The Publishers Audience Measurement Company (PAMCO) will next year replace the National Readership Survey (NRS) as the organisation which oversees the audience figures for newspapers and magazines.
In a statement issued by newspaper marketing body Newsworks on Thursday (9 April), the creation of PAMCO signals “a new approach to reflect today’s multi-platform media landscape”.
The NRS’s existing CEO, Simon Redican (pictured), will lead the new company.
The Newspaper Publishers’ Association (now the NMA) served notice on the NRS last year as it sought a “contemporary audience measurement system” for published media brands that covered all major routes to market – including print, mobile, tablets, PCs and laptops.
The move sparked extensive debate about the future role of joint industry research and saw the NRS’s current chairman, Simon Marquis, announce he would depart at the end of the year to make way for “new blood” and a new system of governance.
Redican told Newsline that the new company will ensure a much “clearer distinction” between the body that commissions the research and the audience measurement itself, delivered by research supplier(s).
“It’s about our ethos and values,” Redican said. “It’s about putting stakeholder requirements – those of media owners and agencies – at the centre of the new company and adopting a customer service approach which establishes the credibility of the research, but crucially that it is used in a world awash with data.”
A criticism of the NRS was that its governing role in commissioning a survey that met the needs of the industry had become confused with the actual research.
It is expected that PAMCO will represent a blank page in tune with the fact that audiences consume content across different platforms – whereas the NRS was established as a print survey that was forced to add on new platforms, such as tablets and PCs, over time.
The shortlist for the audience measurement contract that PAMCO will appoint now consists of three research providers. They have been asked to submit bids for a future-facing system, which takes account of the growing number of devices and platforms. The successful research provider will be announced later this quarter.
A shadow PAMCO board has also been established. Chaired by Rufus Olins, chief executive of Newsworks, its members include David Newell and Teresa Brookes from the NMA, Barry McIlheney from the PPA, Sue Todd from Magnetic, Jane Ratcliffe from MediaCom, Lynne Robinson from the IPA and Simon Redican.
Redican added: “The stakeholder review of audience measurement was started within weeks of me joining NRS nine months ago and I can reassure the industry that the NRS will continue to deliver until the process is complete and will effect a seamless transition to the new industry audience measurement solution.”
When the new organisation is created, its board will be run by an independent chair and include representatives from key magazine and newspaper companies, as well as ISBA, the IPA, PPA/Magnetic and Newsworks.
The NRS will continue to run until the new system has been approved by the PAMCO board. The changeover will take place in 2016.
