E. Q. & What to Do

Last week Dr. George Gallup's Audience Research, Inc. (which has been studying the popular appeal of movies for about nine years) served notice that Mr. Hooper would have to move over in the radio field. Hereafter, sponsors will be supplementing their shoptalk about Hooperatings with a stunning new trade term that Dr. Gallup calls E.Q. (Enthusiasm Quotient).

The Gallup methods are as highfalutin as the language. A radio star's E.Q. is figured by equating the percentage of people who confess to having heard him (Gallup calls it "public familiarity") against the response he gets ("audience enthusiasm"). Unlike Hooper, who uses the telephone, Gallup will rely on house-to-house canvassing. He will make a distinction between programs that depend on a personality and straight musical or dramatic shows. Further, he will make tests to help sponsors find out what type of show will best suit the "personality" of the product (e.g., a children's program would normally be considered a bad medium for advertising cigarets).

For "pre-testing," Audience Research will use the Hopkins Televote Machine, a Rube Goldbergian contrivance originally designed to chart audience reaction to movies (TIME, July 22, 1946). By turning a rheostat, hand-picked audiences indicate their degree of amusement from "very dull" to "like very much." Promising movies have a high "Want-to-See." Radio shows will get a "Want-to-Hear" rating.

By carefully tabulating and "analyzing" Want-to-Hear, Gallup hopes to bring about a small revolution in radio ratings. Says he: "Both Hooper and Nielsen ratings are useful, but neither goes far enough. This new research is designed not only to tell the advertiser what his program is doing. We are moving into the whole area of what to do about it."

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