• by July 22, 2004

DESCENDANT NOT DECEASED, BUT GREATFULLY, NOT DEAD - As it turns out, the "dead man" Fox TV stations president Tom Herwitz said represented the viewing of African Americans in Nielsen's people meter sample in Los Angeles, wasn't a man after all. And according to Nielsen, he or she may not have been dead. But it all depends on how you look at that particular sample household, Nielsen spokesman Gary Holmes told the Riff following the Fox exec's testimony before Congress last week.

"I'm sure that Mr. Herwitz didn't intentionally mean to mislead anyone, but sometimes these things are confusing," said Holmes, who called to clarify the allegation that Nielsen uses dead people in its samples.

"First of all, it's not a dead guy; it's a dead woman," he continued. "And the allegation that we were recording information from a dead person isn't exactly right. In fact, what had happened was that there was a mother and a daughter living in a house and the mother died and the daughter continued to live there. There was a little confusion when we did the audit as to whether [the daughter] was still living there, and she was."

While we understood some of the issues Nielsen has been having, relative to classifying the race of its sample households given the complexity of multicultural America, we don't really understand how there could be much interpretation about the mortality of Nielsen households. As it turns out, there is.

The big issue, said Holmes, was how Nielsen classified the household. "The [MRC] audit report said we should have classified it as an 'unoccupied' house or a 'dormant' house."

YOU CAN CAST YOUR OWN VOTE, FRANKLY, WE'RE UNDECIDED -- Let's see if we've got this straight. Sixty percent of Americans live in areas where neither party has aired any political ads, according to a University of Wisconsin Advertising Project Analysis of Nielsen Monitor-Plus data (Riff July 21). So how is it that 70 percent of respondents to a recent Initiative Media study recall seeing a political ad on TV? We don't know. What we do know, is that the clearest evidence that the political advertising season is in full swing is the fact that nary a day goes by that some esteemed research organization isn't releasing some sort of study about the political ad strategies of the presidential campaigns.

The latest in the litany, Initiative's so-called AdV.O.T.E. (Advertising Views of the Electorate), is a joint effort with CNN Marketing Research. But, the results seem to be fairly objective. Among other things the findings show that so-called "decided voters" are equally likely to be present during CNN's and rival Fox News Channel's coverage. Both cable news networks account for 19 percent of that voter base, whereas the major broadcast networks account for smaller shares: ABC = 10 percent; NBC = 14 percent; CBS = 8 percent.