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Audimeter

Loved reading this story about the first audience measurement device for radio

“At first glance a sample of 200 Audimeters may seem rather small, but it must be kept in mind that each of these remarkable instruments produces, in the course of a year, an amount of information approximately equal to that which could be obtained from about 500,000 coincidental telephone calls!” Nielsen wrote.

Today, to gain an understanding of the customer, companies try listen in to everything they say with smart speaker, monitor what goes on in their homes, how they drive their cars never mind the mundane business of watching their every online move. 

The volume of data all of this produces is hundreds of orders of magnitude bigger than what the Audimeters ever did. So if the volume of data was proportional to the intelligence that could be derived from it, I wonder what the appropriate expectations would be for today if back this was possible:

"NRI clients are now receiving figures which reveal, for each of many important programs, the sales produced per radio dollar expended."

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