"Radarating"

An ultimate in program popularity testing was promised last week by CBS. If its new radar-like spy system lives up to its pressagentry, program directors will be all but able to read listeners' minds.

Instantaneous Audience Measurement Service was invented by Dr. Peter C. Goldmark, 40, CBS's bashful, brilliant chief engineer and color television genius. I.A.M.S.'s listening posts will be little black gadget boxes attached to the family radio in "scientifically selected" homes. These boxes, responding to signals from station transmitters, will flash radio messages back at the rate of one a minute. At the station, these thousands of messages will be electronically counted and translated into graphs showing a program's minute-to-minute popularity.

CBS's gadget is not so new as it sounds; the U.S. Patent Office has similar inventions on file, dating back to 1931. The big difference is that CBS plans to give I.A.M.S. a dress preview early next year, with a national hookup to follow as soon as possible.

If it works as promised, I.A.M.S. will be bound to affect the present polling systems that radio puts so much faith in. But radio's biggest pollster seems to be breathing easily. Said Claude Ernest Hooper: "We fully expect that every measurement we are making currently will still be continuing ten years from today." What's more, he added, Hooper has a similar device of its own--but "we anticipate that [it] will supply supplemental information only, if it proves useful at all."

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