On the final day of the MRG Conference in Budapest, John Stockley and Tim Farmer from Ipsos-RSL showed what existing industry surveys can tell us about emerging technologies.
They explained that convergence can lead to PCs becoming TVs, radios or newsagents and questioned what implication this would have on media consumption.
The benefits of using existing industry surveys to understand this, Stockley argued, is that their large samples address low incidence, they use accepted methodologies and new entrants are immediately on the gold standard of media research.
Stockley looked at what NRS, BARB’s Establishment Survey and RAJAR can tell us about ownership and usage of various technologies, before Farmer went on to use radio listening as an example of what can be found out.
Using NRS data, Farmer showed that although listening to the radio via the internet is a minority activity, it is not insignificant and has doubled over the past year. BARB, RAJAR and NRS data can all provide insight into radio listening via digital TV and encouragingly have similar results regarding universes and what was listened to.
Stockley concluded by telling the conference that industry surveys already provide a range of solid data on ownership and usage which tell us something about convergence but in the future there must be data providing more insight into the consumers.
