commercial became about selling trucks. And, to borrow a phrase from poet Robert Frost, that has made all the difference.
If the decision had gone the other way, just make it about service, I don’t think you’d see this level of outrage. Some folks would be uncomfortable using the words of an American icon, but I think it would have flown.
Dodge claims that the MLK estate approved the ad. A Spokesperson for the estate dispute that. I have to wonder if the estate saw the final video. Because I’d be surprised if they had been comfortable with the presentation.
Of course, I’m also kind of surprised that Dodge chose that particular sermon to use. Later on in it, Dr. King warns of the danger of advertising, especially advertising that sells cars.
Every aspect of a major campaign like this one is filtered and examined and tested. Yet somehow, people still make dumb decisions. Maybe it’s because I’m a writer and announcer, but my advice to Dodge would have been – It’s not about you, let the words speak for themselves.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2018
Theme music for “The View From the Phlipside” and “TVFTP – Podcast” is “Hustle”
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
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