Neil Shepherd-Smith sees that the ideal readership survey must be absolute, to facilitate media planning and to give it value as a currency. To produce this the right methodology is vital and at present, he claims, the replication of NRS data distorts the currency.
The four areas he considered to need investigation are advertising exposure, multiple pick ups, readership accumulation over time and an unbiased measure of average issue readership to provide a credible currency.
In each of these areas the research method considered should be logically perfect and withstand the test of ‘conceptial impeccability’.
Shepherd-Smith told the conference that if he held the reins of the NRS with £2 million to spend, he would freeze the survey for a year, adjust the figures and use the time and money to investigate which research methods, including panel studies, could achieve this ‘conceptial impeccability’ to achieve a survey which competed with figures other media have or will have available to them.
Neil concluded his paper by making an appeal to members of the MRG to ‘search for the truth’.
Following on from Shepherd-Smith, Nick Wiggin spoke about challenging press ad assumptions, from his perspective as associate research director at Optimum Media Direction, Singapore.
Wiggin considered the limitations of current industry data in a survey of ad effectiveness recently conducted across Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, and asked the question ‘does QRS go far enough?’.
The Asian survey provided data which had not previously been available, including section readership figures, place and time of reading, aditional data ad noting scores, product interest, intention to purchase and and so on. The relationship between readers and publications was investigated and the objective was to make this information transparent and usable to press planners.
Report by Lucy Condon in Munich
