Audimeter

A 4 in. x 5 1/2 in. box. designed and colored to suit the housewife's fancy, was installed last week inside the radio of an average-income family in Chicago. Installer was A. C. Nielsen Co.,'s Executive Vice-President Hugo L. Rusch, who is out to start a new and much better listener survey service for advertisers. Two hundred similar "Audimeters" will soon be placed in private homes and the Nielsen firm, Chicago marketing research organization, expects by the end of the year to have more than 5,000 spotted in radios throughout the country.

Working like a telautograph, the Audimeter is designed to record with a stylus on moving tape every twist of the radio switch and dials. It registers programs received, whether a program was tuned de liberately or found by dial twisting, whether it was heard through the full period, tuned out at any point, or kept on only after unsuccessful search for something better. Eliminating memory and other human fallibilities from listener-interest testing, Audimeters should tell advertisers just what audience he has and precisely what in his program, if anything, drives an audience away. Independent of telephones, the survey should sample the 13,000,000 radio owners who are without phone service.

Surveys now in use rely almost entirely on telephones, reach only the higher income listeners, cannot provide accurate record of programs tuned and discarded.

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