Nielsen to Face Second Suit Over LPM

LOS ANGELES Nielsen Media Research by the end of this week will face a second lawsuit attempting to block the rollout of its controversial Local People Meter ratings service in Los Angeles on July 8. But which group will join Spanish-language TV network Univision in taking Nielsen to court is still up in the air.Univision declared its intention to take the LPM controversy into court last week [Adweek Online, June 10]. Today, Alex Nogales, director of the Don't Count Us Out coalition of mainly Hispanic media outlets, said even if the group's executive committee chooses not to sue, the National Hispanic Media Coalition, a separate group in which he serves as president, will. Nogales once again called for Nielsen to "let us see their methodology. You've got to be transparent."Nogales said he is "unconcerned" about the perception that his coalition may look like it is providing a special-interest front to what is in fact a business battle between two corporations, Fox and Nielsen, which is a unit of Adweek Magazines parent VNU. "Fox has its reasons for attacking Nielsen, and we have ours," he said. Nogales said Don't Count Us Out has received no money from Fox.Nogales said that his group is not content to rely on judgments by the Media Research Council or U.S. Rep. Charles Rangel's newly formed committee to study the problem. "I'm not satisfied they are experts in this arena," he said. Nogales called for an independent government audit of Nielsen.The coalition touted the findings of "The Measurement Bias: The Value of a Second Opinion," a study by Ed Rincon of Rincon & Associates. Rincon said Nielsen's samples are subject to problems that have arisen over the years, according to his study of the problem. Among them Rincon mentioned over-sampling of foreign or native born Hispanics; poor cooperation rates; the use of monolingual interviewers; dependence upon a literacy less likely in Hispanic households, retrospective recall, and a fatigue factor in using metering devices; and a lack of information on compliance on whether Hispanics are following instructions. Rincon said Nielsen is guilty of those faulty methodologies "until proven otherwise."Nielsen expressed no confidence in Rincon's research methods or data. To the points Rincon raised, Jack Loftus, senior vice president of communications for the New York-based company, said that Rincon has no idea what Nielsen's sampling method, so his criticism is without basis. Cooperation rates are "always a problem, and that's why we have the highest cooperation rates of any research company that we know of," he said. Nielsen has used only bilingual interviewers and that a Nielsen compliance audit report "is before the Media Research Council as we speak." "The People Meter doesn't rely on retrospective recall," said Loftus. "And we have no evidence to suggest that Hispanics are any less capable of, or diligent about, pushing a button than any other group."

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Nielsen to Face Second Suit Over LPM

Gregory Solman

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Gregory Solman