Notes

There is a general danger that users of Market Research data will misinterpret results and thereby create confusion in the minds of interested parties. It is also possible for surveys to be conducted in such a manner that the results will not provide data that can be reliably used for their intended purpose. This scenario is especially true for estimating the audiences of newspapers and magazines and this document is an attempt to produce a summary of Best Demonstrated Research Practice that can provide authoritative guidelines to the marketing, media and advertising industries.

Before discussing the requirements for good research, one first has to distinguish between research done on behalf of the entire media, marketing and advertising industry by an independent organisation such as SAARF that has been formed to fulfil this purpose, and media owners own research.

SAARF is doing research on behalf of all media, while in most other countries research for the different media types (television, radio, print, etc) are done by different industry bodies, known as joint industry committees (JICs). Industry research is used as a currency for buying and selling of advertising time in electronic media and advertising space in printed media. The idea of industry research is to create a level playing field so that the readership levels between titles are comparable. The same apply to radio listening, television viewing, etc.

Unfortunately, AMPS does not provide sufficient details for programme and editorial planning, for targeting, positioning and other purposes. It also only provides quantitative information, while media owners and marketers also need more qualitative information about the needs, likes, preferences, etc. of the audiences. Marketers also have to do their own product development and product positioning research, research on branding, packaging, etc.

The need for this document has increased in recent times as the number of newspaper and magazine titles is growing, thereby creating the potential for a much more fragmented audience than hitherto. Naturally each title wishes to determine the size and demographic characteristics of its audience and therefore it is vital that not only the credibility of SAARF's AMPS "currency" is maintained, but that the many newcomers to the print industry are made aware of the pitfalls of conducting inappropriate media audience research. These comments are written to serve as guidelines for publishers who want to do their own research.

The AMPS samples are designed to measure national newspaper and magazine audiences down to rural level. A criterion for release into the AMPS database is that at least 40 respondents should claim readership of a specific title during the issue period before demographic details of the audience can be published. Since SAARF started reporting 12-months’ rolling data, the above minimum requirements apply to a 12-months’ sample.

SAARF invites all publishers who plan their own surveys to consult the SAARF Technical Director or the Technical Support Executive for advice before they finalise the research brief.

2. GENERAL ASPECTS THAT CAN HAVE AN EFFECT ON READERSHIP LEVELS

2.1 Level of measurement

Depending on how accurate the required audience estimate(s) are expected to be, an estimate at one of the following levels can be used:

ARF = Advertising Research Foundation in the USA

2.1.1 Vehicle distribution

This is a count of the number of advertising carrying vehicles that are distributed into the market place or the circulation figure (ABC)/ verified free distribution (VFD).

To use circulation figures on its own to estimate the audience size, one has to work with an assumption regarding the number of readers that an average copy would produce. This is extremely

difficult as it differs from publication to publication and it could change without notice due to a myriad of possible changes in the publication such as its price, title or masthead, editorial format, etc. A further shortcoming of using circulation figures only is that no details of the demographic profile of the audience are available for purposes of targeting.

2.1.2 Vehicle contact

This is the level at which AMPS estimates audiences of newspapers and magazines. AMPS determine opportunities to see (OTS) an advertisement in a certain publication, as reflected by the number of readers.

2.1.3 Contact with the advertisement

At this level one would determine opportunities to see an advertisement, which means determining whether a specific page was opened or not, which is very complicated. This is also such an involved process that it does not lend itself to surveys such as AMPS where many titles are measured. Most of the readership research done at this level around the world focuses on one or only a few titles.

For surveys such as AMPS, other variables can be used to estimate page traffic, for example thoroughness of reading, assuming that a thorough reader will have a better opportunity to see an advertisement anywhere in a publication than a person who has just paged through it. Similar assumptions using other variables can be used e.g.:

• A regular reader would also be a more thorough reader than an occasional reader and, thus, has a better opportunity to see and advertisement.

• A person who reads his own purchased or subscribed copy would read more thorough than somebody who reads a friend or family member’s copy

2.1.4 Ad noting, ad perception and sales response

The ideal for the advertiser would be to determine what impact every advertisement has on the sales of the product, which is the final level in the above diagram. Unfortunately, as is evident from the diagram, qualitative factors are at play from the ad noting level further on that make it impossible in a survey such as AMPS, to obtain a noting, perception or sales response measure. This has to be done for each advertisement individually.

2.2 Definition of reading

Before readership can be estimated, one has to decide on a definition of what reading entails.

AMPS uses the following definition:

“Average issue readership” (AIR) means the number of people who claim to personally read or paged through all or part of a copy of a publication for the first time during the issue period prior to the interview. It can be anywhere, anybody’s copy and include both current and old issues.

It will be noted that this definition is quite liberal because one would like to include all potential readers and maybe later on filter them out on other questions, rather than to exclude persons who could have been regarded as readers.

The National Readership Survey (NRS) in the UK’s definition is even wider by also including respondents who claim to only ‘glanced at’ a copy, even without touching it. In the UK environment, this can happen for instance when a person reads over the shoulder of somebody else in the underground train.

2.3 The use of a filter or screening question

Most readership surveys use a filter or screening question to get the irrelevant titles out of the way and then ask more specific questions only of the titles relevant to a specific respondent. This can be done in different ways and one has to decide on whether a time related or open-ended (ever) filter is going to be used. Also what the time span (6-months; 12-months, etc of the filter is going to be and how many answer options to provide (just a Yes/No or also an ‘Unsure’ option).

SAARF experimented with the inclusion of an ‘Unsure’ option during AMPS 2001. After having given respondents a second opportunity to group the ‘Unsure” titles into either the ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ category, we came to the conclusion that it did not assist in any way to help respondents to decide and it was deleted.

2.4 The use of a deflator

Some readership surveys also make use of a so-called readership-deflating question. The purpose of such a question is, as the name indicate, try to limit over-claiming by asking an additional question before the filter question is asked. There are lots of evidence from around the world of over-claiming (or status claiming) of particularly glossy magazines to impress the interviewer. In our environment it also happens in the lower LSM groups, where very little reading takes place and where respondents want to save themselves the embarrassment of indicating that they don’t read.

This is an example of a status deflating question:

Please indicate which statement applies best to each publication:

• I have never heard of it
• I heard of it but have never read it
• I read it in the past but no longer read it
• I still read it from time to time
• I read it regularly

Only the last three categories would then be subjected to further questions. If a normal filter follows, there are then two opportunities to filter non-readers out. Dr Valentine Appel in the USA has done a lot of work to prove that the more people are screened in, the higher the readership level, and vice versa.

However, it should be re-emphasised that one should attempt to obtain a balance between screening non-readers out and screening potential readers in.

2.5 Which other questions to ask?

Normally users of readership research results want for purposes of audience estimates to know the size of the audience, sometimes referred to as the reach or coverage and frequency of reading. In other words, if an advertisement is placed in a title, how many OTS’s it will create and if it is placed in consecutive issues (which is standard procedure for display advertisements), how the audience would accumulate over time. To determine this, you need a measure of frequency of reading (6/6; 5/6; 4/6, etc.)

Normally at least one indicator of quality of contact is asked. On the current AMPS survey, the following quality of contact question is used:

• Origin of copy

A high correlation has been found over the years between different quality of contact questions, such as the origin of the copy and thoroughness of reading (from read cover-to-cover to just flipped through it), consequently only one is regarded as sufficient. The reason why AMPS uses the origin of copy question is because it can also be used to validate the readers per copy (rpc) figures.

2.6 What to use as the currency to estimate readership

It is evident from a Summary of Readership Research Results which was launched in Venice during a Worldwide Readership Research Symposium in 2001 that almost all countries that do industry surveys are using the so-called “recent reading” method to estimate readership.

The recent reading method determines the number of people that read an issue during an average issue period, the so-called average issue readers (AIR-readers). In practice, this reflects the number of readers of a daily newspaper on an average day and yesterday is used during the interview to determine readership. The reason why yesterday is used and not today is because by the time of the interview (normally during the late afternoon/early evening), today is not complete and potential readers can still read after the interview. For weekly titles past 7-days is regarded as the issue period, for fortnightlies 14-days, and so on.

AMPS is the only study around the world that uses the First Reading in Period of Issue method, dubbed FRIPI over the years. The difference between FRIPI and recent reading is that FRIPI only uses respondents who claimed to have read a specific copy, for instance of a daily, for the first time yesterday. If the person has read the same copy that was read yesterday also the day before, he or she would be filtered out and not be included as an average issue reader of that title. This is done to eliminate statistical replication of readers by giving the same person only one opportunity to qualify with a specific copy.

Another method that is used by a few countries, for example in Germany, is the so-called frequency method. The claimed frequency of reading (6/6; 5/6; etc.) is used to allocate a reading probability to each respondent and by summarising these probabilities for the entire sample, the number of readers is estimated. A person that indicated that he/she read 6 out of 6 issues would be allocated a probability of 1, a person that reads 5 out of 6 would obtain a probability of 0.83 and so on.

Another method that was developed in the Netherlands was the First Reading Yesterday or FRY method. It used for more than a decade in Holland as well as in the Scandinavian countries and has just died because it was not a direct measure but relied on modelling.

2.7 Should I prompt and if so, how?

It has been proved that prompting improves respondents’ ability to recall reading and all significant readership surveys use prompting.

When face-to-face interviewing or mail surveys are done, a variety of ways can be used to prompt the respondent to make a reading claim. Normally reduced mastheads are used when asking the filter question. For personal interviewing two options are available. Mastheads can be grouped together (normally up to 6) on a prompt page or they can be shown on cards each carrying only one masthead. The advantage of grouped masthead is that similar titles that can be confused one with the other (e.g. home and garden titles, automotive or financial publications) can be grouped together to limit possible confusion. The weakness is that not all mastheads are good prompts and grouping them together can highlight the stronger ones to the detriment of weaker ones. They are also not all evenly prominent. Just to look at a few mastheads will illustrate this point. One the other hand, single title cards are the most objective and least biased way to prompt, but because they are not grouped cannot be used to limit title confusion.

However, the experiment to include an ‘unsure’ category in the filter question mentioned in Par 2.2 showed that title confusion on AMPS that uses single title cards was not a problem. The greatest source that causes uncertainty in the present AMPS methodology is the fact that some respondents are unsure whether they have read a specific publication within the filter period or outside of it.

During telephone interviewing, obviously only verbal prompting is possible which has limitations of its own.

2.8 Rotation of titles

It is well known that there is a rotational or position effect in the number of positive reading claims, depending on how early or how late the title occurs in the list of titles. The longer the list of titles, the larger the rotational effect becomes. When single title cards are used, it is normal practise to shuffle them in a similar way that playing cards are shuffled before every interview. This randomises the position of each title and evens out the rotation effect across all titles. However, with a lengthy list of titles, this effect may lead to a general reduction in reading claims.

The NRS in the UK is currently experimenting with using personalized title list. They delete some titles for specific respondents, based on the likelihood of reading it. A simple example to demonstrate this method is that publication with a high proportion of male readers will be asked of all male respondents, but only of a sample of female respondents. The

results of the Female sample will then be used to estimate total female readership.

When prompt pages are used the pages must be rotated between interviews to also even out the rotation effect.


2.9 Learning effect

When more than one publication group (e.g. daily and weekly newspapers) are included in the study, the filter should preferably be asked for all groups before any further questions are asked.

If the groups are separated for the filter question, and further questions are asked before moving to the second and further sections to ask the filter question, respondents learn from the group that is first in the rotation that they only get further questions for publication that they claim to have read during the filter period. This artificially reduce the levels claimed for the second and further groups in the rotation because respondents tend to claim fewer titles to reduce the number of extra questions.

3. WHICH METHODS ARE AVAILABLE TO ESTIMATE NEWSPAPER AND MAGAZINE AUDIENCES ?