TORONTO – With all TV companies extending their businesses into other media, the need for cross-media audience measurement has never been greater than now, said Mike Bloxham, director of insight and research for Ball State University’s Center for Media Design.
Bloxham was speaking during a plenary session on understanding consumer behaviour at BBM Canada’s Staying Tuned 2009 conference held Tuesday in Toronto.
The current fragmented nature of media has created what Bloxham calls “the curse of the silos”. Audience measurement data has become "siloed", making it difficult for media owners and advertisers to develop effective cross-media strategies or to even attain a “big picture” view of their audience.
“There are no ‘siloed’ consumers,” Bloxham said, adding that the media industry needs to change its work and business practices, not just its research practices, to address the challenges presented by consumers’ multimedia consumption. However, he cautioned that those challenges are too many, too multi-faceted and too costly at this point in time.
“Virtually everyone is pursuing cross-media solutions,” Bloxham said. “But they won’t be cheap or easy.”
Bloxham pointed out that media change and societal change are interwoven. Changes in media have a real impact on consumer behaviour, and one key consideration going forward is ensuring consumer behaviour researchers are trained properly and have the right skills to develop effective methodologies and programs, he said.
“Insights are only valuable when they’ve been put into action,” Bloxham added.
Audience aggregation is the focus of research currently being conducted by PhD candidate Jose-Domingo Mora and two of his colleagues at Simon Fraser University’s Segal School of Business.
Recognizing that standard methods of measuring television viewing, such as set-top box meters or portable people meters (PPMs), capture audience data on an individual level, Mora’s group decided to research if group viewing of television programming may result in a more engaged audience.
According to Mora, there is research evidence to suggest that viewers who interact among themselves in connection to certain TV programs pay more attention to those programs. Furthermore, experimental research indicates viewers’ engagement with a TV program in turn increases their awareness of commercials broadcast during the program.
Developing an effective measure of group viewing and its impact on media ratings has been difficult, but Mora said his group has come up with what they call the “index of shared consumption (ISC)”, which they hope will not only help to measure viewer engagement but will also provide early indicators of future program performance.
Using the ISC, household relationships among viewers can be taken into account, allowing researchers to possibly predict which family members may have the most influence when it comes to viewing certain TV programs, Mora said.
He added that his group’s research could be applied to any mass medium that lends itself to viewer or listener aggregation, not just television.
One stumbling block to gathering comprehensive audience measurement data is the current trend toward an increasing number of mobile-phone-only households. Media surveys typically use Random Digit Dial (RDD) datasets, explained Barbara O’Hare, director of survey methods research for Arbitron Inc.
In the United States, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act prohibits auto-dialling of mobile phones and there is no directory of mobile phone numbers available to media researchers. In addition, mobile phone users tend to screen incoming calls, further thwarting the efforts of researchers to include this segment of the population in media surveys, O’Hare said.
Canadian researchers have a slight advantage over their American counterparts in this area, due to the fact there are currently no restrictions on contacting mobile phones, including the use of auto-diallers, in Canada, said Natasha Arzumanian, senior research methodologist at BBM Canada. (except for those who have signed onto the CRTC’s do-not-call list)
BBM Canada’s preliminary research from a TV ratings survey conducted in Montreal in September 2008 suggests respondents who live in mobile-only households watch less television than respondents with land-line telephone service, Arzumanian said.
BBM Canada will expand on this research when it conducts a parallel survey this month in Vancouver, she said.
