In all my years in radio I always tried to play fair, to not subborn the ratings system with any of the tacky and somewhat illegal tactics used by other stations. And there were a lot of them, developed and implemented by station managers and consultants. There were a lot of ways that you could manipulate the diary entries to your advantage, if you could get to the people who had the listening diaries. Back then, Arbitron was still developing their own data collection and presentation methods.
Eventually Arbitron (formerly the American Research Bureau) developed rules and regs that they implemented, along with penalties for stations that violated them. The penalties included "stickering", an emblem attached to the rating book, that indicated that the station so "stickered" had involved itself in "ratings distortion practices" and even extended to "delisting", an extreme form of punishment that either removed the station's ratings entirely or moved them "below the line", to the very bottom of rated stations.
The foremost of these rules was that no radio station could ever discuss on the air anything at all about ratings. The stations could not even say the word ratings. They could not describe rating diaries nor could they offer assistance in filling them out, either over the air or in person. These rules, and others, remain in place today.
But, one morning in the 90's, on the Frank O. Pinion show on WKKK WKKX, while I was the show's co-host and the station's PD, FOP, who had been growing increasingly unsatisfied with published ratings, decided to grow his own.
He pulled out the White Pages, drew circles around random names, and insisted that we call them and ask them if they listened or even knew his name.
I did it, knowing instinctively that it was the wrong thing to do. We wound up with a 70% share of the market in what he called the Piniontron Ratings, pretty impressive.
Of course, Ray Massey, PD at WIL, our competition, was recording all of it and sent it along to Arbitron. The phone calls from Arbitron began that afternoon. I danced the best that I could, and damn, I did a fine job, but it was no use. Back then, there was always a mediator assigned to format/market size stations; ours was Dick Williams, who was also the GM at our primary competition, WIL. I called him and he just laughed.
I had no defensible position.
Bottom line was that KIX104 got stickered in the next Book, because Arbitron insisted that the station had engaged in some sort of rating distortion.
We got nailed, and rightfully so.
I call shenanigans on the guys who are violating Arbitron's rules today.
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