NEW YORK (CelebrityAccess MediaWire) — A federal judge ruled against Arbitron on Monday, dismissing a lawsuit brought by Arbitron against New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo over his attempt to stop the company from deploying their new electronic ratings measuring system, the Portable People Meter.
Cuomo and the Attorney General of New Jersey had filed lawsuits against Arbitron, alleging that the company had misrepresented the accuracy of the PPM and that the device was underreporting audience numbers for stations that catered to minority tastes and as a consequence, impinging on their advertising revenue. Arbitron counter-sued, seeking an injunction to prevent New York from stopping the publication of audience estimates but the judge ruled in favor of New York's case being heard in the state courts, Reuters reported.
Arbitron appears to be responding to the criticism in other ways and recently published a set of calculators to estimate the accuracy of their measurements, derived from both the PPM and their older diary system.
"The GRP Reliability Calculator makes it easy for buyers and sellers to estimate the margin of error of the total rating points delivered by radio schedules in PPM markets," said Al Tupek, Chief Statistical Officer, Arbitron Inc. "Now advertisers can have greater insight into the variation of audience delivery in radio schedules that may be associated with the standard error of the ratings." – CelebrityAccess Staff Writers
