MRC pulls RADAR accreditation.

story by Inside Radio

Ad buyers and shareholders alike seem unfazed by news Arbitron’s RADAR national ratings services has lost its Media Ratings Council accreditation. Since RADAR is made up of market-level data which has yet to win the MRC’s blessing in all but three markets, agencies say they had expected the announcement. Arbitron’s stock price jumped 14-cents today.

Of the 43 markets where the PPM service is currently commercialized, the data produced by the PPM services in Houston-Galveston, Riverside-San Bernardino, and Minneapolis-St. Paul are the only ones accredited by the MRC.

The withdrawal is effective with RADAR 107, scheduled to release next Monday, and with the Fall 2010 Nationwide report, which comes out in early March 2011.

Arbitron says it intends to continue to use “commercially reasonable efforts in good faith” to pursue MRC accreditation of its PPM service in each market where it has commercialized or is scheduled to commercialize the service, regain MRC accreditation of the network services and maintain MRC accreditation of currently accredited PPM, diary and software services. Arbitron also notes that it continues to comply with the minimum requirements of the MRC Voluntary Code of Conduct.

Because the withdrawal of accreditation for RADAR occurred late in the production cycle for the release of the RADAR 107 estimates, representation of accreditation from software, data files and related materials will not be removed, Arbitron says. The company plans to directly inform RADAR subscribers of the change in accreditation status.

Dial Global president of operations Charles Steinhauer says, “We believe the marketplace has accepted this data as currency and will continue to utilize these services as Arbitron works to make improvements which will result in accreditation for PPM and its data dependent services.”

Westwood One CEO Rod Sherwood tells Inside Radio he’d like Arbitron to complete the MRC review as soon as possible, but says he’s not worried about the loss of accreditation impacting advertising sales at his company.