Radio: By a Thread

Over the head of every sponsored radio show hangs a heavy threat: its Hooperating.* If the rating is too low, the sponsor usually cancels the show. Results: 1) new shows, which take time to win an audience, often die aborning; 2) U.S. radio is encouraged to stick to the trite and truistic; 3) the Hooper system has more influence than friends among radio show folk.

Last week Hooperatings got a full blast from Joel Murcott, radio editor of the Hollywood Reporter. Wrote Murcott:

“[Hooper] says that 92,550 homes are called each month [for Hooper’s special Coast rating report] on the Pacific web coverage area. … On a 30-day breakdown, it gives about 3,000 calls daily . . . on the entire Pacific Coast. That’s 108 calls per half-hour period. The current report shows 35% average sets in use. That means less than 40 respondents giving the Pacific Coast pace for half-hour listening! … On that small a sample, Mr. Hooper can get odds from any professional gambler that … he will eventually hit a night when not one single respondent is listening to Fibber & Molly or Bob Hope.”

“Falsification and oversimplification!” retorted 48-year-old Charles Ernest Hooper. “In the first place, on the Coast we don’t make a report on one broadcast because our sample is too small. We wait and make a monthly report, using the statistics on four broadcasts. In the second place, we don’t make the same number of calls every hour. . . . We call somewhat more at night than during the day. At night we average 165 calls a half-hour —660 a month on any show in the report.”

* A number representing the percentage of radio sets-in-use which are tuned to any sponsored show, based on a telephone poll of listeners, conducted while the show is in progress by the research firm of C. E. Hooper, Inc.