MRG Evening Meeting: International Audiences

Last night’s MRG evening meeting featured two presentations on international audiences: the first looked at changing news consumption in the digital age, the second examined how European consumers navigate complex decision making processes.

The first presentation featured a study carried out by Essential Research for the BBC, and was presented by Jeremy Nye, head of audience research for the BBC Global News Division, and Stuart Knapman, joint-owner of Essential Research.

Knapman revealed that a recurrent theme of the Tomorrow’s International News Audience study was that “news is everywhere”, with audiences consuming news content more frequently.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, internet dominated the way in which audiences accessed news, with some respondents claiming that their time spent with online news had doubled.

The study identified three main types of news users: Truth Trawlers, who often start by seeing something that interests them on TV news and then go online to get more in-depth information from a variety of sources; Tailors, who use technology such as RSS feeds to get the specific information they want to receive; and News Mainstream, who make short, regular visits to one or two news websites.

The second presentation was given by Alice Monfort, research manager at Omnicom Media Group, EMEA, and focused on OMD’s Pathway Research study.

Aimed at helping international planners, Pathway is OMD’s largest pan-European quantitative study, with results launched in January 2008 in 14 markets.

The research found that Europeans display a wide variety of behaviour across the consumer journey and should not be treated as a homogenous group.

As well as giving an insight into the level of involvement in each category, the Pathway study also helps with targeting by giving a picture of influences across the categories and strategies by identifying the most influential touchpoints.

BBC: 020 8743 8000 www.bbc.co.uk OMD: www.omd.com