This story was updated at 12:50 on Sept. 18, 2013
After years of discussion, print measurement will probably get its makeover
This week’s abrupt announcement that Canada’s two print measurement bodies, Newspaper Audience Databank (NADbank) and Print Measurement Bureau (PMB) will merge and jointly produce a new print and digital study represents a major – and some say long-awaited – shakeup in Canadian audience measurement.
Phillip Crawley
Industry experts say the as-yet unnamed entity will create a much-needed new currency for print media, reduce unnecessary data duplication and costs and potentially provide media buyers and advertisers with valuable additional information such as the role of a media brand in the path-to-purchase, engagement metrics, and measurement of a media brand’s total footprint.
Insiders say it reflects growing publisher and media buyer dissatisfaction with the status quo, working with data that is not only too reliant on antiquated metrics like circulation and readership, but is also well past its expirty date.
“We’re trying to create a new data currency which is relevant to the world of Google Analytics and the instant feedback you get,” said Globe and Mail publisher and CEO Phillip Crawley who, along with Gord Fisher, president of Postmedia’s Pacific Newspaper Group, is co-chair of a new data steering committee established in August 2012.
The committee’s purpose, said Crawley, is to clearly state the publishing industry’s desire for change to both PMB and NADbank. “The traditional way of doing our industry research is no longer what the industry needs,” said Crawley. “The agencies and the advertisers are looking for much more timely data. [They don’t want] to wait six or 12 months to see a readership study.”
Crawley suggested that the future of Canada’s nearly $3 billion print industry is at stake. “We feel that we could do much better if we had more timely data which talked about the profile of our customers in a more detailed way than we currently can,” he said. “We all have internal data of our customers, but third-party, validated data, which is what the agencies want, we can’t deliver it quickly enough.”
The steering committee, funded by the various publisher groups, agencies and the Canadian Media Directors’ Council (CMDC), is comprised of representatives from the country’s major newspaper and magazine publishers, including Postmedia COO Wayne Parrish, Toronto Sun publisher Mike Power, TC Media senior vice-president, business information solutions and education Pierre Marcoux and St. Joseph Media president Doug Knight.
While the plan is to establish the new entity in 2014, with its first data delivered in 2015, PMB president Steve Ferley conceded that some “complicated” governance issues need to be worked out. “With a will on all parts, you can solve those issues,” he said.
“It is a magnificent, elegant solution to eliminating duplication and redundancies in print media research,” said Ferley. “It will hugely beneficial.”
Ferley said it has become clear that print media research needs to be more efficient, particularly as margins for all participants are being squeezed. “Everybody’s under pressure to reduce costs, and print media research can’t escape those demands,” he said. The new approach will generate “significant” cost savings for publishers, agencies and advertisers, he said.
Technical issues, such as how to cost effectively combine the different data collection techniques, incorporating product usage data, including local market data in the total mix and how to incorporate website data from sources like comScore, have been largely addressed within the proposal put forth by Taylor Nelson Sofres, the organization that oversees the studies for both organizations, said Ferley.
PMB currently amasses readership data through in-person interviews, while NADbank data is collected through a combination of telephone interviews and online panels. The new research model proposed by Taylor Nelson Sofres, which oversees data collection for both PMB and NADbank, will be a “multi-modal” combination of the three, said Ferley.
On-again, off-again
Bill McDonald, president and publisher of Metro and chair of the NADbank board, said that Monday’s announcement, which was leaked to media before the two sides could come together to draft a formal press release, is the culmination of an on-and-off discussion that has been taking place for several years.
“Sometimes those discussions get pretty hot and sometimes they go cold, but about a year ago the conversation heated up again and we started talking about working more closely together,” said McDonald. “There seemed to be a lot of interest and support from virtually all sides of the business.”
McDonald said the proposal still has to be ratified at all-member meetings of PMB and NADbank, slated to take place sometime in October or November, but suggested there were no major hurdles to its implementation.
McDonald said there is an emphasis being placed on ensuring continuity, but acknowledged the importance of layering in the additional data sets as soon as possible.
CMDC president Penny Stevens said that the merger addresses some long-held concerns among the buying community. “Newspapers and magazines were in desperate need of a serious shakeup of audience measurement on all sorts of fronts,” said Stevens.
Stevens said there’s “a lot of movement” in the industry geared towards getting better measurement, with the primary drivers being the excessive cost of measurement and the fact that data is often out-of-date and not comprehensive enough.
While both PMB and NADbank are highly regarded measurement bodies, Stevens said that the timeliness of the data has become a “huge issue” for buyers, exacerbated by the wealth of digital information now available to them. “We’re talking about data that is a year out of date,” said Stevens. “When you’re in a real-time world, it just doesn’t make any sense any more.”
Stevens’ hope is that the merged entity could provide data monthly or even weekly. And while admitting to being both research and cost naïve, she believes it’s an attainable goal.
Steven praised Crawley as one of the key figures in the proposal. “Kudos to him for getting something to happen,” she said. “The jury is still out on whether or not the merger of PMB and NADbank is the answer to his prayers, but fundamentally it was his drive to get something started.”
Stevens says that a PMB/NADbank merger is the first step towards addressing a laundry list of media buyer wants from measurement: The role of media in the path-to-purchase; an integrated system that measures consumer behaviour across a bundle of media products and brands; evolution of audience metrics from “opportunity to see” to “likely to see”; the evolution of measurement from program content to commercial content; ease of access to data, and all in a timely manner.
“There’s a myriad of things we want and need and should get, and just the lens into the digital world allows us to see that yes it’s possible and yes we need it,” she said.
NADbank chair McDonald said the goal of the new entity is more recent and more frequent data, but said it’s yet to be determined how those goals will be attained. A research and governance task force will grapple with these issues, he said, with the new entity’s various research committees and boards addressing them going forward.
