CLAUDE E. HOOPER, THE FATHER OF HOOPERATINGS - 1898-1954
RADIO’S RULERS: CROSSLEY, HOOPER & NIELSEN
“Nothing matters in commercial radio but a Hooper or Crossley rating, whichever one you happen to read. All success is measured by them, most jobs are lost on account of them.” - Frederic Wakeman, “The Hucksters”, 1946.
Little has been written about Archibald M. Crossley, Claude E. Hooper or Arthur C. Nielsen. Yet, these three pollsters wielded more influence on Network Radio programming than NBC’s Sarnoff or CBS’s Paley. Their semi-monthly surveys measured program popularity in several dozen major cities and gave advertisers an idea of what their money was buying - by estimating with reasonable accuracy the number of homes where their programs - and more importantly, their commercials - were being heard.
Crossley’s Cooperative Analysis of Broadcasting Reports and the flamboyant Hooper’s Hooperatings left us with the only measure of program popularity from Network Radio’s Golden Age halcyon days of the 30's and 40's. Nielsen Audimeter ratings chronicled its last hurrahs in the late 40's and early 50's. Their thousands of monthly averages allow us to identify Network Radio’s most popular programs and personalities - plus many others that weren’t so popular.
How ratings developed is yet another story of high stakes competition involving Network Radio. Only this one was among the pollsters, themselves.
Ratings: Born In The Snitch of Time. Consumer research had taken hold in advertising by 1927. Advertisers and their agencies wanted to know how cost-effectively their sales messages delivered customers. This want would become a need a few years later when the Great Depression slashed consumer spending and advertising budgets.
Archibald Maddock Crossley, a 31 year old Literary Digest magazine research director, had established his own firm specializing in consumer survey services in 1926. An early Network Radio advertiser, Davis Baking Powder Company, commissioned Crossley’s researchers in 1927 to confirm the local reception of the Davis program - and its commercials - on stations along the newly established NBC chain of stations.
What Crossley’s people discovered was theft. As Crossley recalled in 1963, “In a number of cities we found local commercials being substituted for the national ones, so the stations were collecting twice. This bit of sin was brought to the attention of the network, which promptly issued rebates followed by heart-to-heart talks with the offending stations.”
Crossley’s whistle-blowing for the baking powder manufacturer caught the attention of other radio advertisers who wondered what happened to their programs and commercials once they left the network studios - and, if at all possible, how many people heard them. In response, Crossley initiated random telephone sampling to estimate program popularity and coined the word ratings to define the percentage of homes that reported listening to specific programs.
As individual sponsors commissioned Crossley for their own studies, demand grew for a continuing service to measure program popularity in major cities on a regular schedule. With the endorsement of the Association of National Advertisers, (ANA), and 30 subscribers each paying $65 a month, Crossley’s network-wide polling service began on March 1, 1930. The original surveys of radio listening trends in 33 major cities were published three times annually and won Harvard University’s award as the year’s most outstanding example of commercial research.
Network advertisers finally had an estimated count of listeners to compare with newspaper and magazine circulation figures. Crossley’s increasingly popular reports became semi-monthly in 1932 at the dawn of Network Radio’s Golden Age. The American Association of Advertising Agencies, (AAAA), joined the ANA in 1934 to create the Cooperative Analysis of Broadcasting, (CAB), to finance and market Crossley’s surveys. The two sponsoring groups were later joined by the National Association of Broadcasters, (NAB). As a result, the CAB became ruled by a committee of mixed interests and Crossley was merely its employee. The situation eventually led to the CAB’s demise.
Crossley and the CAB had the field of radio audience research to themselves for just a few months. Then along came a young super-salesman named Hooper.
Hoop Rolls From Pots & Pans To Fame & Fortune. “The most powerful voice in radio is the emphatic rumble of a 49 year old New Englander, Claude Ernest Hooper, whose name is a household word and whose Hooperatings are the most eagerly awaited edicts in the frenetic universe of broadcasting.” - John Keating, Esquire, 1948.
Claude Hooper needed a job. The 32 year old, called Hoop by his friends, once had a promising career during the stock market’s heyday as an account executive for Doremus & Company, New York’s largest advertising agency specializing in financial and brokerage clients. But in 1931, nobody wanted to be on Wall Street - certainly not Claude Hooper, with a wife and two daughters to support.
Back when Hooper was earning his bachelor’s degree from Amherst, the gregarious Baptist minister’s son had built a reputation as a tireless cookware salesman working his way through college. But the Depression had made selling advertising campaigns to stock brokers a tougher sell than peddling pots and pans to reluctant New England housewives. Going over his list of prospective contacts for new opportunities, Hooper came across the name of Dr. Daniel Starch, a once obscure associate professor at Harvard when Hooper was pursuing his MBA. Hooper had enjoyed Starch’s courses in Experimental Psychology and Statistical Research.
Starch had since developed an acclaimed newspaper and magazine readership scoring method published in 1923's Principals of Advertising. He left Harvard to establish Daniel Starch & Staff, a marketing research firm that enjoyed immediate success. Starch added to his personal resume by moonlighting as Research Director for the AAAA and published a survey of the country’s growing radio audience in 1928, shortly after the networks began operating. That study wasn’t lost on Hooper who saw opportunity and called on his former teacher.
Starch remembered his former student whom he recognized as a born salesman. Hoop landed a sales job with Starch and remained for two successful years - honing his knowledge of media research and expanding his contacts throughout the advertising and publishing communities. Along the way he encountered another Amherst grad, L. Montgomery (Monty) Clark, who was employed as a freelance researcher for the ANA. Hooper recruited Clark for the Starch organization and in working together the two eventually developed plans for a business partnership.
Clark-Hooper, Inc., specialists in magazine advertising research and evaluation, was founded on a shoestring in April, 1934. With their Starch credentials and personal enthusiasm the pair soon had signed contracts from a roster of women’s magazines - McCall’s, Ladies Home Journal, Woman’s Home Companion and Good Housekeeping - plus the giant of general interest magazines, The Saturday Evening Post, which had a weekly circulation over 2.5 million.
Mad Magazines. By 1934, magazine publishers had become angry with Network Radio’s claims of circulation - their huge size of audience - expressed by Crossley’s CAB research. The periodicals reasoned that something had to be wrong with the CAB findings. They were right. And Clark-Hooper was about to prove it.
Sixty-five percent of American homes had a radio in 1934. As Crossley had determined, almost all of those homes also had a telephone. The use of the telephone for radio audience research purposes was a natural. That was the one area in which Clark-Hooper had no argument with Crossley. However, the partners found two major problems with the CAB reports of broadcast popularity.
First and foremost was CAB's methodology. Crossley used a Next Day Recall method, asking respondents by telephone what radio programs they had listened to the previous day. The system was rife with the possibility of memory error and was weighted in favor of the most popular and best publicized programs which came immediately to mind - whether heard or not. (After all, everybody listened to Eddie Cantor, didn’t they?)
Clark and Hooper conferred with research guru George Gallup who recommended the Telephone Coincidental method, originally developed by husband and wife researchers Percy White and Pauline Arnold. Telephone Coincidental surveys asked whoever answered the phone what was being listening to on the home’s radio, if anything, at the moment the phone rang. Telephone Coincidental removed any need for respondents to either remember or think - just react.
The second problem identified by Clark-Hooper was Crossley’s alleged failure to count the number of non-listeners found. They charged that Crossley simply ignored many respondents who had not listened to the radio from the overall count which inflated both the sets-in-use and ratings figures. Clark-Hooper’s report, Yardsticks On The Air, underscored the alleged over-counting of listeners and suggested Telephone Coincidental as a remedy for the problem.
Arch Crossley agreed that Telephone Coincidental had merit, but his stubborn CAB board wasn’t buying the idea. Clark and Hooper saw opportunity and seized it. As a result, magazine publishers seeking an “honest count” were the first subscribers to the new, independently owned Clark-Hooper Radio Research Service, launched in the fall of 1934.
Four Questions With Millions of Answers. During the first week of every month an army of part time Clark-Hooper employees in 30 major cities each made over 150 random phone calls every evening from 6:00 until 10:30, Eastern Time. The pollsters - many former telephone operators or handicapped persons looking for a bit of extra income - all asked the same four simple questions when they “nickled” a city with calls:
1 “Were you listening to the radio just now?”
2 (If so) “To what program were you listening, please?”
3 “Over what station is the program coming?”
4 “What advertiser puts on the program?”
The first Clark-Hooper Broadcast Advertising Report was issued in November, 1934. Not surprisingly, its results indicated Network Radio listening - also expressed as ratings - were noticeably less than the numbers reported by CAB. Nevertheless, Clark-Hooper’s share of audience figures, matching programs versus programs, closely resembled the CAB totals, so rankings of program popularity between the two services were almost identical.
Magazine publishers who underwrote the report were delighted. Advertisers and their agencies were enlightened. Now it was the broadcasters’ turn to get angry. It was an anger that evolved into an animosity against the Telephone Coincidental system that kept the inferior CAB alive for another dozen years. A decade later, Arch Crossley confided to his friendly rival Hoop that it was CAB’s administration by committee, its internal politics and its reluctance to respond to competitive challenge that prevented him from countering the offensive that began with the first Clark-Hooper Report.
Hooper’s immediate mission was selling the new Clark-Hooper service to advertisers and their agencies as the most accurate means to compare radio’s reach to the printed media. It was a tough sell against the established CAB which had the acceptance, support and administration of the advertising and broadcasting industries’ most powerful members and trade associations. As Hooper recalled in 1942, “Advertisers who were friendly to us said, ‘Don’t go into radio! There are people running the CAB who are politically powerful and jealous of their position of leadership. They’ll force you out of business by exerting pressure!’ Then he added in typical Hooper humor, “But we were young and foolish in 1934.”
Clark-Hooper’s broadcast division scrambled for subscribers over the next three years, but its magazine and newspaper divisions continued to flourish and kept the company profitable. However, it became obvious that Hooper was more interested in broadcasting than publishing. This was most evident in 1936 when he convinced Clark to invest company money into the development of The Programeter, a mechanical device attached to a radio to record when the set was turned on, how long it was on, and to what stations it was tuned when it was on - the prototype of A.C. Nielsen’s Audimeter.
The two partners stopped short of buying the finished product for $50,000 - deciding to stick with Telephone Coincidental as their methodology of choice. Their reasoning was simple. The mechanical system couldn’t report if anyone was actually listening to the radio when it was on. (1)
Clark and Hooper decided amicably to part ways in 1938. Hooper left with the nine-employee radio division which accounted for 20% of the company’s income and Clark kept the larger publishing divisions with 80% of the partnership’s revenue.
Hooper biographer Frank Nye asked Clark about the split in 1957. Clark recalled, “I always felt about Hoop just as I did after our first meeting - that he was one of the most brilliant and enjoyable characters I have ever known. He was a loyal and honest partner and our five years of intensive business association was one of the most successful partnerships I have ever known about.”
Hooper’s Poll Vaults To Prominence. C.E. Hooper, Inc., funded with loans from Hoop’s life insurance, opened its doors for business in May, 1938. The monthly Network Radio ratings service didn’t miss a beat in its transition of ownership. Several months later Chicago marketing research giant Arthur Nielsen offered Hooper $250,000 for the business. Hoop turned down the tempting offer but wisely kept the door open - just in case. (2)
Then came Hooper's epiphany - the turning point in his struggle for recognition and acceptance against the larger CAB. It happened when Hoop was having lunch with a prospective subscriber. He was asked to define in one word exactly what he was selling. As Nye reports, Hooper thought for a moment, probably traced a forefinger over his trim mustache, then smiled broadly and said emphatically, “I’m selling Hooperatings!”
Claude Hooper had just given himself a brand name, a catchy brand name, and more importantly, the essence of a tangible branded product to publicize and market. General Foods didn’t sell fruit flavored gelatin - it sold Jello. Kimberly-Clark didn’t sell paper tissues - it sold Kleenex. Claude Hooper wasn’t selling radio audience research - he was selling Hooperatings.
Hoop the pitchman went to work. He courted the press with parties and distributed monthly “First Fifteen Hooperating” rankings for nighttime network programs and “Top Ten Hooperating” lists of the most popular daytime shows. Newspapers reprinted the Hooperatings and Hooper’s publicity machine began running on a regular schedule, reaching millions of readers every month. For the first time radio listeners could see how their favorite programs were faring every month in the ratings race - the Hooperatings race - and follow them like baseball standings. It didn’t take long for radio comedians pick up on this popularity and jump on Hooper’s promotional bandwagon. Bob Hope said it best, “A Hooperating is an ulcer with a decimal point.”
The CAB soon found itself playing continual defense against Hooper’s publicity barrage and his good-natured digs against its methodology - barbs that had many in the radio industry beginning to question the Crossley system. The reluctant networks and their local affiliates were becoming Hooper converts and subscribers.
Hooper piled the competitive pressure on CAB in 1938 by extending his network radio polling hours to include daytime programming - encompassing all sponsored programs from 9:00 a.m. until 10:30 p.m. The following year his service was expanded to include the West Coast - and tripling the national sampling from 400 to 1,200 calls per half hour, totaling over two million calls annually. The reluctant networks, stations and ad agencies were becoming Hooper converts and his subscriber list was fast approaching 100.
Quantity Trumps Quality. A publicity bonus for Hoop came along when an indignant Eddie Cantor told the press that said he could disprove the validity of Hooper research. Cantor had an axe to grind with his Hooperatings which had fallen nearly 40% over the course of two seasons. Lacking any evidence to invalidate Hooper’s methodology, the comedian accused the ratings service of favoring “lower class” programs over those of “higher quality.”
Hooper took Cantor and his other critics to school with his widely circulated response: “Please remember that ratings aren’t intended to, and don’t evaluate programs. They are not criticisms. They are measurements. Because a symphony gets a 4.0 rating and Fibber McGee & Molly gets a 28.0, we don’t say that Fibber is seven times as good. We merely report that seven times as many people listened to him.”
Hooper’s monthly reports were in a continual state of refinement with increasingly detailed information while the CAB fell further behind in its feeble, committee-directed reactions. The CAB finally modified its methodology in 1942 to Same Day Recall. Hooper countered by doubling his evening Telephone Coincidental reports, polling both the first and third weeks of every month. Hooper’s operators were now making over 4.5 Million calls per year.
The race was really over later in 1942 when the radio networks began to withdraw their support from CAB which amounted to 40% of its annual $350,000 in revenues. Hooper continued to apply the marketing pressure, drumming-in his “brand” whenever the occasion arose. An example of Hooper’s name promotion is found in his memo enclosed in the Hooperatings following a New York elevator operators’ strike on September 25, 1945: Your advance Hooperatings and this complete report go to you on schedule this week, as usual, because a force of loyal Hooperettes and Hooperites walked 13 flights of stairs at least twice daily to serve you.
The Cooperative Analysis of Broadcasting finally threw in the towel on August 2, 1946, and negotiated to sell its list of 102 remaining subscribers to Hooper. (3) Time magazine reported CAB’s collapse like an obituary: “Radio’s most famous linesman passed into limbo last week. The Cooperative Analysis of Broadcasting, Inc, sponsor of the ‘Crossley rating’ system, closed its Manhattan office and went out of business. Cause of death: Radiomen decided last summer that the industry-financed CAB was duplicating the independent telephone poll of C. E. Hooper.”
But Hooper’s adversaries died hard. Shortly after the CAB folded, the NAB established the Broadcast Measurement Bureau, (BMB), and poured $1.25 Million into a survey mailed to a million households. The experiment was an expensive flop. Hooper added insult to injury when he told NAB members footing the bill that his firm could have conducted the identical field research for half the cost!
More and more broadcasters, once resentful of Hooper intruding into their business and deflating their cushy CAB ratings, signed local station contracts with the enthusiastic little man whose name had become synonymous with ratings. By 1947, Hooper had over 600 subscribers, each paying from $125 to $1300 per month. The cash flow allowed Hooper to expand into an early Hooperatings service for television in 1948. All of this was being closely observed by A.C. Nielsen.
Know When To Fold ‘Em… Arthur Nielsen had introduced his company’s original service, tracking grocery and drug store purchases, in 1934. It was a phenomenal success. Eight years later Nielsen expanded into radio audience research with the Audimeter system similar to the Programeter that Clark and Hooper had turned down in 1936.
With television a growing phenomenon in 1948, Nielsen’s firm was eager to expand its broadcast ratings business. The fastest way to expand was take over the competition. Nielsen set it sights - again - on C.E. Hooper. Claude Hooper, meanwhile, was constantly traveling, lecturing and selling. A welcome guest in most any network, station or ad agency executive’s office, Hooper picked up the insights of insiders about the future of the broadcast industry. It was knowledge that he would employ when takeover talks with Nielsen got serious.
First reports of Nielsen’s attempt to buy Hooper’s radio and television rating services surfaced in December, 1949. Hoop had seen the handwriting on the wall: Network Television programs would soon dwarf the popularity of Network Radio shows. Network Radio would become a supplemental service - primarily of news and special events - to local stations that were expanding in both number and popularity. Local radio was where the action - and clients - would be in the mid-1950's and beyond.
Hooper sold his national radio and television network rating services to Nielsen in March, 1950, for an estimated $650,000 - a sum that was up 160% from Nielsen’s 1938 offer. But Hoop shrewdly kept his company’s local market radio services where his Hooperatings would remain the ratings benchmark for another 20 years.
Claude Hooper had a zest for living as well as working. He was an avid outdoorsman who loved fishing and hunting wherever his business travels would take him. On December 15, 1954, he was hunting from a propeller driven airboat in Utah with a friend from Salt Lake City’s KSL Radio. The boat hung up on a sandbar and Hooper jumped out to free it. He fell into the boat’s unshielded whirling propeller and was killed instantly. He was joined in death just a few years later by the kind of Network Radio that made him famous.
Arthur C. Nielsen died at age 82 in 1980. Archibald Crossley who was first to survey radio listening in 1927 and gave ratings their name, was the last of Network Radio's three famous pollsters to die - in 1985 at the age of 88.
(1) Hooper would later use this competitive argument when Nielsen introduced its Audimeter in 1946, headlining one of his many memos to clients, “They Have To Be Listening To Be Sold!”
(2) Arthur Nielsen and Arch Crossley both became Claude Hooper's personal friends.
(3) By this time Arch Crossley had virtually divorced himself from the CAB to focus on political polling where he established himself as a leader in the field with contemporaries Elmo Roper and George Gallup.
This post is in part abridged from Network Radio Ratings, 1932-1953.
Copyright © 2012 & 2018, Jim Ramsburg, Estero FL Email: tojimramsburg@gmail.com
“Nothing matters in commercial radio but a Hooper or Crossley rating, whichever one you happen to read. All success is measured by them, most jobs are lost on account of them.” - Frederic Wakeman, “The Hucksters”, 1946.
Little has been written about Archibald M. Crossley, Claude E. Hooper or Arthur C. Nielsen. Yet, these three pollsters wielded more influence on Network Radio programming than NBC’s Sarnoff or CBS’s Paley. Their semi-monthly surveys measured program popularity in several dozen major cities and gave advertisers an idea of what their money was buying - by estimating with reasonable accuracy the number of homes where their programs - and more importantly, their commercials - were being heard.
Crossley’s Cooperative Analysis of Broadcasting Reports and the flamboyant Hooper’s Hooperatings left us with the only measure of program popularity from Network Radio’s Golden Age halcyon days of the 30's and 40's. Nielsen Audimeter ratings chronicled its last hurrahs in the late 40's and early 50's. Their thousands of monthly averages allow us to identify Network Radio’s most popular programs and personalities - plus many others that weren’t so popular.
How ratings developed is yet another story of high stakes competition involving Network Radio. Only this one was among the pollsters, themselves.
Ratings: Born In The Snitch of Time. Consumer research had taken hold in advertising by 1927. Advertisers and their agencies wanted to know how cost-effectively their sales messages delivered customers. This want would become a need a few years later when the Great Depression slashed consumer spending and advertising budgets.
Archibald Maddock Crossley, a 31 year old Literary Digest magazine research director, had established his own firm specializing in consumer survey services in 1926. An early Network Radio advertiser, Davis Baking Powder Company, commissioned Crossley’s researchers in 1927 to confirm the local reception of the Davis program - and its commercials - on stations along the newly established NBC chain of stations.
What Crossley’s people discovered was theft. As Crossley recalled in 1963, “In a number of cities we found local commercials being substituted for the national ones, so the stations were collecting twice. This bit of sin was brought to the attention of the network, which promptly issued rebates followed by heart-to-heart talks with the offending stations.”
Crossley’s whistle-blowing for the baking powder manufacturer caught the attention of other radio advertisers who wondered what happened to their programs and commercials once they left the network studios - and, if at all possible, how many people heard them. In response, Crossley initiated random telephone sampling to estimate program popularity and coined the word ratings to define the percentage of homes that reported listening to specific programs.
As individual sponsors commissioned Crossley for their own studies, demand grew for a continuing service to measure program popularity in major cities on a regular schedule. With the endorsement of the Association of National Advertisers, (ANA), and 30 subscribers each paying $65 a month, Crossley’s network-wide polling service began on March 1, 1930. The original surveys of radio listening trends in 33 major cities were published three times annually and won Harvard University’s award as the year’s most outstanding example of commercial research.
Network advertisers finally had an estimated count of listeners to compare with newspaper and magazine circulation figures. Crossley’s increasingly popular reports became semi-monthly in 1932 at the dawn of Network Radio’s Golden Age. The American Association of Advertising Agencies, (AAAA), joined the ANA in 1934 to create the Cooperative Analysis of Broadcasting, (CAB), to finance and market Crossley’s surveys. The two sponsoring groups were later joined by the National Association of Broadcasters, (NAB). As a result, the CAB became ruled by a committee of mixed interests and Crossley was merely its employee. The situation eventually led to the CAB’s demise.
Crossley and the CAB had the field of radio audience research to themselves for just a few months. Then along came a young super-salesman named Hooper.
Hoop Rolls From Pots & Pans To Fame & Fortune. “The most powerful voice in radio is the emphatic rumble of a 49 year old New Englander, Claude Ernest Hooper, whose name is a household word and whose Hooperatings are the most eagerly awaited edicts in the frenetic universe of broadcasting.” - John Keating, Esquire, 1948.
Claude Hooper needed a job. The 32 year old, called Hoop by his friends, once had a promising career during the stock market’s heyday as an account executive for Doremus & Company, New York’s largest advertising agency specializing in financial and brokerage clients. But in 1931, nobody wanted to be on Wall Street - certainly not Claude Hooper, with a wife and two daughters to support.
Back when Hooper was earning his bachelor’s degree from Amherst, the gregarious Baptist minister’s son had built a reputation as a tireless cookware salesman working his way through college. But the Depression had made selling advertising campaigns to stock brokers a tougher sell than peddling pots and pans to reluctant New England housewives. Going over his list of prospective contacts for new opportunities, Hooper came across the name of Dr. Daniel Starch, a once obscure associate professor at Harvard when Hooper was pursuing his MBA. Hooper had enjoyed Starch’s courses in Experimental Psychology and Statistical Research.
Starch had since developed an acclaimed newspaper and magazine readership scoring method published in 1923's Principals of Advertising. He left Harvard to establish Daniel Starch & Staff, a marketing research firm that enjoyed immediate success. Starch added to his personal resume by moonlighting as Research Director for the AAAA and published a survey of the country’s growing radio audience in 1928, shortly after the networks began operating. That study wasn’t lost on Hooper who saw opportunity and called on his former teacher.
Starch remembered his former student whom he recognized as a born salesman. Hoop landed a sales job with Starch and remained for two successful years - honing his knowledge of media research and expanding his contacts throughout the advertising and publishing communities. Along the way he encountered another Amherst grad, L. Montgomery (Monty) Clark, who was employed as a freelance researcher for the ANA. Hooper recruited Clark for the Starch organization and in working together the two eventually developed plans for a business partnership.
Clark-Hooper, Inc., specialists in magazine advertising research and evaluation, was founded on a shoestring in April, 1934. With their Starch credentials and personal enthusiasm the pair soon had signed contracts from a roster of women’s magazines - McCall’s, Ladies Home Journal, Woman’s Home Companion and Good Housekeeping - plus the giant of general interest magazines, The Saturday Evening Post, which had a weekly circulation over 2.5 million.
Mad Magazines. By 1934, magazine publishers had become angry with Network Radio’s claims of circulation - their huge size of audience - expressed by Crossley’s CAB research. The periodicals reasoned that something had to be wrong with the CAB findings. They were right. And Clark-Hooper was about to prove it.
Sixty-five percent of American homes had a radio in 1934. As Crossley had determined, almost all of those homes also had a telephone. The use of the telephone for radio audience research purposes was a natural. That was the one area in which Clark-Hooper had no argument with Crossley. However, the partners found two major problems with the CAB reports of broadcast popularity.
First and foremost was CAB's methodology. Crossley used a Next Day Recall method, asking respondents by telephone what radio programs they had listened to the previous day. The system was rife with the possibility of memory error and was weighted in favor of the most popular and best publicized programs which came immediately to mind - whether heard or not. (After all, everybody listened to Eddie Cantor, didn’t they?)
Clark and Hooper conferred with research guru George Gallup who recommended the Telephone Coincidental method, originally developed by husband and wife researchers Percy White and Pauline Arnold. Telephone Coincidental surveys asked whoever answered the phone what was being listening to on the home’s radio, if anything, at the moment the phone rang. Telephone Coincidental removed any need for respondents to either remember or think - just react.
The second problem identified by Clark-Hooper was Crossley’s alleged failure to count the number of non-listeners found. They charged that Crossley simply ignored many respondents who had not listened to the radio from the overall count which inflated both the sets-in-use and ratings figures. Clark-Hooper’s report, Yardsticks On The Air, underscored the alleged over-counting of listeners and suggested Telephone Coincidental as a remedy for the problem.
Arch Crossley agreed that Telephone Coincidental had merit, but his stubborn CAB board wasn’t buying the idea. Clark and Hooper saw opportunity and seized it. As a result, magazine publishers seeking an “honest count” were the first subscribers to the new, independently owned Clark-Hooper Radio Research Service, launched in the fall of 1934.
Four Questions With Millions of Answers. During the first week of every month an army of part time Clark-Hooper employees in 30 major cities each made over 150 random phone calls every evening from 6:00 until 10:30, Eastern Time. The pollsters - many former telephone operators or handicapped persons looking for a bit of extra income - all asked the same four simple questions when they “nickled” a city with calls:
1 “Were you listening to the radio just now?”
2 (If so) “To what program were you listening, please?”
3 “Over what station is the program coming?”
4 “What advertiser puts on the program?”
The first Clark-Hooper Broadcast Advertising Report was issued in November, 1934. Not surprisingly, its results indicated Network Radio listening - also expressed as ratings - were noticeably less than the numbers reported by CAB. Nevertheless, Clark-Hooper’s share of audience figures, matching programs versus programs, closely resembled the CAB totals, so rankings of program popularity between the two services were almost identical.
Magazine publishers who underwrote the report were delighted. Advertisers and their agencies were enlightened. Now it was the broadcasters’ turn to get angry. It was an anger that evolved into an animosity against the Telephone Coincidental system that kept the inferior CAB alive for another dozen years. A decade later, Arch Crossley confided to his friendly rival Hoop that it was CAB’s administration by committee, its internal politics and its reluctance to respond to competitive challenge that prevented him from countering the offensive that began with the first Clark-Hooper Report.
Hooper’s immediate mission was selling the new Clark-Hooper service to advertisers and their agencies as the most accurate means to compare radio’s reach to the printed media. It was a tough sell against the established CAB which had the acceptance, support and administration of the advertising and broadcasting industries’ most powerful members and trade associations. As Hooper recalled in 1942, “Advertisers who were friendly to us said, ‘Don’t go into radio! There are people running the CAB who are politically powerful and jealous of their position of leadership. They’ll force you out of business by exerting pressure!’ Then he added in typical Hooper humor, “But we were young and foolish in 1934.”
Clark-Hooper’s broadcast division scrambled for subscribers over the next three years, but its magazine and newspaper divisions continued to flourish and kept the company profitable. However, it became obvious that Hooper was more interested in broadcasting than publishing. This was most evident in 1936 when he convinced Clark to invest company money into the development of The Programeter, a mechanical device attached to a radio to record when the set was turned on, how long it was on, and to what stations it was tuned when it was on - the prototype of A.C. Nielsen’s Audimeter.
The two partners stopped short of buying the finished product for $50,000 - deciding to stick with Telephone Coincidental as their methodology of choice. Their reasoning was simple. The mechanical system couldn’t report if anyone was actually listening to the radio when it was on. (1)
Clark and Hooper decided amicably to part ways in 1938. Hooper left with the nine-employee radio division which accounted for 20% of the company’s income and Clark kept the larger publishing divisions with 80% of the partnership’s revenue.
Hooper biographer Frank Nye asked Clark about the split in 1957. Clark recalled, “I always felt about Hoop just as I did after our first meeting - that he was one of the most brilliant and enjoyable characters I have ever known. He was a loyal and honest partner and our five years of intensive business association was one of the most successful partnerships I have ever known about.”
Hooper’s Poll Vaults To Prominence. C.E. Hooper, Inc., funded with loans from Hoop’s life insurance, opened its doors for business in May, 1938. The monthly Network Radio ratings service didn’t miss a beat in its transition of ownership. Several months later Chicago marketing research giant Arthur Nielsen offered Hooper $250,000 for the business. Hoop turned down the tempting offer but wisely kept the door open - just in case. (2)
Then came Hooper's epiphany - the turning point in his struggle for recognition and acceptance against the larger CAB. It happened when Hoop was having lunch with a prospective subscriber. He was asked to define in one word exactly what he was selling. As Nye reports, Hooper thought for a moment, probably traced a forefinger over his trim mustache, then smiled broadly and said emphatically, “I’m selling Hooperatings!”
Claude Hooper had just given himself a brand name, a catchy brand name, and more importantly, the essence of a tangible branded product to publicize and market. General Foods didn’t sell fruit flavored gelatin - it sold Jello. Kimberly-Clark didn’t sell paper tissues - it sold Kleenex. Claude Hooper wasn’t selling radio audience research - he was selling Hooperatings.
Hoop the pitchman went to work. He courted the press with parties and distributed monthly “First Fifteen Hooperating” rankings for nighttime network programs and “Top Ten Hooperating” lists of the most popular daytime shows. Newspapers reprinted the Hooperatings and Hooper’s publicity machine began running on a regular schedule, reaching millions of readers every month. For the first time radio listeners could see how their favorite programs were faring every month in the ratings race - the Hooperatings race - and follow them like baseball standings. It didn’t take long for radio comedians pick up on this popularity and jump on Hooper’s promotional bandwagon. Bob Hope said it best, “A Hooperating is an ulcer with a decimal point.”
The CAB soon found itself playing continual defense against Hooper’s publicity barrage and his good-natured digs against its methodology - barbs that had many in the radio industry beginning to question the Crossley system. The reluctant networks and their local affiliates were becoming Hooper converts and subscribers.
Hooper piled the competitive pressure on CAB in 1938 by extending his network radio polling hours to include daytime programming - encompassing all sponsored programs from 9:00 a.m. until 10:30 p.m. The following year his service was expanded to include the West Coast - and tripling the national sampling from 400 to 1,200 calls per half hour, totaling over two million calls annually. The reluctant networks, stations and ad agencies were becoming Hooper converts and his subscriber list was fast approaching 100.
Quantity Trumps Quality. A publicity bonus for Hoop came along when an indignant Eddie Cantor told the press that said he could disprove the validity of Hooper research. Cantor had an axe to grind with his Hooperatings which had fallen nearly 40% over the course of two seasons. Lacking any evidence to invalidate Hooper’s methodology, the comedian accused the ratings service of favoring “lower class” programs over those of “higher quality.”
Hooper took Cantor and his other critics to school with his widely circulated response: “Please remember that ratings aren’t intended to, and don’t evaluate programs. They are not criticisms. They are measurements. Because a symphony gets a 4.0 rating and Fibber McGee & Molly gets a 28.0, we don’t say that Fibber is seven times as good. We merely report that seven times as many people listened to him.”
Hooper’s monthly reports were in a continual state of refinement with increasingly detailed information while the CAB fell further behind in its feeble, committee-directed reactions. The CAB finally modified its methodology in 1942 to Same Day Recall. Hooper countered by doubling his evening Telephone Coincidental reports, polling both the first and third weeks of every month. Hooper’s operators were now making over 4.5 Million calls per year.
The race was really over later in 1942 when the radio networks began to withdraw their support from CAB which amounted to 40% of its annual $350,000 in revenues. Hooper continued to apply the marketing pressure, drumming-in his “brand” whenever the occasion arose. An example of Hooper’s name promotion is found in his memo enclosed in the Hooperatings following a New York elevator operators’ strike on September 25, 1945: Your advance Hooperatings and this complete report go to you on schedule this week, as usual, because a force of loyal Hooperettes and Hooperites walked 13 flights of stairs at least twice daily to serve you.
The Cooperative Analysis of Broadcasting finally threw in the towel on August 2, 1946, and negotiated to sell its list of 102 remaining subscribers to Hooper. (3) Time magazine reported CAB’s collapse like an obituary: “Radio’s most famous linesman passed into limbo last week. The Cooperative Analysis of Broadcasting, Inc, sponsor of the ‘Crossley rating’ system, closed its Manhattan office and went out of business. Cause of death: Radiomen decided last summer that the industry-financed CAB was duplicating the independent telephone poll of C. E. Hooper.”
But Hooper’s adversaries died hard. Shortly after the CAB folded, the NAB established the Broadcast Measurement Bureau, (BMB), and poured $1.25 Million into a survey mailed to a million households. The experiment was an expensive flop. Hooper added insult to injury when he told NAB members footing the bill that his firm could have conducted the identical field research for half the cost!
More and more broadcasters, once resentful of Hooper intruding into their business and deflating their cushy CAB ratings, signed local station contracts with the enthusiastic little man whose name had become synonymous with ratings. By 1947, Hooper had over 600 subscribers, each paying from $125 to $1300 per month. The cash flow allowed Hooper to expand into an early Hooperatings service for television in 1948. All of this was being closely observed by A.C. Nielsen.
Know When To Fold ‘Em… Arthur Nielsen had introduced his company’s original service, tracking grocery and drug store purchases, in 1934. It was a phenomenal success. Eight years later Nielsen expanded into radio audience research with the Audimeter system similar to the Programeter that Clark and Hooper had turned down in 1936.
With television a growing phenomenon in 1948, Nielsen’s firm was eager to expand its broadcast ratings business. The fastest way to expand was take over the competition. Nielsen set it sights - again - on C.E. Hooper. Claude Hooper, meanwhile, was constantly traveling, lecturing and selling. A welcome guest in most any network, station or ad agency executive’s office, Hooper picked up the insights of insiders about the future of the broadcast industry. It was knowledge that he would employ when takeover talks with Nielsen got serious.
First reports of Nielsen’s attempt to buy Hooper’s radio and television rating services surfaced in December, 1949. Hoop had seen the handwriting on the wall: Network Television programs would soon dwarf the popularity of Network Radio shows. Network Radio would become a supplemental service - primarily of news and special events - to local stations that were expanding in both number and popularity. Local radio was where the action - and clients - would be in the mid-1950's and beyond.
Hooper sold his national radio and television network rating services to Nielsen in March, 1950, for an estimated $650,000 - a sum that was up 160% from Nielsen’s 1938 offer. But Hoop shrewdly kept his company’s local market radio services where his Hooperatings would remain the ratings benchmark for another 20 years.
Claude Hooper had a zest for living as well as working. He was an avid outdoorsman who loved fishing and hunting wherever his business travels would take him. On December 15, 1954, he was hunting from a propeller driven airboat in Utah with a friend from Salt Lake City’s KSL Radio. The boat hung up on a sandbar and Hooper jumped out to free it. He fell into the boat’s unshielded whirling propeller and was killed instantly. He was joined in death just a few years later by the kind of Network Radio that made him famous.
Arthur C. Nielsen died at age 82 in 1980. Archibald Crossley who was first to survey radio listening in 1927 and gave ratings their name, was the last of Network Radio's three famous pollsters to die - in 1985 at the age of 88.
(1) Hooper would later use this competitive argument when Nielsen introduced its Audimeter in 1946, headlining one of his many memos to clients, “They Have To Be Listening To Be Sold!”
(2) Arthur Nielsen and Arch Crossley both became Claude Hooper's personal friends.
(3) By this time Arch Crossley had virtually divorced himself from the CAB to focus on political polling where he established himself as a leader in the field with contemporaries Elmo Roper and George Gallup.
This post is in part abridged from Network Radio Ratings, 1932-1953.
Copyright © 2012 & 2018, Jim Ramsburg, Estero FL Email: tojimramsburg@gmail.com