TORONTO – New innovations and approaches to audience measurement are needed to ensure advertisers are receiving a good return on their investment in today’s fragmented media world. That was the message voiced by several speakers during BBM Canada’s Staying Tuned 2009 conference held at the Toronto Marriott Eaton Centre Hotel on Tuesday.
The conference kicked off with a keynote address by Pamela Wallin, newly appointed Canadian senator, former broadcaster and senior advisor to the president of the Americas Society and the Council of Americas in New York City.
“As I stand here today, I know that the potential has never actually been greater for the (broadcasting) business,” Wallin said. “And it’s also the most frightening time to be living through the issues that are facing broadcasting and media companies….We all have a very daunting challenge ahead.”
The current shift in media usage as consumers pick and choose their information and entertainment sources is creating disintermediation between media and advertising companies and their intended audience targets, Wallin said. Although she said she believes television will continue to attract a large amount of advertising revenue, broadcasters need to be able to measure audience engagement even more finely and more discretely than they do currently.
Pete Doe, managing director of NielsenConnections, a division of The Nielsen Company based in New York City, said his organization is focused on using data fusion to integrate audience measurement currency data from various sources, whether they be set-top box, Internet or mobile panels.
“There’s a potential huge goldmine of information, but it’s sort of raw material. It’s a bit like oil under the ground – you need to refine it to make it useful,” Doe said.
In the view of Anne Crassweller, president of NADbank (Newspaper Audience Databank), it is still too soon in Canada to move to Web-based audience measurement panels. NADbank’s own research found no consumer demographic or behavioural consistency among various audience measurement data sources, such as online panels and RDD (Random Digit Dial) telephone samples. And in fact, parallel tests of multiple online panels also revealed a lack of consistency among audience responses.
At this point, there does not seem to be an obvious “conversion factor” or “weighting” approach to bridge the differences, Crassweller said, adding that NADbank is in the early stages of working with Environics on an attitudinal weighting methodology.
“We need to provide accurate data for media to be used as currency for buying and selling advertising,” Crassweller said.
For quite some time, the media industry has been moving away from a “diary” approach to audience measurement, said Jim MacLeod, president & CEO of BBM Canada. That transition will effectively be complete for BBM Canada when it rolls out combined Portable People Meter (PPM) radio and television panels later this year. Initial rollout in Toronto will occur in April or May, with PPM commercialization scheduled for Sept. 1.
BBM Canada is using Arbitron’s PPM devices, which are pager-sized audience measurement devices that are “personal, portable and passive”, MacLeod explained. Participants are expected to wear the PPM devices for at least eight hours a day. The PPM records radio listening and television viewing data by capturing coded signals. When the PPM is inserted in a docking station at the end of the day, the meter data is transmitted to BBM Canada for processing.
Mark O’Neill, founding partner and managing member of ROI Media Solutions in Los Angeles, said he thinks PPM technology could help bring about a renaissance for radio. One advantage to BBM Canada’s implementation of PPM is it allows radio listening data to be captured on a minute-by-minute basis, as opposed to quarter-hour blocks. Furthermore, PPM measures actual radio exposure instead of relying on participants’ recall of their radio listening habits, O’Neill said.
According to O’Neill, with new PPM analysis tools, radio broadcasters will be able to compete with digital media for advertising dollars because they will be able to measure the immediacy and engagement of their listening audience, as opposed to merely demonstrating incidental radio listening habits.
Another innovative approach to measuring audience media consumption is eye-tracking technology currently being used by Havas Sports in France. During a presentation, Julian Vivier, director of research for Havas Sports, showed how eye-tracking technology could measure the effectiveness of sponsorship during sporting events.
Using the example of a Rugby World Cup match broadcast on the Internet, Vivier was able to demonstrate which sponsors’ brands were looked at the most, and which screen locations and camera angles were most effective at capturing audience attention. This is vital information for advertisers and sponsors who want to maximize brand exposure in the cluttered world of sports jersey logos and field-level signage, Vivier said.
With live sporting events creating their own unique opportunities for advertisers, at the other end of the spectrum is the challenge brand marketers face as television customers increasingly use digital video recorders (DVRs) to time shift their TV viewing.
While it would appear at first that DVR usage means less brand exposure because of the tendency of television viewers to fast-forward through advertisements, in actual fact advertisers are gaining more audience than they would if consumers were not using DVRs to record broadcasts they otherwise would not see, said Bruce Goerlich, former president of strategic resources for ZenithOptimedia.
A new television audience metric, known as C3, is being used to address the issue of DVR-recorded television programs, Goerlich said. On average, most DVR playback occurs within three days, he said. As such, C3 provides an average commercial minute rating of a TV program, including up to three days of non-fast-forwarded playback.
“Don’t be afraid of the DVR,” Goerlich advised television broadcasters and advertisers, emphasizing again that DVRs can actually result in more viewership of programming and therefore more brand exposure.
Linda Stuart is a Toronto-based freelance writer and covered Staying Tuned for Cartt.ca.
