One has to wonder.
On the one hand; it is never safe to bet against the awfulness of a nontrivial data processing system; whether it’s a legacy nightmare with a downright Lovecraftian lifecyle; or a painfully half-baked and rushed replacement for one; yes it can be that bad.
On the other hand; this sort of chicanery seems like something that would be noticed, even if only by chance in the course of other work, by the humans involved often enough that it wouldn’t be a safe trick to use against an organization that actually takes a hard line on the matter, even if their data processing is actually handled by a time-sharing system hosted within Azathoth the Blind Idiot God. Getting away with it most of the time can still be quite painful if the punishment for the remaining cases is severe(plus, an entity that actually cares would be likely to increase scrutiny of someone discovered to have cheated in the past; making it harder to get away with anything in the future).
This inclines one to wonder if, perhaps, the market forces were such that Nielson, for whatever reasons, more closely identifies with the interests of the broadcasters(or requires their cooperation to a degree that cannot be obtained purely by coercion) more than it does with the interests of the advertisers; and an informal arrangement exists where, within unstated but mutually understood limits, broadcasters are afforded a little ‘professional courtesy’ when it comes to burying certain embarassments; presumably as long as they don’t do it often enough or blatantly enough to upset the business.
