C. E. Hooper
audience measurement company
The C. E. Hooper Company was an American company which measured radio and television ratings during the Golden Age of Radio. Founded in 1934 by Claude E. Hooper (1898–1954), the company provided information on the most popular radio shows of the era.
Claude E. Hooper became well known for his radio audience measurement systems, Hooper Ratings or "Hooperatings". Before beginning work in radio measurement, Hooper was an auditor of magazine circulation. Hooper worked within the market research organization of Daniel Starch until 1934, when he left to start a research company with colleague Montgomery Clark, Clark-Hooper. In the fall of 1934, the company launched syndicated radio measurement services in 16 cities. Clark left the business in 1938 and Hooper continued the firm as C. E. Hooper, Inc.
The survey method employed by Hooper was designed with the help of George Gallup (see Gallup Poll), whose input Hooper later acknowledged as key. It differed from the method being used by the advertising industry service, the Cooperative Analysis of Broadcasting (CAB); in particular, Clark-Hooper's method involved contacting listeners during the shows being analyzed as opposed to the following day. In the industry, the method was dubbed "telephone coincidence"; it superseded CAB's earlier method ("telephone recall") as the industry standard, and Hooper's prevalence eventually led to the 1946 dissolution of CAB.
In 1948, as the radio networks began venturing into television, Hooper began measuring TV ratings as well.
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This entry incorporates text from “C. E. Hooper” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.