Claude Ernest Hooper was born on May 31, 1898 in Kingsville, Ohio, United States. He was the son of Alfred Ernest Hooper and Clementina Charlotte MacEwen, both natives of Canada. His father was a Baptist minister whose numerous parish assignments led to the family's residing in several New York and Massachusetts towns.
Hooper graduated from high school in Chicopee, Massachussets, in 1917 and received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Amherst College in 1921, although his schooling was interrupted by brief service as a private in the United States Army in 1918. His family's modest resources required that Hooper finance his education by door-to-door selling, a practice he continued while attending the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. He earned a Master of Business Administration degree from that institution in 1923.
Hooper worked for a savings and loan company in Yakima, Washington, and in 1923-1924 he returned to the East to go into advertising. In a succession of jobs he became aware of the problem that he would later try to solve for the broadcasting industry: How can the mass media measure their audience and determine the reach and effectiveness of their commercial appeals? Hooper was advertising manager for the Harvard Business Review from 1924 to 1926 and for Scribner's magazine from 1926 to 1929.
From 1929 to 1931 Hooper was an account executive with the advertising firm of Doremus and Company. He then joined the market research firm of Daniel Starch to study the readership of printed advertising, research he continued after he left Starch in 1934 to form Clark-Hooper with an Amherst friend, Lloyd M. Clark. Although the new firm focused on printed advertising, Hooper also began accepting clients who needed reliable knowledge of the radio audience. During the mid-1930s he developed his research techniques and began assembling a body of comparative data.
In 1938 Clark-Hooper was dissolved and Hooper formed a new corporation, C. E. Hooper, to continue the broadcast audience research. Hooper had been preceded in the audience-measurement field by Archibald M. Crossley, who since 1930 had been measuring audience characteristics for the advertiser-subsidized Cooperative Analysis of Broadcasting (CAB). He challenged the results of Crossley's "recall method, " which polled listeners on their behavior over a period of up to twenty-four hours prior to the inquiry, with his "coincidental method, " which asked respondents if they were presently listening to the radio and, if so, to what program and station. Deriving its data from random telephone calls made in more than thirty metropolitan areas of "equal network opportunity, " Hooper's organization sold several kinds of information to the networks and advertisers--the proportion of those called who were listening to the radio during the airtime of a particular sponsored show (sets in use); the proportion of sets in use listening to that program (share of audience); and the percentage of total homes called listening to the program (the program's Hooperating). A Hooperating of 20. 0--a good rating--meant that one out of every five homes called (including homes in which no one answered the telephone and those in which the radio was not in use) was listening to the program in question.
The superiority of Hooper's method combined with his aggressive salesmanship to promote a growing acceptance of his research findings. He ably defended his techniques and criticized those of his competitors in Radio Audience Measurement (1944), written with Matthew N. Chappell. In mid-1946 the CAB dropped the Crossley ratings. Hooper was at the height of his success and influence. His company grossed nearly $1 million annually. But the question of what, exactly, they measured had already become controversial. Hooper carefully asserted that he offered only an index of comparative program popularity in major cities. As utilized by networks and sponsors, however, the ratings functioned as a measure of program quality and often became the sole basis of policy decisions. The conflict inherent in the popular arts between business and artistic needs found expression in the increasing criticism of "ratingitis" by performers and columnists.
Hooper's methods were increasingly questioned, since his techniques did not measure listening behavior in rural areas or in smaller communities, for example, or in homes without telephones. In addition to mounting criticism, Hooper faced tough new competition from the A. C. Nielsen Company, which had in 1943 begun to measure audience characteristics with a mechanical device attached to radio sets. While Nielsen's method had its limitations--Hooper pointed out that set use was not identical with listening behavior--it increasingly won clients. In March 1950, Hooper sold his national rating service to Nielsen for a reported $600, 000. He retained his local surveys of radio and television in major urban markets.
For all his influence and publicity, the public knew little of Hooper's personal and family life. He so successfully concealed his name that Time once referred to him as Charles Hooper (December 30, 1945). During a duck-hunting expedition on Utah's Great Salt Lake he was fatally injured in a boating accident; he died shortly after arriving at a Salt Lake City hospital.
Hooper was a Protestant.
Hooper was independent in politics.
Short, blond, and mustached, Hooper was an intense, voluble, confident professional. Both as a businessman and as a sportsman, he traveled extensively from his New York firm and his South Norwalk, Connecticut, home.
In September 1927 Hooper married Emily Judson Reed; they had one daughter.
