THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 16, 1997 TAG: 9702160221
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C6 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY BOB ZELLER, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: DAYTONA BEACH, FLA. LENGTH: 59 lines
More than 8 million people will be watching the Daytona 500 on television today when the green flag drops at Daytona International Speedway.
In about 400 homes, electronic boxes will keep close track of who watches the race and how long they watch it.
The boxes are the ``people meters'' of the Nielsen Media Research Co., which generates the Nielsen ratings that television broadcasts live and die by.
Auto racing telecasts have been growing in popularity right along with the sport itself. This growth has prompted the Nielsen company to begin to pay more attention to the racing numbers, which have become comparable to those of traditional sports such as baseball.
``We're going to be establishing some type of a data base for auto racing,'' said Robert E. Ruggiero, vice president of Nielsen Sports Marketing Service. ``For the most part, auto racing is a Saturday or Sunday afternoon telecast. And for it to get ratings comparable to the bat-and-ball sports is impressive.''
The Nielsen company has signed an agreement with NASCAR to provide statistical information and to help people in the sport use the numbers for their benefit.
Nielsen has 5,000 people meters scattered around the country, and the ratings are based on how many are on during the race. Because there are about 97,000,000 television households in the United States, one meter statistically represents about 19,400 homes.
So if 400 meters are on Sunday, the 500's television rating will be lower than last year's. By the same token, if 500 meters are on, the race telecast will break its own rating standard. The record for the 500 telecast was set in 1994 with a 9.6, which means about 9,040,000 people watched the race.
The people meter is operated with a remote-control device and includes buttons for each member of the family. There's even a visitor button. If you're watching, you push your button and your light turns from red to green.
The company even has a contingency plan to cover those who fall asleep during the race (or walk away from the set without pushing their button back to red).
``If after 70 minutes, no buttons have been pushed or no channels have been changed, there is a prompt light,'' Ruggiero said. If someone doesn't push a button at this point, the information from that people meter is not used for the telecast, he said.
Interestingly, the Daytona 500 telecast ratings have remained fairly steady since the first flag-to-flag show in 1979. That year, about 7.8 million viewers tuned in to see Richard Petty win his seventh Daytona 500 while Cale Yarborough and the Allison brothers duked it out on the backstretch.
The telecast did not break 8 million until 1987, when 8,570,000 viewers watched Bill Elliott romp to victory.
A two-hour rain delay in 1995 dropped the audience to about 7.4 million - smaller than the 1979 audience. And only in that record year of 1994 did the audience exceed 9 million.
But there are other indicators that dramatically show the growth of NASCAR.
In 1996, for the first time, NASCAR races ranked in the top 30 cable shows of the year. Competing against NFL football and all the prime-time broadcasts of all the cable networks, NASCAR races ranked 29th and 30th, Ruggiero said.