Influencing your Nielsen rating is like cheating on your SAT.

Evidently Oprah never got that memo. You've probably heard about her tweet during the Grammys, but if you didn't, check out the screen shot below, captured by ShortFormBlog.



Not only did she spell Nielsen incorrectly, she directly violated the company's policy.

In the world of media planning/buying/placement/advertising in general, Nielsen ratings are a sort of currency, as Wayne Friedman so aptly put it.

"Nielsen measures the television viewership of a sample of roughly 25,000 households across the United States." (New York Times) Attempting to directly influence these families is like writing the answers to the Calculus exam on your shoe.

Tweeting this could give OWN a one-up against the other shows that air during that time period like Downton Abbey (speaking of, did anyone see the Christmas special on Sunday? Epic.), Shameless or the Grammys. Since this was such an extraordinary year for the Grammys in terms of viewership (39 million people tuned in, making it the second largest audience after Michael Jackson's big year in 1984), I doubt very much that Oprah's ratings were affected much. But the principle still stands: If you try to cheat the system, you're going to get burned.

Jimmy Fallon actually did something similar in November. He launched an "Occupy Nielsen" movement asking the viewers who had Nielsen boxes to tune into his program, even if they weren't going to watch it. You can see his spiel here.

For Oprah's tweet, Nielsen will attach an asterisk to "OWN's ratings at the time of day Ms. Winfrey's message was sent, noting a 'possible biasing effect.'" For Fallon, "Nielsen excluded (his) show from its averages altogether, a much more severe punishment." (NYT) The severity of the punishment varies because of the different degrees of specificity in each request.

On David Letterman's show (Monday, Feb 13, 2012), the day after Oprah's tweet, he referenced the event and made a request similar to Fallon's in November. No word or reaction from Nielsen that I've caught wind of yet, but then again, it was not specific at all and presented in a much more naive way. Watch the clip here (time 10:00-12:08).

The reasoning for Nielsen's policy seems fairly simple to me: You don't want Nielsen households to be bribed with everything under the sun. As a people, we would end up with horrible choices for television entertainment, the niche shows would disappear and we would have very few long-running shows - they'd run out of money! (Speaking of long-running shows, congratulations to The Simpsons on 23 seasons and 500 episodes. I don't care if you like them or not, that is quite an accomplishment!)

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