Ten top tips for sexing up your research press release
It’s silly season and news is drying up – so it’s a good job Research the Media’s Richard Marks is on hand to share his top ten ways to derive whatever meaning you like from figures that should really be telling a different story.
What are you reading this for? No one reads opinion columns in August. After all, nothing happens and everyone in Medialand is away. It’s the height of the summer: the top rated show in the UK last week was New Tricks and even they are in Gibraltar.
It’s also the silly season for press releases, with the nationals desperate for anything to fill their papers. After all, there are only so many times you can run articles about Malcolm Tucker swearing at Daleks.
So, seeing as it’s just the two of us around at the moment, strictly off the record and just between us, here are my top ten tips for ‘sexing up’ press releases about research. See how many you recognise:
1. Commission a survey on what people ‘ever’ and ‘regularly’ do and then drop those words from the press release. So you can say that 65% people watch TV on their mobile phone and let headline writers write about the death of television.
65% of people doing something at some point in time is not the same as them spending 65% of their time doing it, but it is surprising how often this approach goes unchallenged and reach is assumed to be share.
2. Frustrated that the official audience figures don’t show what you want them to? Want to prove that the Internet has overtaken other media? Put a couple of claimed recall questions on a national ‘Omnibus Survey’ operated by one of the big research companies.
What people recall doing will be distorted, and you can put out a press release quoting a major research brand as saying that traditional media is dead. Don’t feel at all guilty that you have spent three grand undermining industry surveys that cost millions to run.
3. Percentages are not your friend. They typically put figures in a helpful context – better to focus on grossed up numbers out of context…
4. …unless you are trying to show that you are growing from a very low base in which case you can talk about 100% growth in viewing levels if your viewer had his girlfriend round last weekend.
5. Disappointed that so few people are using your service? Take it up a level and focus on volume of usage. So instead of 1% of the US population using your service for just ten minutes a day, better to say that over 17 million hours were spent with your service last month. Be sure not to give any context (see point 3). This is also known as ‘Numberwang‘.
6. Want to give some additional gravitas to your survey? Call it a census. Sounds big and most people don’t speak Latin, so only researchers or Boris Johnson may take offence. Of course the government may wonder why they waste tens of millions of pounds of taxpayers money trying to interview the whole population every ten years when they could just ask a couple of thousand people…
7. Don’t like a TV programme? Focus on the overnight figures, particularly for dramas. By the time you update the online article with the consolidated figure a week later – and undermine your argument – no one will notice as the news cycle has moved on.
Here’s a great example from the Daily Mail where updated text has been added to totally contradict the headline, but the headline remains.
8. Literally sex your release up by getting sex in the headline. Not easy in the world of research, but hats off to this mobile phone study for telling us that one in ten use their mobile during sex (see also point 1). Time Use studies are also a treasure trove of such worrying information.
9. It’s quite easy to convey growth using audience measurement data, because there are so many different time periods and metrics to choose from. Your radio station may be going down year-on year, but perhaps it’s up compared to last quarter, in your target demographic, or for your flagship show.
Reach may be down but average hours are probably up as a result. Sometimes the latest RAJAR figures can seem like a children’s birthday party – everyone goes home with a prize if they look hard enough.
10. Want to preserve an air of mystery? Then don’t quote any figures at all. This is the most radical approach, so you need to be in a position of power to do it. We are told that Netflix commissioning the House Of Cards series has changed the shape of TV forever.
However we don’t know how many people saw the series and Netflix certainly isn’t going to tell us, as they don’t need to – they don’t take advertising. Audience figures are just so last decade: it was a success and that’s all we need to know.
Meanwhile the new CBS hit series Under The Dome is also doing well on Amazon Prime’s VOD service, but even CBS itself isn’t being told by Amazon exactly how well. So perhaps this is the way forward, just say how proud you are of the performance of a show or service and then make people feel retro and old school if they ask for any numbers.
People love a mystery and will write articles trying to speculate by extrapolating from general web traffic. Even better, they may try and look at Twitter activity to make a guess. Remember when papers would run headlines estimating viewing based on record power surges caused by people switching on kettles after the game ended?
A growing proportion of media usage is happening within walled garden services, so this is a trend for the future. Sadly this innovative approach has arrived too late to prevent such potential TV classics as Don’t Scare The Hare and Celebrity Wrestling from falling victim to the tyranny of actual audience measurement.
So there you have it, but remember – all of this is off the record, you didn’t hear it from me.
Richard Marks is the Director of Research The Media. Find out more here.