The publishing industry has now embraced the need to start measuring people’s reading behaviour as communication gestalt.
The media research industry in South Africa is sailing in uncharted waters. The good ship AMPS has lost its main mast and the industry lies becalmed in the Media Doldrums waiting for the Establishment Survey (ES) to sail into sight in April 2017, carrying the latest navigational charts so that we can all resume our journey into the unknown.
Understandably for many passengers, emotions are running high and people are looking for a captain to keelhaul, but the truth is that we, the media sailors, are to blame for the impasse by refusing to change tack even though the prevailing winds of media consumption had dramatically shifted.
People simply don’t consume media the way they have done in the past. As a newspaper reader, with a specific news content affinity, it is not the fact that the source of my content is printed or delivered via a mobile device that is significant, it is the content itself. Technology is merely a delivery mechanism facilitating my reading; it isn’t a separate medium.
Performance guru Dr. James Harrington once observed, “Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement. If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t improve it.”
Measure it right
When it comes to newspapers (and magazines for that matter), the good news for 2017 is that the publishing industry has embraced the need to start measuring people’s reading behaviour as communication gestalt. If we measure it right we can start to get the creative messaging right. And if we get the messaging right we’ll get the advertising ROI right.
In the Establishment Survey (ES), the obsolete AMPS definition of newspaper readership, which was essentially a measurement of ‘ink on fingers’, has been thrown overboard to create space for a platform agnostic measure of reading as a behaviour. In ES reading means that … you have personally read or paged through a newspaper or newspaper article irrespective of whether it was a paper copy, or read online on a computer, mobile device or tablet.
The problem is that AMPS has been measuring consumer exposure to newsprint not consumer exposure to published content. So, AMPS 2015 reports a 5% decline in the Citizen “readership” but online readership of the Citizen has increased 31% over the same period. The Times drops 25% in AMPS readership but unique browsers increase by 17%. Business Day AMPs readership would appear to be stagnant but reading of published online BDFM content has increased 49%.
A basket of Independent Media titles shows declines in AMPS readership but reading of IOL is up 66%.
Published word as powerful as ever
From a holistic perspective, there are more people reading than ever before and the published word is as powerful as ever.
This platform agnostic approach will be carried through into the new Publisher Research Council reading currency PAMS (Publisher Audience Measurement Survey) which is due for release in September 2017.
In addition to changing the reading behaviour metric, the PRC has also recognised the need to generate a regular stream of agile data regarding the habits of readers. After scrutinising global best practices for measuring reading in a digital era, the PRC has approved a methodology for the PAMS currency, which will utilise a hybrid of traditional face to face interviews in conjunction with developing and maintaining an online reader panel.
In the past, AMPS measured what newspaper readers did yesterday in order to explain what they do today. In 2017 PAMS will begin the process of continuously measuring what readers are doing today, in order to accurately predict what they will do tomorrow.
The course has been charted and the sails are set. In 2017 newspapers and publishers will finally embark on a new journey in the Brave New Media World.
Gordon Muller (@mzansimedia) is a joint general manager of the Publisher Research Council.
This story was first published in The Media Yearbook 2017. Click on the cover to read the digizine.
The Publisher Research Council (PRC) gears up for a busy year
Peter Langschmidt, general manager of the PRC, says 2017 “heralds a new dawn of media research in South Africa”. He says that after 40 years of a single source AMPS, “the industry is moving to the global model of a hub Establishment Survey (ES) with linked donor currency surveys and with the PRC being an integral spoke”.
Langschmidt says the PRC’s ‘Read to Remember’ slogan underpins its commitment to “researching and better understanding of both the quality and quantity of our audiences – we will get closer to understanding how reading facilitates learning and brand recall better than any other medium”.
The PRC website has been designed to become the de facto resource for everything reading related, including all primary research resources, white papers, international discussions and best practice,” he adds.
Projects, studies and upcoming research this year includes Media Synergy, which combines Nielsen Adex data with the GFK consumer scanner panel sales of 3 000 representative South African shoppers. This clearly shows that when including print and online in a schedule the actual sales ROI per rand spent is better than TV or radio.
Other upcoming surveys for 2017 include Brand Mapp from WhyFive and Media View by TNS Kantar which will examine the inherent strengths of reading vs other media due for release in April. Our major study for 2017, will be PAMS, a new reading currency survey in SA conducted by Nielsen, incorporating global best practice, due for release in the Sept 2017.
Based along the lines of similar panels like PAMCO in the UK and EMMA in Australia the PRC will begin development of their own panel in 2017. This mobile panel is envisaged to reach around 16 000 respondents in year one. Results will be calibrated and validated against the traditional PAMS face to face methodology before release.
“Publishers have accepted the need to move away from measuring exposure to paper, towards measuring platform-agnostic reading behaviour which can be seen in the ES and PAMS reading questions,” says Langschmidt. “Most of our research will closely follow the release of the two waves of the ES 2017.”
“We will ensure the most complete measurement of reader audiences, across all platforms, to inform effective advertising investment, unlike in the past, when reader research provided advertisers with only the numbers.”
In 2017 the PRC will be releasing six different studies that provide the audience numbers; but in addition, many other measures like perception, trust, multiple exposures, brand awareness and recall, and actual ROI per rand spent.”
