SMS -- an audience measurement tool for television?

We’ve worked on many television programmes with an SMS text feature — whether it’s a vote, survey, game or straight forward text-to-screen.  Always, always, we would read or hear about the audience figures for that programme and wonder how if 10 million people were supposed to be watching, how come the service only received 400 text messages in an hour?  OR sometimes it was the other way round: a rated audience of about 200,000 — and the programme would receive 15,000 texts.

Anyway, I mention this because ContentSutra carries a story on this from Exchange4media.com.  They mention that:

Channels have seen an amazing correlation between real time SMS response levels and TRP data published days later. In fact, they can now even predict with surprising accuracy their own TRPs as soon as a programme is aired. No need to wait for published data to tell you if you have a hit or flop in your hands.

This goes both ways though.  I firmly believe you can also see what programmes have nonsense audience ratings by taking a look at their corresponding SMS traffic.

Check out the full article(s) here: Link