Music to Fill Prescriptions By

Walgreen Co. (Deerfield, Ill.) has announced it will participate in the market trial of the Arbitron Portable People Meter (PPM) system at 189 stores in the Houston area.

Beginning in September, Walgreens stores will use encoded audio programming from In-Store Broadcasting Network (Salt Lake City), which provides an in-store music service and broadcast advertising network. The audio programming will be embedded with unique PPM identification codes supplied by Arbitron. These codes are inaudible and can only be detected by a PPM. When an Arbitron PPM survey participant enters one of these retail outlets, the Portable People Meter will detect the codes and report that the individual has been exposed to its in-store audio programming.

According to Scarborough Research, Walgreens stores are visited by at least 47 percent of the adult population in Houston over the course of a typical month.

Walgreens joins The Kroger Co. (Cincinnati), Best Buy (Richfield Park, Minn.), The Gap (San Francisco), Gallery Furniture (Houston), National CineMedia (Centennial, Colo.) and Old Navy (San Francisco) as retail participants in the demonstration.

Portable People Meter is Arbitron’s newest audience measurement service. It uses a passive audience measurement device — about the size of a small cell phone — to track consumer exposure to media and entertainment, including broadcast, cable and satellite television; terrestrial, satellite and online radio as well as cinema advertising and many types of place-based electronic media. Carried throughout the day by randomly selected survey participants, the PPM device can track when and where they watch television, listen to radio as well as how they interact with other forms of media and entertainment. The PPM detects inaudible codes embedded in the audio portion of media and entertainment content delivered by broadcasters, content providers and distributors. At the end of the day, the meter is placed in a docking station that extracts the codes and sends them to a central computer. The PPM is equipped with a motion sensor, a patented quality control feature unique to the system, which allows Arbitron to confirm the compliance of the PPM survey participants every day.

In-Store Broadcasting Network provides an in-store music service and broadcast-advertising network for delivery within supermarkets and drugstores. Its music programming is housed locally on a music server at each location containing the music library and In-Store Broadcasting Network’s proprietary scheduling and delivery software. This software enables each server to receive new ads and playlists as often as necessary transferred over the Internet. The playlists dictate what will be played during the following week in that particular store.