C. E. Hooper, Inc., produced widely accepted reports on radio listening which dominated the field of audience measurement from the late 1930's through the 1940's. Known as Hooperatings, these reports provided broadcasters and advertisers with information on program audience size in selected U. S. cities serviced by the major networks.
The Hooperatings were first produced in the fall of 1934 by Clark-Hooper, Inc., a newly incorporated market research firm of Claude E. Hooper (1898-1954) and L. Montgomery Clark. Initially concerned with the print as well as the broadcast media, the joint enterprise ended in 1938 when Clark left and Hooper began to devote himself exclusively to measuring radio listening. Hooperatings were started at the urging of magazine publishers, who were concerned that network program audiences be more adequately measured. They felt that the reports of the Cooperative Analysis of Broadcasting (CAB) of Archibald Crossley were exaggerating the size of radio audiences. Relying initially on the coincidental method of George Gallup rather than the Crossley “recall” method of telephone interviewing, Hooper succeeded in deflating the CAB figures and later, in 1946, replaced the Crossley service. Although he had begun measuring television audiences and had refined and expanded his radio services by the late 1940's, Hooper bowed to the national competition of A. C. Nielsen in 1950. Until his death in 1954, Hooper concentrated, by agreement with Nielsen, on local radio and television ratings.
For additional information see Frank W. Nye's “Hoop” of Hooperatings: The Man and His Work (Norwalk, Conn., 1957) in the Society Library.
