LOS ANGELES - "If you can put a number on it," Arthur C. Nielsen Jr. said his father once told him, "then you know something."
It was a lesson the younger Nielsen - who died Monday at age 92 - never forgot. His lifelong efforts remade his father's once-obscure Chicago market research firm into a sprawling worldwide measurement giant with a brand name that, in the U.S. at least, became a household synonym for television ratings.
Today - even after his company has undergone ownership changes, not to mention weathered near-continuous industry complaints of supposedly flawed methodology - TV executives still arise before dawn to check out the Nielsens, foretelling the fate of their shows and their careers with each ratings point. In recent years, the company has expanded into measuring online traffic and other new media.
Nielsen, who in 1984 retired from the company that now simply bears his surname, had been suffering from Parkinson's disease and died in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka.
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"Art" Nielsen was born in Winnetka on April 8, 1919, and graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1941. During World War II he served as an officer in the Army Corps of Engineers.
Art Nielsen joined his father's firm at an auspicious time. In the postwar years, the nascent commercial television industry was growing rapidly, but there was no clear and universally accepted means of telling how many people were actually watching the programs. The issue was of vital interest to sponsors trying to determine whether the programs were worthy of financial support.
The Nielsens developed a system that sampled a small portion of U.S. viewers.
