With last week’s announcement that Canada’s print measurement organizations, PMB and NADbank, were merging and planned to release a single audience insights study for newspapers and magazines, Media Filter was curious to hear about similar studies in other markets.
Our research led to Sydney, Australia, where in August Ipsos released the first data from its Enhanced Media Measurement Australia (EMMA) study, a new cross-platform audience insights survey.
EMMA provides data for more than 600 newspapers and magazines in Australia, including over 150 community titles and 250 regional titles. Its scope includes measurement of all newspaper and magazine formats including print, website, mobile and tablet, as well as sectional readership and reader engagement metrics (compete study details here).
Simon Wake, managing director of Ipsos MediaCT in Sydney, said it is also a channel planning tool that features information on respondents’ TV and radio consumption as well as cinema and out-of-home. Like PMB, EMMA also provides comprehensive product usage data.
EMMA has a rolling sample of 54,000 people, with interviews conducted every day of the week – which Wake said leads to more accurate recall of how, when and where respondents interact with a specific media brand. Interviews are mostly conducted online, with approximately 10% done in-person. Data is released monthly.
Wake said the study was born out of publisher frustration with data that they considered out-of-date and that inadequately captured key audience metrics. Prior to EMMA, readership surveys in Australia were conducted only on weekends.
“The publishers understood that to get a more accurate reading of the consumption of newspapers and magazines, in any format, interviewing had to happen each day of the week.”
EMMA was constructed using best practices from Ipsos’ audience measurement in more than 41 countries, including the United Kingdom and France.
Marketing in Australia recently reported a “big discrepancy” in readership data between EMMA data and that of its predecessor, Roy Morgan, with some upswings in readership as high as 47%. Perhaps not surprisingly, publishers are dropping the Roy Morgan readership study.
Wake said industry reception to the new data has been positive, particularly among newspaper publishers. “Because we’re interviewing each day of the week, the numbers that changed most significantly were Monday to Friday in newspapers,” he said. “[Respondents] weren’t being asked on a Saturday what they read last Monday, they’re being asked on a Tuesday.”
Wake recently told The Australian newspaper that as many of 20% of previous survey respondents did not accurately recall what they had read seven days ago.
