DavidEduardo,
I like the quote you use in your Radio-Info.com profile..."half of the truth is a whole lie". This new language preference “quota” has really screwed up the general market.
Language preference proportionality is not new. It has been done for over a decade in all the major Hispanic markets except Las Vegas.
All that achieving proportionality on both Spanish dominant and English dominant Hispanics does is insure that the total sample has the right percentage for each; the total Hispanic sample does not change at all.
Both KISF and KWID are up over 20% since the Holiday book and the general market stations are paying the price.
Nobody is "paying the price" since reality is the object. The truth is that Arbitron was including too many English dominant Hispanics in the PPM panel and not enough Spanish dominants. So, once the correct balance was struck, we have a better view of the behaviour of the entire market, including its subsets.
The whole truth is that Arbitron would not have spent the money to implement language preference if they were not boycotted and pressured by Spanish Language companies.
The "pressure" to use language preference as a stratification variable began back in the mid to late 90's and it came from this simple fact: with growing Hispanic populations, it became apparent that Spanish language stations would jump and drop by enormous percentages from book to book... meaning that the sample was always out of whack.
The MRC decided to intervene, and leading Hispanic targeted broadcasters such as Heftel, Tichenor, SBS, Radio Unica, Excel and others started documenting the lack of programming based logic in the immense wobbles.
Arbitron accepted the need to get proportionality on language preference, particularly since English dominants tended to have a higher response and return rate and thus got more than their share of representation. But they could not implement for several years since the old Control Data mainframe software which had been ported to the current platforms had run out of fields to use for new stratification variables and had to be totally rewritten, something that took nearly 3 years to do.
If this new system was so important in order to get an accurate sample, Arbitron would be executing it in every market around the country (not just the markets where the Hispanic population is above 10%).
Arbitron buys the data from Nielsen. Nielsen only does language enumeration in the markets we know about... they just started doing Las Vegas last year. Enumeration is very costly and is not available from any other source. So many markets don't have it because the data does not exist.
And you don’t think Spanish Language companies have any influence over the MRC???
Broadcasters and advertisers alike have the ability to make their views known to the MRC. But the MRC, which was created in part to allow advertisers to know that ratings are done properly and in part to keep the Federal Government out of the ratings business, is very impartial and motivated only by good methodology well implemented.
