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I find it astonishing that Nielsen Media Research is still using paper diaries -- in the twenty-first century!

In September of 2004, the Wall Street Journal broke a story about a woman down in central Florida who had problems determining who to give credit to on a Nielsen diary. She had a choice between "Sagwa, the Chinese Cat" on PBS and "Dora the Explorer" on Nickelodeon. The Nielsen editor wound up giving the viewer credit to Dora, even though the TV was turned off at the time.

The explanation came from Gary Bentley, Nielsen's manager of data processing: "If we threw out every diary with a little glitch, we could go home early."

The Nielsen and Arbitron systems are just jokes. Rupert Murdoch is going crazy because his ratings are down in New York. The politicians are getting involved, and someday soon we will get truly accurate writings.

There is technology being developed to passively monitor the audio signal you are being exposed to, 24/7. Once that happens, and once we put GPS in this puppy as well as Ad-ID (more on Ad-ID in the next section) then we are going to have a truly accurate measure -- an integrated measure -- of television and radio combined in a sample that is going to be dead on.

But this is not going to come from Nielsen and Arbitron.

They announced their "Project Apollo" new marketing information service, and then gave up because it was going to destroy their present business model. They cannot move away from what they are doing now, which is selling imaginary numbers to people who make decisions based on those numbers.

Soon enough, somebody else will come in with a truly accurate ratings system.

Talk about a nuclear explosion waiting to happen!

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