Arbitron announced that Médiamétrie, the French provider of TV, radio, Internet and cinema audience measurement, has signed a license agreement that will enable the independent media measurement company to evaluate Arbitron’s Portable People Meter system in Paris.
The two-year agreement will enable Médiamétrie to evaluate the PPM encoding system and the willingness of Parisians to keep the pager-sized PPM device with them as they go about their daily routines. Médiamétrie will also appraise the television ratings from the PPM and compare the ratings to the current audience measurement systems —set-top people meters for TV and day-after telephone recall for radio—used in Paris.
The aptly named Portable People Meter (PPM) is a new technology developed by Arbitron that can measure audiences of cable and satellite television broadcasts as well as broadcasts from terrestrial, satellite and Internet radio stations. PPM is a pager-sized audience measurement device that is carried by consumers. It automatically detects inaudible codes that are embedded in the audio portion of any broadcast programming by specially designed Arbitron encoders. At the end of each day, the survey participants place the Portable People Meters into base stations that recharge the devices and send the collected codes for tabulation. The meters are equipped with a motion sensor that allows the compliance of the PPM survey participants to be monitored every day.
It is currently undergoing a U.S. market trial in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and has been selected as a media measurement tool in a number of countries around the world.
France joins a growing roster of companies in countries around the world that currently use or have agreed to evaluate the Arbitron PPM technology, including BBM Canada, Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS) in Singapore and Belgium, Intomart in the Netherlands, and N.V. Audimetrie in Belgium, IBOPE Media Information in five countries in Latin America and RAJAR, in the United Kingdom.
For more information visit www.arbitron.com.
