Barry Kiefl is the president of Canadian Media Research. He will be moderating Does Size Matter: Measuring Your Audience, a panel at Prime Time in Ottawa about how audiences are measured and

why we should care.

FUNDING agencies, parliamentary committees and the CRTC have recently criticized the state of Canadian TV drama and are calling on the industry to develop a strategy to increase audiences. As a result, broadcasters and producers have been paying closer attention to measuring TV audiences.

In its recent request for comments on Canadian drama, the CRTC underlined the harsh reality that currently only about 11% of all drama viewed on English TV is Canadian. No other developed country in the world has such a small audience share for its indigenous drama. Of course, no other country imports virtually all the programming of a neighboring country, and that neighbor happens to be the world’s most prolific producer of TV drama and entertainment.

Starting with Dramatic Choices, the study by Trina McQueen that laid the groundwork for funding strategies and incentives to produce Canadian drama capable of attracting larger audiences, the industry has been grappling for the past year with the issue of how to increase audiences for Canadian drama. The CRTC recently received comments from all the major players and we await the next steps.

Of course, this is not an entirely new issue. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, I had the pleasure of working with Al Johnson, president of the CBC, on a study of audiences for Canadian drama. We learned some 25 years ago that there was a fundamental problem in English TV drama. In 1979/80, less than 5% of drama viewed was Canadian! Unfortunately, because drama was defined somewhat differently in the study, one cannot say that there has been a doubling of Canadian drama viewing. However, there has probably been some improvement.

As Mr. Johnson said in his speech to the Broadcast Executives Society on Feb. 19, 1981: ‘Some people persist in the view that ‘Of course that’s what the Americans do best; we Canadians can’t and shouldn’t try to compete’… Who says that Canadians don’t want and won’t watch Canadian drama on television? Well, I say that’s nonsense. We simply don’t allocate enough of our gross national product to reflecting this remarkable and diverse, this fascinating and funny and frustrating country of ours on television.’

His speech ended with the thought that this country would realize the power and importance of TV and predicted that in the 1980s there would be a sweeping Canadianization of television.

So, how is it that in 25 years we haven’t been able to solve this vexing problem? Are we going about it the right way at this time? Finally, are we measuring the performance of Canadian networks and Canadian drama as they should be measured?

I will leave the former two questions for others to deal with, but how should we measure TV audiences?

It is important to recognize that we probably have in place the finest audience measurement system in the world. We are the only major country with two people-meter systems, the recognized gold standard in TV audience measurement.

Nielsen Media Research has operated its state-of-the-art people-meter system in Canada since 1989, currently with a nationally representative sample of more than 3,500 households. Nielsen has constantly updated its technology and research design and has provided flexible and powerful tools for analysis of the audience data.

BBM, for its part, introduced a new national people-meter system in 2002, also with a large, nationally representative sample. BBM is experimenting with a portable meter system that may be introduced commercially in 2004.

Both companies must adhere to the standards of the Global Guidelines for Television Audience Measurement, which was published in 1999 by the European Broadcasting Union, and which I helped to author on behalf of the Canadian Advertising Research Foundation.

Advertisers are even more interested in TV audience measurement than broadcasters or producers. When asked at a major conference on TV to define a ‘quality’ program, a Canadian advertising executive responded: one with a large female 18 to 49 audience. Advertisers pay roughly $3 billion annually for television commercial time and seek accuracy to the nth degree. It really doesn’t matter to an advertiser whether the program is ER or Degrassi: The Next Generation, but the audience estimates for the program must be correct.

Therefore, I can assure you that the measurement system we have in place is equal to that of any in the world. But are we using the excellent systems we have to their full advantage, and are there are other supplemental techniques that we should be using?

When ratings data is published or talked about in the press, the conventional metric used is the ‘average audience’ or the ‘average minute audience’ (AMA). Traditionally, TV broadcasters have measured the audience performance of a program using the average minute audience statistic. The AMA refers to the number of viewers tuned in to the average minute of a program.

AMA best for advertisers

For example, according to Nielsen, Cold Squad on Saturday evenings last year had an average audience of some 564,000 viewers in its average minute on Saturday night between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. The AMA is the measure advertisers use to buy time and estimate the number of eyeballs likely to see their ad at any given point in a program or series such as Cold Squad. It is a measure that advertisers have required since the beginning of television. But is it the most suitable for measuring the audience for Canadian drama?

Audience ‘reach,’ or the number of different people who watch a specified number of minutes of a program or series, is a totally different statistic for measuring audience performance. Reach can be measured on a per-episode, monthly or seasonal basis. The total season reach is the number of different viewers who have seen at least one episode (30 minutes) in a TV season. This measure is more suitable for evaluating the performance of a TV series from a producer’s or programmer’s perspective.

Again, using Cold Squad as an example, Nielsen shows that the Saturday episodes had a season reach in 2002/03 of some 3.3 million viewers – that is, more than three million Canadians watched at least 30 minutes of Cold Squad. So, reach tells us that the number of Canadians touched by a drama can be substantial – if we could get them to watch more frequently, the AMA and the share would increase.

Not only is the AMA more a tool for advertising purposes, but it also tends to favor programs that draw upon heavy TV viewers. The audience-reach statistic levels the playing field to some extent and permits one to more fully understand the audience impact of Canadian programs. At a minimum, audience reach and average audience should at least be used in tandem.

Audience reach is not the same as just adding up the AMA of different telecasts of a series, which can double count viewers, especially when dealing with multi-day soaps or stripped programs. Aggregating or adding together the AMAs for different airings of a program is a useful statistic and can show that a program has a very large audience. However, it doesn’t change the fact that Canadian drama has a 10% to 11% audience share.

To calculate overall share, the AMAs are converted to hours spent watching all Canadian drama programs, then totaled along with the millions of hours spent watching foreign drama. The hours watching Canadian drama are then divided by the total hours, and in recent years they account for only 10% to 11% of the total hours. Aggregating audiences won’t affect the total audience share analysis of the CRTC or increase the share of Canadian drama.

On another front, Nielsen and BBM have been actively trying to improve their reporting system for Canadian drama, and this will allow for more thorough analysis of the AMA, audience reach and audience share of these shows.

But we should not ignore other measures of performance.

For example, how satisfied are the audiences that watch Canadian programs versus foreign programs? A new survey, the TV Quality Survey, sponsored by VisionTV, is beginning to explore audience awareness and satisfaction with channels and programs and has uncovered valuable findings. Who would have guessed that The National with Peter Mansbridge would be rated almost as highly as C.S.I. and Law & Order in terms of viewer satisfaction? (See table).

Canadian dramas generally don’t score as highly, but the survey also reveals that a substantial proportion of Canadians is willing to pay for better-quality programming. This new quality survey measures viewer awareness of, and satisfaction with, all Canadian networks and TV series and, coupled with the ratings data, is a basic planning tool for broadcasters and producers trying to understand what will attract audiences to Canadian drama.