Viewers fail to tune in for ACP doco Park Street

I was one of those 6,289 and I want my 30 minutes back !

I hope they sell it to the ABC, I’d quite like to see it…

http://gobarbra.com/hit/new-56.....8fae4c124c

The Devil Wears Nada…

No one cares though that’s the thing. It’s like some of these blogs, only other journos, publicists and TV producers read them! Who wants to see the dull arse magazine editor moaning that Jess Mauboy didn’t rock up to the shoot. YAWN. I caught the last 10 minutes of it…dull as.

The credits are the give away to why it won’t be a hit. It’s produced by ACP execs and plays like nothing more than an ad for the company. If this is an insider documentary, then so are those morning show advertorial spots for carpet shampoo… and Big Kev is MIchael Moore… hang on a minute.

For a start, many of us don’t have Foxtel.

It’s a great ad for getting rid of your Foxtel sub. Pretty woeful original programming, lucky Gyngell is picking up the bill.

All the women in it looked like clones and none had any personality – you need conflict in shows like this and there wasn’t any.

I like it!!!

Pointless exercise to begin with. There was no freakin’ way ACP would dare show what ‘really’ goes on over there. Controlled PR stunt for advertisers, more like!

It’s on cable, what do you expect?

How can 5,437 people watch in Brisbane and nobody watches in Melbourne?

I would’ve thought this would be almost impossible.

They didn’t do much to drive awareness for the show, despite having all those titles.

I found this rather amusing: http://video.dailytelegraph.co.....ark-Street

What a waste of 30 minutes & that dreadful woman in the black glasses. Does not make me interested in the magazine industry or buy mags

Gotta Love the quality of TV Audience measurement data. Perth has a UE of 1.856m people from 15.4m (5 Cap city), or 12%. Nat Subs TV has a UE of 7.154m. Being kind and saying all WA Sub TV is Perth centric, then Perth Sub TV UE’s equal 858k. Sample size is 451 from Nat Sub total sample of 3762 (based on 12%). This equates to 1 box per 1900 people. Based on this, 4% of 1 actual person watched the show (Was it a hand/foot/ear) or 1 whole person watched for ~72sec. Quite reliable don’t you think???

I’d definitely watch it if it wasn’t on at the same time as Adam Hills AND Big Love.

what would have been interesting would have been how they are facing/addressing the real challenges facing the magazine industry today ie. the interweb,

Utterly. Mundane.

And while I’m at it, enough with the advertiser love. We know you need them, but we don’t care. We care about cat fights. Bring on the cat fights!

What a shame ! I think the viewing figures would have been much better if we’d known about it ! There was NO publicity and therefore no interest ! Obvious really !!

The reality of this is that it might be slightly interesting to those in the industry if it is a true in depth look at how ACP runs (although most already know this). However, by positioning a show like this towards the public expecting to see behind the scenes glamour of the glossy mag world is only going to lead to disappointment. As we know, publishing is publishing. It doesn’t matter if you work on Plumbers weekly or Grazia. Its the same old s**t! To me its a good example of the media industry thinking the public give as much of a toss about it as they do……which clearly, they don’t!

If you saw the ads to promote this, you can understand why it tanked. Flashing up (in big letters) that you get to see “editors; stylists; interns” – WTF? These 3 professions (if you can call a teenage work experience kid a profession) are not the type of people and careers that generate excitement. Womens mags are the domain of the eternally stupid to begin with – made and read by shallow muppets, so expecting people to be riveted by the fake-tanned camera chasers and their stories on Botox/handbags and shoes was a bit too much to ask.

When are Australian producers/media going to wake up to the fact that the majority of Australians (especially Sydneysiders) are simply not interested in the fake tits and tan crowd from the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney, nor reality based shows that are more akin to vain self-promotion vessels for these wannabe’s? Ch7 woke up to themselves when they canned the ridiculous idea of filming the obnoxious Roxy Jacenko and her PR harpies, but they are going to have their Waterloo with this proposed show around Jackie Franks or whatever her name is.

Yawn

Are we treating OzTam figures as serious now? Doesn’t the huge gap between Bris figures and other states scream, “These figures are unreliable”? I thought Foxtel had a way to measure exact viewer numbers? How do we find those that?

Utterly disappointed yet not surprised. Those women in magazines are all the same: institutionalised and all believe as my smart guy friend said ‘their own BS’. That’s what’s so cringeworthy.

What do Australian shows rate on Foxtel normally? Can we have some comparison?

I want more drama!

Looked like an advertising stunt to me – take a look at the last credits featured and see the ‘creative director’ in the black glasses came up with the ‘concept’. yeh—right. And oops – shouldn’t her credit have read ADVERTISING creative director? I did like the client plug and the lovely display of her work on her ipad and folio….thrilling.
start again please – and with real editorial insights and dramas

I loved it :o) but did not notice much advertising for it, I was lucky to spot on a blog that it was going to air

It was pretty average. And I don’t know any of these people personally, so I don’t really want to come across as bitchy, but the Cleo editor is clearly the bogan one, and the Cosmo one must be the narky one? Is this reality or scripted?!?!?

Clones, you’re all a bunch of inseperable clones.

Maphs and NW.

To try an clear a few things up. Yes OzTAM is a sample (well, actually a panel but that is a different story). And yes around 1 in every 2,000 people are in a home with an OzTAM box. To put that sampling ratio (which is actually a high SR) into perspective, with around 17.15m people of voting age in Australia if we sampled them with the same ratio we’d need a sample of around 8,500 to get voting intentions. Last election the majority of polls predicted either a hung parliamant or a cliff-hanger election – and they were using sample sizes of n=1,000 in the main.

Put simply, sampling works. And good sampling works even better. As a matter of fact the last time I had a blood sample taken for testing the doctor took 5ml of the 5+ litres of blood in my body – I didn’t insist that he take it all as 1/1000th of my blood was more than sufficient, and in fact they used as they only used a few drops of that sample or around 1/100th of the 1/1000th

Now NW, Foxtel (and EVERY cable company in the world) does NOT have a way of measuring VIEWING. They can (technically) measure all the channel TUNING – but they have no way of knowing who in the home is viewing the programme being tuned. So how does the MultiView system work? Well (and Murray Love leap in here), they use a people-based sample to project the tuning from a sample of metered viewers. Yes, the dreaded sample again is the only way to get robust estimates.

Now some data. Yesterday across the 5 metros there were n=867 Subscription TV homes with n=2,403 people in those homes contributing to the ratings. Focussing in on Perth for Maphs benefit there were n=351 people in the ratings. Of these 1 person of those n=351 watched the first two minutes of the program. As they only watched 2 off 30 minutes they counted as 1/15th of a full viewer. Don’t forget that in Perth because of daylight savings it was on air at 6:30pm (Foxtel don’t delay broadcasts) up against the current affairs programmes and not the 9:30pm it was broadcast here in Sydney.

Now when this all got projected it ended up as 76 viewers in Perth. Do i seriously believe that there was exactly 76 viewers … no way. But I am pretty darned sure that with 350 of the 351 NOT watching the programme in the panel, and the one who did watched just 2 minutes (before probably switching to a current affairs programme – I haven’t dug that deep) means that something in the order of magnitude of a hundred people seems pretty fair to me. The point is, that there is not a single person on this planet that does know exactly how many did watch in Perth and that there is no known way to actually do this … then 76 is an OK estimate by me.

Regarding Melbourne and Adelaide with zeroes, well none of the n=492 people in Melbourne and none of the n =254 people in Adelaide watched any of the programme so an estimate of zero audience based on the observed viewing of these around 750 people seems OK to me again.

So why was Brisbane so high? No idea. It appears that 2 or 3 people of the n=524 people in the sample watched it on and off across the half hour. Also, due to daylight saving it was on an hour earlier so facing different competition onthe FTA channels – maybe that is a reason. Maybe there was local promotions or advertising that tweaked a few people’s interests.

The bottom line is that we do have the viewing data for n=2,403 people in Subscription TV homes for last night. Only a handful watched out of the number hence the estimated rating was so low.

It all seems pretty fair to me when you take all the above into account.

P.S. Sorry for the s***house typing. And just to clarify, those sample counts such as n=351 people in Perth. means n=351 people in homes with Subscription TV. The total sample is much higher than that – I looked simple at those people who were capable of watching the programme.

What is everyone talking about no advertising for it?? If you have Foxtel there were lots of promos for this dismal show. If you don’t have Foxrel then you couldn’t have watched it anyway.
If this were on free to air it would be axed before the second episode.

@Sal, thanks for sharing (http://video.dailytelegraph.co.....ark-Street) they all look boring or annoying and seem to have no idea what’s going on.

Holy moly. Check out Carolyn Innis two minutes in on the video. They should just give her a show.

I’m no statistician, but the hugely disparate results from the different cities just shows how flawed sampling actually is WHEN you’re dealing with such a fragmented media market.

John > sampling works great when your dealing with a limited set of options, like your examples. But when there are 100+ channels to measure, clearly with the number of people on the panel currently, it struggles to get an accurate result whenever the viewer levels get low.

I’m sure the people looking after the numbers would be able provide some confidence or error margins based on standard statistics methodologies.

As for ‘Park Street’.. I guess it’s a bit of fun. Did anyone expect it to rate higher?

Foxtel, give John a show, he’s engaging, entertaining and informative! I look forward to that promo! Excellent explaination, while I often question oztam numbers I appreciate your methodology and ability to speak to me = A+Simpleton

The problem is the belief that magazine publishing ceases to exist once you leave the editorial office. The comment from one of the editors about the magazine bouncing back and forth from her to the sub-editors “then off to the printer” is typical of the attitude from editorial teams. Where were the ad managers, circ staff, marketing team, production staff, printers, distributors, even retailers etc? This is where the real drama and conflict lives – not an individual moping about the office because it is raining at an event.

It seems that in the blinkered desire for ‘glamour’ they have completely forgotten that it takes a huge team of people across many business units to get a magazine on to the retail shelves, not just a few girls choosing photos and creating the layout.

I dont buy the magazines because who really cares that such and such of a celebrity is caught on a beach in a bikini? Not exactly stimulating reading so why would it be a stimulating tv show?

@Ivory Tower – this show was completely dull as it was, but I couldn’t think of any way to make it MORE boring than by adding in segments about the circulation department. Are you serious?! All this show needs is a plot, real or manufactured – whatever. Just stop telling us what a sub editor does and stop stop explaining how your ads “associate with the demographic”. Urgh. DULL.

I’ve heard from a source with connections to the top of PBL and Fox that they’re making a spin off focused solely on the ACP circulations department. And it’s going straight onto fox8 in prime time.

It’s going to be called “The Circ-us” and is destined to replicate the success of Park Street.

Loved the sampling and statistics 101 John. I think Andre has a point though. The long tail of cable, digital and satellite TV channels is making the current TV audience measurement panels ineffective and rather blunt instruments for accurate and effective measurement.

As the audience migrates to the smaller channels (refer to the recent article here about where the Thursday peak audience has gone) it becomes clear that the old FTA TV measurment model needs to evolve.

It is obvious that Australia needs to incorporate return path data measurement in some form to its television ratings. This would ideally be at census level or alternatively a huge panel (tens of thousands of homes). This would give a much more accurate measure of the audience for the smaller channels and even allow some level of profiling of these channels/programmes audience. You may sacrifice some of the finer qualities of a peoplemeter panel that requires total respondent compliance. What you gain from the huge sample is an ability to measure smaller channels and in an increasingly non-linear world they will all be smaller channels.

It’s obvious this show should never have been made as a doco – the material was begging for a bitchy Sex In The City type of treatment. Having worked for No Idea (as we affectionately/cynically dubbed it!) earlier in my career, I know the terrain and would be willing to have a go at writing or co-writing a script for such a show, if any producers are reading this (I’ve just joined Starnow, if you want my details.)

the concept for this show came from ACP hype tapes
shown at conference… ACP liked them so much THEY
bought it; sadly no one else did! What are we, stoopid?