• by Joe Mandese , June 1, 2007

Lost in Thursday's hoopla surrounding Nielsen's release of controversial commercial minute ratings, the TV researcher also quietly announced a decision that some might find equally controversial: A plan to begin paying Spanish-speaking households hefty sums to get them to cooperate with Nielsen's TV ratings process. While Nielsen typically provides various cash incentives to households and individuals participating in its TV ratings samples, the new Hispanic plan will make it a kind of bilingual Robin Hood, reducing the cash incentives it pays English-speaking Hispanic households, and giving higher cash incentives to those who speak primarily Spanish.

Nielsen executives did not disclose precisely how much money they would be paying these households, but said the plan would be based on the findings of a six-month test in which it doubled the incentives paid to Spanish-speakers and reduced the amount paid to English-speakers by 30%.

Based on the results of that test, conducted in New York and Los Angeles, Nielsen said it would implement the new incentive plan in all of its people meter samples - both nationally and locally - effective July 1.

The goal of the plan is improve the representation of an especially difficult and sometimes elusive component of the TV audience in Nielsen's sample, and Nielsen stated that the "quality initiative" would improve household language representation in its TV ratings samples, "making them more representative of the Hispanic household universe and improving the overall accuracy of the audience estimates."

But the move is not without concerns and potential consequences. Among other things, Nielsen has studied the effects of high cash incentives on the overall behavior of TV households, especially the potential that the incremental source of money might alter lifestyle patterns by enabling some households to purchase entertainment equipment that changes the way they watch television, or by doing things other than watching television - like dining out more frequently.

Nielsen did not disclose any of those findings in Thursday's announcement, but the amount of money Nielsen pays some of its most difficult households has grown to the point that the company has been looking into the potential that it could grow high enough to require Nielsen to report the incentives as a new source of income to the Internal Revenue Service.