PEOPLE METERS: START OF SOMETHING BIG?

Call it “The Invasion of the Button Pushers.” It stars a cast of unknowns in 2,000 homes. It has gotten as much press attention as any of the new season’s TV shows.

It’s the neC. Nielsen Co. people-meter system. Beginning today, it becomes the company’s sole national ratings system, succeeding a diary-meter system axed after a 20-year run.

The people meter--Nielsen calls it a “multipurpose home unit”--is a small box with eight buttons, six for the family and two for visitors. Each viewer punches his or her button when watching and logs off when leaving.

Out with the old diaries and diarists, in with a brand new sample group and their remote recorders.

Wired to the TV set, the new system incorporates Nielsen’s old-style audimeter (as in audience meter) technology that simply records which program is being watched--be the watchers the whole family, Sam the cat or, uh, nobody.

The day’s data is electronically whisked to Nielsen computers in Dunedin, Fla., then dispatched for next-morning inspection by network and advertising officials seeking wisdom on how things went last night.

No one in the industry calls the new system revolutionary. A few say it’s evolutionary. NBC research chief Bill Rubens cheerfully calls it an “aberration,” a system little different from one in which you’d punch a time clock.

“It’s really high tech of the ‘50s,” says Rubens. His network nonetheless was the first to sign up for it. CBS followed suit last Thursday, after grumbling and negotiations to fix what it considered statistical biases.

ABC says it may do without the service this season unless its complaints are resolved. Its executives were scheduled to meet with Nielsen officials here today in a last-ditch effort to settle their differences and get ABC back into the Nielsen-ratings fold.

The new Fox Broadcasting network, which now says it serves 115 stations nationally, has become a customer of the new Nielsen service.

The people-meter system went into full-fledged operation Aug. 31, co-existing with the old system that Nielsen declared finis today.

Granted, with the new TV season officially starting next Monday, television’s new off-camera statistical show, despite all the fuss about it, may well strike viewers as slightly to the left of whoopee.

But networks and advertisers, who’ve watched its test runs, are extremely interested, although there are no predictions that people meters signal the dawn of profound change in TV--except for an expectation that more male viewers will now be found be in front of the tube than in diary days.

Last year, advertisers spent an estimated $9 billion on network TV, $5.1 billion of that in prime time. They understandably like to have an idea of how effective all this largesse is.

They and the networks previously learned how audiences responded to their wares through Nielsen’s two-pronged national sample--the first prong an audimeter, or “passive” meter, attached to TV sets in 1,700 homes.

From that came raw numbers--how many households tuned to network programs. But the figures didn’t say who or how many had watched, nor did they give such demographic data as age, sex and education of viewers.

That came from viewing diaries kept in 2,600 other homes. But that intelligence wasn’t relayed instantly. It took a few weeks to emerge as fodder for network and advertising analysts.

Another problem: In recent years, what some call a complex new video “environment” has developed--cable TV, pay cable, a variety of channels, videotape recorders, remote controls. Diary-keepers have had trouble keeping track.

And, as one analyst puts it, “cooperation rates were going down” among diary-keepers--who, according to many in the industry, tend to be women who tended not to note what the men in their house watch when men were alone.

Enter Nielsen’s new “active” meter system, exit the diaries. And perhaps now comes what could be a new era for the male couch potato, particularly this fall on Sunday afternoons and Monday nights when football is spoken.

“Because women generally filled out the diaries, they probably understated male viewing,” says Steven Sternberg, research chief for the advertising agency of Bozell, Jacobs, Kenyon & Eckhardt.

“Now, with the people meters, men are actually filling in their own viewing at the time they’re watching,” he says. This means more male viewers will be recorded, he adds, and this augers well for sportscasts, particularly ABC’s “NFL Monday Night Football.”

Although the most sought-after audience in terms of spending consists of women from 18-to-49, Sternberg thinks the advent of people meters means the networks are aiming more of their entertainment series at men.

He cites CBS’ new Vietnam series, “Tour of Duty,” and the network’s male-oriented Tuesday-night roster of “Houston Knights,” “Jake and the Fatman” and “The Law and Harry McGraw.”

CBS research chief David Poltrak disagrees. “Tour of Duty,” for example, would have been on the prime-time roster even without the new Nielsen system, he says.

Advertisers nowadays seek a young male audience, and “that’s an area where CBS has been weak traditionally,” he says. “We knew we had to shore up that weakness . . . so our plan was to go after the young male audience and the young audience in general from the start” in the coming season.

There is general agreement, save from NBC’s Rubens, that overall viewing levels under the new system will go down from 2% to 4%--but only, the networks say, because of the new method of head-counting, not because of a smaller audience.

(Nielsen each September increases its estimate of the number of households with TV sets. As of Sept. 1, it said there were 88.6 million such homes in the United States, 1.2 million more than during the 1986-87 season.)

On the advertising agency side, Paul Isacsson, executive vice president of Young & Rubicam, professes not to know why network numbers will be lower under the new system. But he ventures one theory.

It has nothing to do with a change in methodology. “Maybe,” he muses, “people aren’t watching networks as much as their diaries or the audimeter (formerly) indicated.”

One ad agency Nielsen-watcher, Ogilvy & Mather’s Marc Goldstein, says the diaries used in the old days tended to show an older, more rural sample of audience. The new system is a change for the statistically better, he says:

“It’s a little more reflective of what the U. S. population is today . . . a little more urban, a little younger.”

But the networks insist that they have no designs to plan series aimed at this new people-meter crowd.

(One research executive who doesn’t work for a network described ABC Entertainment chief Brandon Stoddard as not keen on those who would wed the Muse to statistics. “He hates research people,” the executive explains. (Stoddard, as usual, was unavailable for comment about either this allegation or the new Nielsen system.)

Warren Littlefield, executive vice president at NBC Entertainment, doesn’t think one can come up with a show deliberately built for the people-meter trade. At least, not yet.

“Six months ago, we were all led to believe that younger urban shows would have a more favorable response in the people meters,” he says. “To date, there is nothing to clearly substantiate that.”

Not only that, he says, “I’m not sure I know how to design things for people meters, because I don’t understand them yet. And I don’t think anybody else does.”

There are those who aren’t so sure.

The prospect is possible, says Bruce Rosenblum, research chief at Lorimar Telepictures, whose 7.5 weekly program hours in network TV this fall will range from ABC’s high-tech “Max Headroom” to CBS’ venerable “Dallas.”

However, he adds, “I just don’t see the networks abandoning their past development procedures just to produce for a new technology.”

They aren’t ignoring people meters, he notes. “I know that in recent conversations with people at the networks they’re concerned about the new technology.

“The question they always have is, ‘How do you think this (show) will perform on people meters?’ But I don’t think they’re going to deviate from putting quality programs on just because of the new technology.”

This is not to say the temptation--to approve or reject a new series or renew or ax an old one because of people-meter returns--won’t be there, warns Ted Harbert, the No. 2 executive at ABC Entertainment.

“I think the networks are going to have to be very, very cautious and responsible that they don’t succumb to the temptation to make too many quick decisions about a show,” he says.

In olden days, when a network waited up to a month for ratings, “it was really dependent on its executives to make a gut call” on the fate of a show or shows, he notes.

Now, he says, with people meters providing overnight audience numbers and demographic data, “it is easy to fall into the trap of letting research or ratings make a decision for you--which I think is a real, real problem.”

Despite this new people-meter method of tallying the national Nielsen vote overnight, diary-keeping is not completely dead. An electronic stake has not yet been driven through its heart.

Diary-keeping will continue on the local level, a spokesman says, during “ratings” sweeps.

Such sweeps, conducted four times a year, are an intensive audience measurement effort, the results of which are used by local stations in setting their own advertising rates. The first one this season starts on Oct. 29.