TV's ratings white-out

In the past nine days, Toyota has spent almost £2 million advertising its relaunched Corolla people-carrier on television. Yet even the biggest spending advertiser of the moment has no idea how many viewers have seen its ads, who they are or where they live. Meanwhile, over at Channel 4, they are still waiting to find out whether the £10 million invested in Shackleton - its most expensive drama yet - made it a ratings cracker or a turkey.

Toyota and Channel 4, in common with everyone else in the £6 billion-a-year television industry, are currently "flying blind" - making programming and advertising decisions based on no viewer data whatsoever, after a new audience measurement system launched last week with a major glitch. The lack of information is seriously troubling an industry addicted to the instant feedback of "overnights" - data on the size and composition of the previous night's TV audiences.

"They are important because they act as a trading currency for advertising sales and they allow advertisers and programmers to tweak campaigns and scheduling quickly," says Stephen Farquhar, account director at Toyota's media-buying company, Zenith. "We are on air with our biggest campaign in years and we can't get the instant results we need. It's a huge issue for us."

Evening Standard had hoped to explain the causes of the glitch, but the Broadcasters' Audience Research Board (Barb), which compiles the figures, is bafflingly reluctant to provide any unequivocal information. This secretive company, jointly owned by the broadcasters and the advertising industry, has been giving its own reasons to concerned ad agencies in private briefings: it has variously been blaming foot-and-mouth, flooding and transport problems for delaying the new system. This week, Barb's chief executive, Caroline McDevitt, was repeatedly too busy "in meetings" to proffer any explanation. What is clear, however, is that the new system is reporting overall viewing levels five per cent lower than the previous system.

The implications are serious for the commercial broadcasters, in what is already shaping up to be another bad year. "We will be adjusting what we are prepared to pay accordingly," says one major advertiser ominously. This in turn has prompted rumours that the figures are being kept back at the insistence of one TV company which has suffered a disproportionately large fall in viewers under the new system.

Sue Read, marketing and research director for Granada and a director of Barb, dismisses the rumours. "There is no hidden agenda," she says. "We are simply making sure the system functions perfectly. The old system was devised when there were just a few analogue channels. Now there are 210 channels on six platforms. It is a very complex research operation to get right."

Barb collates data gathered through a set-top box linked to the television set and video recorder in the homes of a carefully selected sample of the population. The boxes record what is being watched every 60 seconds: family members and guests are supposed to clock in and out using a handset (so-called "peo-ple meters") each time they enter and leave the room. Households are paid a few pounds a week to cooperate, with enticements such as shopping tokens and prize draws.

Barb assumes that the sample reflects the behaviour of the general population to calculate how many people were watching any channel at any moment. It also breaks down the audience's demographic and geographic characteristics.

AS well as introducing new set-top boxes, Barb has recruited a new panel for the first time in 30 year, now enlarged from 4,000 homes to 5,100. It claims the new sample is more representative. By any standards it has been a huge undertaking. Barb commissioned more than 80,000 face-to-face interviews to recruit the new panel, and devoted 3,000 engineer-hours to installing the new boxes.

The new system, reported to have cost £12 million, should be more accurate than any in use in the world. Yet critics claim that it remains an extravagant way of measuring who is in the room while a programme is on. "Its limitation is that it is unable to say whether they are watching or not. So headline figures of, say, '20 million watching EastEnders' are probably exaggerations," says Dominic Stead, deputy managing director of media-buying company MPG.

For some TV executives, the ratings' very ubiquity skews broadcasters' priorities. As David Liddiment, head of programmes at ITV, told the Edinburgh television festival last autumn: "We are losing sight of the innate value of programmes . . . Numbers now seem to be the only universal measure for excellence." At the moment, they do not even have that.