NRS – In Second Place But Still Dabbling In Performance Enhancers

Stuart McDonald, head of advertising insight at News International, dissects last week’s NRS release for the free London papers, explaining why NI is not totally happy with their ‘second place’ result and why the company believes the NRS must change…

Last week the NRS released the first readership figures for the free evening newspapers in London, thelondonpaper and London Lite – a full year after their launch. There was a great expectation around the industry about this release and what it could tell us. You could sense the anticipation in Wapping, Kensington and the West End as the date got closer.

Finally, we had “claimed” readership estimates on the London evening newspaper marketplace. Finally, we can now look at the profile of readers versus other publications. Finally, agencies have information on these titles and can understand how important free newspapers are in reaching the young and upmarket in London.

So it’s all good news then? Yes and no.

Yes, we are happy that the survey tells us that we are as upmarket as the Evening Standard, younger than the Metro and leading the ABC1 under-35 market.

But, and this is a big but, we are not happy with the way that the NRS measures these titles and we are calling for changes to be made to bring the survey up to date.

The latest NRS release (January to June 2007) illustrates this clearly. NRS managed just 231 interviews of thelondonpaper readers in this six-month period and 250 London Lite readers. Yes, this is above the 175 threshold that the survey demands but woefully low for any confidence in the headline figure and small change compared to the 60 million copies we distributed during this time.

The trade press have all picked up that there is a 32,000 reader gap between the two evening free papers. Average issue readership is of course at 95% confidence levels. This could mean a swing of more than 110,000 readers either way for both titles – but this is down to just an extra 19 interviews over a 26-week period, less than one additional interview a week! This means that the two titles have different readers per copy – something which is hard to imagine by anyone that has witnessed their distribution on the streets of London.

There has been a lot of coverage of News International’s push to get the NRS figures suspended from publication, and this is something that I would like to address here. Originally, the first release of NRS data was scheduled for release in July (December to May NRS), but we were told that there was a potential discrepancy in the estimates. The Evening Standard had already had its readership estimates suspended from October and November 2006 as there was title confusion between that and London Lite (which was previously ES Lite and Standard Lite). The survey measures claimed recall of reading behaviour – the fact that Lite has had three different guises is likely to confuse people surveyed in this manner.

We asked NRS to investigate the responses that were coming back, and we found that in January they had interviewed just 15 readers of thelondonpaper – despite eight million copies being distributed! For those that aren’t aware, the interim data releases of the NRS (those in-between the quarterly releases) do not include self-completion questionnaires (SCQs), something which we felt would be more likely to appeal to the young urban readership that the free newspapers attract. With this in mind, the NRS suggested that the December to May estimates should not be released and the first release being January to June (as it was a quarterly releases the SCQs would be included) in September.

We are, however, still not happy with the number of interviews that were completed in January 2007 (the figure increased to 20 with the SCQs), but nonetheless the estimates were released on 13 September.

Metro revolutionised the newspaper marketplace in the UK when it launched in 1999, but the NRS was (and is) slow to react to this phenomenon.

In Ireland, the JNRS (Irish equivalent to the NRS) is addressing the free newspaper issue (they currently have two free titles in the morning in Dublin) by considering boosting the sample in urban areas – an idea I’m glad to say that the NRS is now considering.

The NRS has long been considered the “gold standard” in audience measurement, but this shine is now starting to fade as confidence in the survey falls after issues such as this. More effort is needed to research this important channel as the circulations of these titles have shown that they are here to stay.

We are hopeful that the figures for the next release (due in December – the April to September data) will be a better representation of thelondonpaper‘s place in the London marketplace.

When the NRS introduces ways to improve the measurement of free newspapers they can then truly lay claim to be the “gold standard” and hopefully, for everyone, they won’t settle for silver.