Chris Shaw, joint managing director of Universal McCann, praised the introduction of the Quality of Readership Survey and said that if its presence undermines the NRS then “so what?”
Speaking at yesterday’s PPA Magazines ’98 conference Shaw went on to say that NRS was “hardly the most stable currency” and he had lost count of the number of times a title’s circulation had gone down while its readership increased. He even said that the introduction of the new survey may spur NRS to change its ways.
Whilst Shaw said he liked to use ABC data he said that it too could do with updating – for example more frequent reporting and the inclusion of less bulk and international sales.
The overall point of Shaw’s speech was to argue for a research model whereby all the different surveys for all the different media could come together to provide a “total communications package.” One hub of this model would be NRS while adjoining spokes would be QRS, qualitative research and an omnibus study to monitor new magazine and newspaper launches.
Dominic Owens, from BT, then took to the podium and asked the golden question: “will QRS lead to more money being spent on advertising?” First off though he expressed his gratitude to all those involved in producing QRS and praised it for being a “fabulous” piece of research. He denied, however, that it would destabilise the NRS, saying it would sit comfortably on top of the established Survey.
Owens believes that QRS will cause more money to be spent on advertising: for him the key point of QRS is that it will be able to improve creative work, because it measures the type of articles ads are running against. If it allows for improved ad messages then the number of messages placed will surely increase.
This will, of course, mean that the survey will need to be sold to creative departments which, it was acknowledged, will not be an easy task.
When questions were taken from the floor doubt was expressed about how creatives would take this theory. Owens said it would be up to agencies to persuade them, with use of soundbite if necessary, that the use of QRS will enable them to produce work which is “better appreciated”. He finished off by saying that planners would have to be “brave enough” to enter into this debate.
