It’s Wonderful, It’s Disgusting, It’s the Sweeps

Now that the December doldrums and January reruns are officially over, something bizarre, wonderful and disgusting is about to happen to television.

It’s Sweeps time again, vidkids, and here’s a preview of what enticing stuff TV has in store for couch potatoes during the next four weeks, when the viewership of every TV station in the country is measured to determine what its advertising rates in the coming months will be:

In a flurry of special segments, newscasters at KABC-TV Channel 7, KNBC-TV Channel 4 and KCBS-TV Channel 2 will scrutinize kids who call obscene 976 numbers, a day in the life of “Saturday Night Live” ’s church lady Dana Carvey, super babies, the perils of date rape and the identities of Southern California’s 10 most wanted criminals.

Natalie (Mindy Cohn) will lose her virginity to Snake the Truck Driver on NBC’s “Facts of Life,” David and Maddie will be reunited on “Moonlighting” and Donna Mills will get married on “Knots Landing.”

A trio of best-sellers--”Elvis and Me,” “Windmills of the Gods” and “Noble House”--will come to the tube in the form of expensive, occasionally titillating and incessantly promoted miniseries.

Prime-time entertainment specials will generally shunt aside topical issues in favor of escapism. Audiences will get to see a kidnapped Carol Burnett fall for her captors, Telly Savalas resurrecting the “Dirty Dozen” for another World War II mission and Dick Clark and Ed McMahon serving up another helping of their “Super Bloopers and New Practical Jokes.” For the nostalgia crowd, Dobie (Duane Hickman) Gillis, Perry (Raymond Burr) Mason and the Smothers Bros. will return to the small screen.

KTLA Channel 5 will pony up a bevy of “world TV premiere” movies, including “2010” and “Mask.” Rivals KTTV Channel 11 and KCOP Channel 13 will host their own weekly film festivals with themes of violence and revenge that they will promote in radio, print and TV ad campaigns.

ABC Sports will overdose on the Winter Olympics, cashing in on its $309-million investment in the video rights to the Calgary Games. And though the KABC-TV Eyewitness News team is sure to find even more to report about the Olympics, viewers can count on Southern California’s premiere Sweeps station to come up with non-Olympics Sweeps offerings. Some fans may tune in just to see if Channel 7 can top “Sex Addiction,” a five-part series by Dr. William Rader that ran during the last Sweeps period in November:

“ ‘Why can’t I stop?’ ” asked the voice-over announcer in the radio promotion back then. “Sex addicts. They live a life that some would envy. But making love is making their lives miserable.”

Four times each year--February, May, July and November--every television market in America is surveyed by the two major ratings services, Nielsen Media Research and Arbitron Rating Service. These are the “Sweeps”--a term that no one at Nielsen or Arbitron seems be able to trace to its origins. Arbitron conducted the very first Sweeps in November, 1959, and Nielsen began its Sweeps in 1964.

Arbitron’s Nan Myers said the term probably referred to the sweeping action of a broom in the beginning, with programs and promotion efforts “swept” into the ratings periods to deliver the most impact for a station. Others theorize that “Sweeps” is short for sweepstakes: a winner-take-all lottery.

One point where there is no argument: The February, May and November Sweeps are times when every station in the land tries mightily to get more viewers than the competition (during July, the summer rerun season, lower viewership makes it uneconomical to try so hard to boost ratings).

For most stations, Sweeps periods are the only times of the year that their audience levels are measured. That’s why competition steps up noticeably, even extending to the networks. The Sweeps don’t directly impact ABC, CBS and NBC because they get national ratings every day. Still, they schedule highly touted movies, miniseries and special episodes of sitcoms and dramatic series to help their affiliates get the edge in local ratings.

Along with the major networks, the 15 largest media markets, including No. 2 Los Angeles, are rated every day of the year by Nielsen and Arbitron. Several thousand homes across the country have meters attached to television sets and those meters record when a set is on and the channel to which it is tuned.

Until last September, however, these meter readings did not reveal who was watching. A new system--the People Meter--promises to change all of that. The new method can record whether Mom, Dad, Bobby, Susie or the family dog is actually watching. However, some broadcasters dispute the People Meter’s accuracy, and the only universally accepted method in the broadcast industry for pinpointing a program’s audience is still the Sweeps diary.

During Sweeps, Nielsen and Arbitron mail diaries to homes selected at random across the nation and ask everyone in the household to record what they watch on TV. The diary information reveals which programs appeal to children, teens, adults and senior citizens. To advertising agencies that buy commercial time, this information is invaluable in targeting the best programs on which to market their products.

Sweeps ratings are based on information gleaned from more than 100,000 diaries that are mailed out four times a year to randomly selected households in the 212 television markets.

“We start out with a computer that generates 7-digit randomly selected numbers so we get both listed and unlisted phones,” said Kathryn Creech, vice-president for communications of Nielsen Media Research. “We make about 400,000 calls and about half of them agree to take our diary, and only about 100,000 actually send them back.”

Everyone involved in Sweeps--from advertisers to statisticians to broadcasters themselves--admits that it is an imperfect system. “People will write in their diaries that they’re watching the news or PBS or a ‘National Geographic’ special instead of a ‘Love Boat’ rerun,” said Pierre (Pete) R. Megroz, Arbitron Rating Service’s vice president for TV sales and marketing.

But the experts also admit that it is not a system that will be scrapped anytime soon.

“Diaries are the most cost-effective way to measure every market,” said Arbitron’s Myers. “It’s inexpensive, and small-market stations are not going to want to pay more money for a better system. I don’t think Sweeps are going to be phased out of existence in our lifetime.”

“I think so much of the Sweeps stuff is so awful,” said KCBS veteran news commentator Bill Stout. “It’s not just downright offensive. It’s really disgusting stuff. I don’t know how you get around that: the promotions and marketing-hype element is there in mass merchandising, and TV is mass merchandising.”

Some broadcasters, particularly broadcast journalists, cringe at Sweeps time.

“I’m not proud of it,” said one Los Angeles correspondent. “If we did real news instead of scare stories on how you can get AIDS from a doorknob, it might be different. But when you do it just to get ratings, it’s deplorable.”

Not everyone finds the Sweeps so distasteful. Acknowledged masters of the game such as KABC-TV General Manager John Severino in Los Angeles and WABC-TV General Manager Bill Applegate in New York thrive on the competition. Under their tutelage, their news divisions have come up with such classic Sweeps series as “Confessions of a Porno Star” (KABC) and “Highway Horror” (WABC).

The secrecy of Sweeps programming remains deadly serious. Veterans such as NBC network producer Jack Chestnut even use the term “industrial espionage” in describing the kind of poker playing that goes on at Sweeps time.

“Sweeps don’t affect the network news operations--at least, not in the same way as they do local news, with their reports on leather bikinis and Vanna White’s lingerie,” said Chestnut. “We are in a very, very tight ratings battle (at “NBC Nightly News”) with CBS and ABC, but believe me: We don’t start out the news day by trying to out-sleaze the competition.”

In big media markets such as New York (No. 1) and Los Angeles (No. 2), however, local news operations are constantly trying to outguess each other.

In the first week of Sweeps last May, KNBC’s Steve Gendel aired a series on AIDS at 4 p.m. that was undercut by a similar series on KABC that aired at 6 p.m. Gendel maintained that the KABC series, which was a rebroadcast of a Dr. Art Ulene series that aired months before, was aired deliberately to undermine his own reports.

The same week, KNBC reporter Colleen Williams did “A Day in the Life” series with local celebrities, including morning deejay Rick Dees. A day before the Dees segment aired on KNBC, KABC did its own Dees profile at the top of its 11 p.m. newscast.

At KABC and KCBS, Sweeps programming also spills over into the local magazine shows “Eye on L.A.” and “Two on the Town,” where cleavage, bathing suits and faraway fantasy travelogues prevail in the crucial ratings periods. “Eye on L.A.” Sweeps subjects in the past have included the world’s best nude beaches, Hawaiian swimsuit models photographed in 3-D, a stripper’s convention and host Chuck Henry in search of the headhunters of Borneo.

(The ad for the Borneo edition of “Eye on L.A.” pictured a cannibal holding Henry’s head. “In deepest jungles, a tribe awaits,” read the announcer. “You and Chuck are invited for dinner.”)

“The competition is most intense in Los Angeles and New York,” Chestnut said. “In New York, (WNBC anchor) Chuck Scarborough did a Sweeps series on ‘Is God dead and, if not, does He care?’ WNBC also sent (anchor) Pat Harper out on the streets of Manhattan as a bag lady for a weeklong series. Somebody felt sorry for her and gave her $15, and they played that up on the 5 o’clock news.”

Harper earns $350,000 a year anchoring the news for WNBC.

Former WNBC news director Jerry Nachman, who was responsible for both series, said the bag lady series was Harper’s idea, but claimed the Scarborough series as his own.

“The interesting thing about that was we really tried to approach a serious, philosophical question,” Nachman recalled. “We talked to clerics, scholars . . . and you know what happened? Scarborough was up against a Sweeps series on salmonella and chickens on WCBS and we got creamed in the ratings!”

Nachman decries the Sweeps system that turns local TV newsrooms into station-promotion tools four times a year, but sees no alternative until the ratings system changes.

“The New York Herald Tribune, the New York Journal American, Washington Star, Chicago Daily News . . . all great newspapers. I don’t think anybody would debate that. But they’re all gone now because they did a poor job of marketing, packaging and selling themselves

“It is my opinion that the best news operation married to a flabby, flaccid advertising operation will always lose to a flaccid news operation married to a great advertising and promotion operation. I don’t defend that. I just say that it is true.”

But the Sweeps battle is not just fought among local news staffs. The major networks become more competitive at Sweeps time too.

“There’s a competitiveness and a certain amount of counter-programming that goes on,” said Nielsen’s Creech. “Its like the way you dress your kid up for school on the day they have pictures taken. Then the next day, he goes back to dressing normal.”

Many consider the nadir of Sweeps counter-programming to be the pre-videocassette recorders Sweeps seasons of the late 1970s. Perhaps the darkest day of all was Feb. 11, 1979, when prime-time America had to choose between “Gone With the Wind” (CBS), the first network telecast of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (NBC) and a new TV movie, “Elvis” (ABC).

Even now, with more than half of the nation’s 88.6 million TV households equipped with VCRs, only one network offering can be taped at a time. That means even the VCR-family will have to choose among ABC’s coverage of the Closing Ceremonies at the Winter Olympics, the opening installment of CBS’ four-hour “Bluegrass” movie with Cheryl Ladd and another new “Perry Mason” mystery movie on NBC on Feb. 28.

In the eye of the hurricane are the ratings services, trying to remain neutral. Nielsen even publishes a pamphlet for its clients, pleading that the company is the umpire in the Sweeps game and is often unjustly vilified.

“Have you ever seen an umpire whose decision pleased everyone?” the pamphlet reads. “Our corporate heart instinctively goes out to the ‘ump’--because in the television field, we are his counterpart.”

But at times, both ratings services are drawn into the fray.

Last spring, for example, Nielsen went to court to defend its right to drop eight days of ratings in the May Sweeps survey after KABC-TV broadcast a series on Nielsen ratings. Nielsen’s lawyers argued successfully that KABC broadcast the series deliberately to lure members of Nielsen’s metered households to watch KABC that week and artificially boost the station’s ratings.

“It’s too bad it got blown out of proportion that way,” said KABC anchor Paul Moyer, who reported the Nielsen series. “It’s a damned interesting story. The ratings hit us right where we live and people don’t understand where they come from.”

Though Nielsen dropped its ratings for the eight days of the KABC series in May, Arbitron did not. In its ratings survey “book,” however, Arbitron did print a disclaimer advising its clients that KABC’s series might have biased the ratings.

While critics maintain that the KABC incident was one of the most blatant efforts to skewer ratings, it isn’t the only one.

“(KNBC news director) Tom Capra used to tell me, tongue-in-cheek, that the ultimate 100-share TV show would be a series on how the Nielsen boxes might cause cancer,” said Nachman, a former NBC vice president for the network’s five owned-and-operated stations before he became WNBC news director and, later, manager of a Washington, D.C., station. “I mean, you’ve got a meter on your set and you’re not going to tune in to see if you’ll get cancer?”

Broadcasters such as Nachman freely admit that the history of Sweeps programming is rife with attempts to skirt a 23-year-old Federal Trade Commission warning against the manipulation, or “hypoing,” of ratings.

The FTC issued its “Guidelines Regarding Deceptive Claims of Broadcast Audience Coverage” on July 8, 1965, following Congressional hearings on the problem of ratings manipulation. The guidelines call for the ban of “activities calculated to distort or to inflate” ratings, such as “a special contest, or otherwise varying . . . usual programming, or instituting unusual advertising or other promotion efforts, designed to increase audiences only during the survey period.”

Those guidelines remain unaltered today, according to FTC spokeswoman Lynn Colbert, but they carry no penalties and have never been enforced. That is because the broadcast industry--including the networks, ratings services and the advertising agencies that use the ratings to determine ad rates--agreed to police itself through the formation of a Broadcast Ratings Council.

“We’re talking about the ethical behavior of stations, and I don’t know how you can legislate ethical behavior,” said Mel Goldberg, executive director of the council, which changed its name 10 years ago to the Electronic Media Ratings Council. “We’re a voluntary organization and, even though we’ve had Justice Department approval to do this for 25 years, we don’t have the authority to make anyone stop (distorting ratings).”

What the council can do, Goldberg said, is publicly chastise broadcasters or ratings services that attempt to sidestep the FTC guidelines. The council audits both Nielsen and Arbitron annually to make certain their survey methods are accurate.

Most stations engage in “hype” during Sweeps periods, Goldberg said, and normally it doesn’t bother the ratings council. He even suggested that because most stations do it, they cancel each other’s hype out.

But hype that is specifically designed to distort ratings should be forbidden, he said. His organization defines ratings-distortion activities during Sweeps as:

Special audience surveys that stations conduct during Sweeps periods asking viewers to watch a particular program. For example, KARE-TV, a Minneapolis station, blanketed its market area with questionnaires last May asking people to watch “as often as possible for the next seven days.” The station’s Sweeps ratings showed an 8% jump and prompted a formal protest from rival WCCO-TV, the leading station in the market.

Contests with prizes that are worth far more than prizes awarded in non-Sweeps contests. A Milwaukee station held such a contest in 1986 that offered $1.6 million in prizes to viewers during Sweeps.

Special features “which emphasize the ratings panels, past or present, which might attract current panel members who would have a unique interest in such features.” The KABC Nielsen series is a prime example.

The manipulations may seem small to many viewers, but the stakes are higher than most realize. Though new and sophisticated methods are now being developed to replace Sweeps, national and local spot advertising rates are still set during the 16 weeks each year that Nielsen and Arbitron survey all 212 television markets in the country.

What is at stake for the stations and networks is how more than $20 billion a year in advertising will be split among them.

“Sweeps will become less and less focused and important in the next few years,” said Adweek reporter Larry Collins, who covers the TV ratings and their relation to Madison Avenue for the trade magazine.

The dramatic changes in programming that occur during Sweeps are the result of a 30-year-old tradition in television--a tradition that technology is slowly destroying. Both Nielsen’s Creech and Arbitron’s Megroz predict that Sweeps programming will subside as their companies persuade the networks, their affiliates, cable companies and pay-TV operations such as HBO to catch up with the computer technology now available to measure their audiences accurately.

“Sweeps programming is the result of inertia,” Megroz said. “Logically, counter-programming, stunting and hypoing will disappear when Sweeps are replaced by People Meters. Why save your blockbusters for the Sweeps if you don’t need to?”

Nielsen’s People Meter and Arbitron’s ScanAmerica can measure national and local television audiences 24 hours a day all year long. Instead of simply measuring whether a TV set is turned on, as the old Nielsen Audimeter or “black box” once did, the new People Meter requires each family member to log on by pushing a pre-programmed button before settling down to watch. The People Meter can then record not only what show is being watched, but also who in the family is watching it, thus providing an instant demographic breakdown on a program’s audience. And, in the future, audience measuring devices will become even more sophisticated.

“There are infrared sensors that can tell who each family member is by the heat their hands throw off, and there is also a scanner system that can tell who each member of the family is by the angle of their height when they walk into the room,” Creech said.

But though People Meter data will be delivered faster and more accurately some day, the technology is still experimental and expensive in comparison to Sweeps diaries.

“The trend is to use technology to accurately reflect viewing habits,” she said. “But until then, it will continue to be Sweeps diaries. The Sweeps will be with us for a while.”