The media industry has been warned to get its house in order ahead of the launch of the new currency for published media early next year.
Audience Measurement for Publishers (AMP), which will launch in February 2018, is part of an ambitious reform of readership measurement in the UK, ensuring a cross-platform approach that fully reflects the digital and print nature of modern published media.
The Publishers Audience Measurement Company (PAMCo) will launch AMP in nine months, creating an entirely new Joint Industry Currency (JIC) that will sit alongside the likes of TV’s Barb and radio’s Rajar.
Speaking at the 2017 PPA festival, which saw publishers, agencies and marketers gather to discuss the future of the sector, Mediacom’s head of press trading, Adam Crow, warned time was running out to make the necessary internal changes to use the new currency.
“It’s now on advertisers, agencies and media owners to start gearing up to be AMP ready,” Crow said. “Only if we have all our processes and training sorted will we be able to sell it through to clients.”
Crow added that agencies should sort their work-streams immediately, stating that Mediacom has already set them up to cover trading and technical processes, with a team of people working on the preparations to ensure its success.
It is widely believed that AMP will give publishers a much needed boost by allowing them to trade across both digital and print platforms, and overturns a system that has been in place for more than 60 years in the form of the National Readership Survey (NRS).
“The narrative for publishers in recent years has been very narrow and extremely negative,” said Immediate Media’s MD of advertising, Duncan Tickell. “But this is about getting back on the front foot.
“If you look at the scale of our brands compared to 10 or 15 years ago, they have been transformed. But the mood music has been incredibly negative. It’s bonkers. And it’s because we’ve only been talking about digital in one bucket and print in a separate one.”
Tickell said that PAMCo and AMP represent a “big step forward” in being able to demonstrate that across different platforms, many publishers are growing, healthy businesses and that a successful launch should help attract more marketing dollars.
In the meantime, PAMCo is running a series of educational events to help people learn more about the changes. Further details available on the PAMco website.
