Radio: New Sponsor

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For the past 16 years, Hooperatings have served as the stock market of radio. Sponsors bought and disposed of entertainers largely on the basis of the fluctuations in their popularity reported by the semimonthly charts of C. E. Hooper, Inc. Other researchers, and in particular Chicago's A. C. Nielsen Co., indignantly charged that the Hooper system, based on phone calls and limited to 36 large cities, was both incomplete and subject to error "as high as 40%." Gadget-minded Arthur Nielsen in his surveys used Audimeters, which are attached to radios in selected homes and record on film the time, station and frequency of use of the set.

Last week this intramural argument was finally resolved; Nielsen bought Hooper's network reporting services for an estimated $600,000. Now top dog in the national radio field, Tabulator Nielsen expects to fulfill all Hooper's old network contracts with his own twice-monthly rating report. Said he jubilantly: "Radio was being short-changed by a system that measured only urban areas. But we'll soon bring order out of chaos."

Hooper's withdrawal from a dominant position in the industry promised to be temporary. He is holding on to a variety of local research activities. On his return next month from an Arizona vacation, he plans to introduce a gadget of his own: a new automatic device for measuring TV shows. Giving up his national rating system without regret, he said: "We rode network radio up, and now we're letting someone else ride it down."