ABC’s Quest to Count the Uncounted

In saloons, hotel rooms, second homes and college campuses, there is an uncounted army of network viewers whose numbers range between 4 million and 10 million, a senior ABC executive estimated Tuesday. And they should be included in national audience estimates, added Richard Montesano, ABC vice president for market research.

It could happen “within two to three years,” he said at a news conference where ABC showed results of studies it and other companies have made on “out-of-home” network viewers not tallied by the A.C. Nielsen Co.

Among other things, one national ABC survey of 418 bars or restaurants with bars on Oct. 24 showed that 2.8 million more viewers in such watering holes saw a “Monday Night Football” telecast of a San Francisco-Chicago game than were tallied in national Nielsens.

The ratings company has about 5,000 viewer-activated “people meters” in homes around the country. However, it doesn’t include in its viewer count those in bars, hotel rooms, second homes and college campuses.

Cable TV, videotape players and independent TV stations now are contributing to the decline of network audience shares, which eight years ago peaked at 90% and are expected to be in the mid-60% range in the next decade.

As Alan Wurtzel, ABC senior research vice president, put it in a statement Tuesday, new technologies and changing life styles mean that “we in the television industry can no longer ignore the considerable uncounted audiences at out-of-home locations.”

Findings from a variety of ABC viewer studies, some made as far back as 1980, asserted that:

--There was a college campus audience in 1987 that, had it been added to the ratings for NBC’s “Late Night With David Letterman,” would have increased viewers age 18 to 24 by 33%.

--Uncounted out-of-home viewing of regularly scheduled sports events on the three major networks in 1987 amounted to a 6.3% larger audience than was recorded. An additional 1.4% would have been added to the ratings for the Big Three’s prime-time entertainment shows by counting out-of-home viewers.

--The uncounted hotel audience for early-morning network news programs on Oct. 24-25, 1988, would have boosted the programs’ national audience by 3.5%--or 56,000 viewers--had that audience been included in the national Nielsens.

ABC’s Montesano is chairman of a committee on out-of-home viewing sponsored by an industry group, the Advertising Research Foundation. He said he didn’t know how much more revenue could be yielded for the networks if existence of a substantial uncounted audience could be documented. But “once it is a rating, it will be part of the buying and selling process,” he said.

The goal of all three networks is to get the uncounted counted, he said.

What he hopes to do, he explained in an interview after Tuesday’s presentation, is to get the Nielsen company to find ways to estimate audiences in colleges and second homes, with hotels next.

He conceded that tallying the mostly male viewers who gather in bars to watch major sports events would probably require a different methodology--perhaps diaries that Nielsen later could provide networks and advertising agencies “as a supplemental report to their people-meter report.”

He said that there is a potentially huge audience lurking in so-called sports bars, which have large video screens for sports fans.