The Portable People Meter (PPM™) provides new and improved measures of audiences that aren't available from the measurement services currently in use for radio, television and cable. It is designed to meet the challenges of digital broadcasting as well as the convergence of media and the Internet. And it is an answer to the quandaries faced by audience researchers who must persuade an ever more reluctant population to take part in ratings and consumer surveys.
By measuring the individual person and by using audio encoding as a reliable means of station identification, the Portable People Meter can significantly improve the way radio is measured in the United States and offers additional consumer insights for broadcast and cable television.
The PPM delivers year-round, all-day electronic measurement of audience demographics.
Both broadcasters and media research companies around the world are faced
with the expensive and difficult transition to digital broadcasting. At the
same time, the Internet and other interactive media are further complicating
the task of keeping track of who is listening to what over which means of distribution.
The PPM system can track digital as well as analog broadcasts, whether carried over the air, on the Internet or by satellite.
Because an inaudible program code stays embedded in the audio even after a program is recorded on a digital recorder, the Portable People Meter is able to capture and identify station exposure no matter what methods of recording and playback are used.
The Portable People Meter is as close to passive audience measurement as we
can get. Consumers don’t have to write an entry in a paper diary every
time they listen to radio. So long as the meter is worn or carried by the
survey participant, listening is automatically registered, without any conscious
effort.
Because other ratings services have required some sort of active recordkeeping by the survey participant, they have always been troubled by a respondent's bias toward one of the media being measured. With the Portable People Meter, our instructions for the panelists are simple:
Because the Portable People Meter doesn't require any decision making about whether to press a button or to write down an entry or to remember what was heard, all exposures to encoded content are recorded completely and objectively.
The Portable People Meter is the most unobtrusive way of measuring audience demographics ever devised. We've made taking part in the survey as simple and easy as possible to minimize consumer objections to saying "yes" to participating in a PPM panel.The Portable People Meter can provide new and improved measures of audiences that aren't available from the measurement services currently in use for radio, television and cable.
PPM™ is a service mark of Arbitron Inc.