How Much Is Enough?

The previous post about online audience measurement prompted a discussion in the office about the mechanics of measurement (heads up, bit of a nerdy post this one - the discussion moved swiftly to more pressing matters concerning Graham Onions and Steve Harmison).

Anyone who has worked closely with ratings data, be it TV, radio or print knows that the mechanisms for recording viewing/listening/reading can be complex. More importantly the definitions used are often no more than arbitrary. For those that are not familiar with these definitions these are the ones for BARB, Rajar and the NRS:

• TV viewing is defined as 'being in the room with the TV switched on'

• Radio listening is defined as 'listening for 5 minutes or more during a fifteen minute period'

• Newspaper reading is defined as 'reading or looking at for at least 2 minutes'

Beneath these definitions are more complex rules and regulations that also play a role in the process of measurement, eg the TSA areas for radio (that define where a station broadcasts), sort cards for print (that build the short list for the readership questions), and so on. But these definitions also have one other factor built in, namely persistence. You have to listen to a radio station for 5 minutes in order to be recorded as a listener. Two minutes is the rule for reading a newspaper. For TV it’s 30 seconds in a clock minute (consecutive). These are designed to weedle out those who aren’t really of commercial value to an advertiser.

So what is the persistence level for online? 5 seconds? 20 seconds? As far as I can tell there isn’t one (if anyone knows differently let me know). Imagine the scenario: you are sitting at home in front of your laptop and you click on a link. No sooner has the home page loaded than you notice your trousers are on fire. You shut down immediately and call 999. But you’re still counted as a unique user. Is that right?

The purpose of media measurement is to evaluate the likelihood that an individual is exposed to advertising. On this basis established media are getting a raw deal. There is no way the online world will give up audience by introducing a persistence level, so maybe established media should think about relaxing theirs.

Despatch from the frontline of the online measurement war

There is increasing hostility between the internet audience measurement rivals Comscore and Nielsen. As a Comscore subscriber Sigint received an email from their top brass to ‘set the record straight’ following a press release from Nielsen boasting about the size of their own measurement panel.

Clearly on the offensive, Nielsen had claimed to have the largest and most representative online measurement panel in the world. Comscore, now out-flanked, hit back hard saying that Nielsen’s claim was ‘factually untrue’. In other words a lie (this is about as good as it gets in the world of media research believe me). We eagerly await Nielsen’s next move.

But does any of this really matter outside of the PR departments within each camp? Sample size is an issue for any type of research but for gold standard currency data it’s generally accepted that while it would be nice to accurately report everything, in reality you don’t need to. The vast majority of ‘currency’ data users (who also fund the measurement systems) are only interested in the audiences to the more established channels and titles – the bottom of the long tail is simply classified as ‘other’. It makes it hard for new entrants, but no subscriber is going to double or triple their contribution just to measure the tiniest niches in the market.

In the US Comscore claim to report on 70,000 sites monthly, in comparison to the measly 30,000 that Nielsen now covers. But do we really need to know the audience profile to internet site number 70,000? Probably not. What we are really seeing are tactical exchanges of fire in the continuing battle for domination of the online audience measurement world. Meanwhile subscribers hold out for a ceasefire and maybe even the unthinkable, a single, better and cheaper measurement provider.

Insight by Algorithm

With simple digital analytics you can quickly and easily paint a rich picture of your customer. Let’s say you’re Ford and you want to know about visitors to pages on your site featuring the S-Max MPV. A quick run might turn up the following:

Visitors to the S-Max pages also spend time on car sites such as What Car and Car magazine - maybe they are looking for some independent advice. They also over-index on sites such as AutoTrader - perhaps they want to see what prices are like for used Fords. Intriguingly they also score highly for food related sites - perhaps they are modern cosmopolitan types who love cooking as well as cars.

They usually arrived at the site from Google, but downstream they often went to social networks after leaving the Ford site - to talk to their friends about cars perhaps.

The analysis also shows that they are most likely to be ‘new homemakers’ - so maybe looking for a car to suit a young and growing family. You can also see that ‘new homemakers’ are likely to visit interior design sites such as Mydeco and Fired Earth.

So, a strategy built around young families with an interest in food, design and interiors, utilising social networks, looks like a great idea.

However, the following could also be true:

It’s true that visitors to the S-Max pages did also visit What Car and AutoTrader, but they couldn’t really give a stuff about food websites, that was their partner looking for recipes. People usually share the same PC at home and analytics can’t accurately tell different users apart. The downstream traffic to social networks wasn’t the potential S-Max buyers either, it was their 16 year old using Facebook.

And they are not what you would describe as ‘new homemakers’. They have two teenage children. Their interior design tips come from the Argos catalogue. But they do live near to a new housing estate and the geodemographics that link to the analytics assign all addresses in a postcode the same category.

In reality of course most of this noise comes out in the wash. But it does highlight the increasing amount of trust we place in algorithms to decipher the amount of media data we have to play with.

Social media blurs the line between research and marketing

The majority of the media that people consume are still what we call traditional. They are one-way, ‘few to many’ channels whose creation and distribution requires complex infrastructure. They are also channels for marketing of course, and so it’s important to know who the audience is and how many of them are out there. As a result there are industries to create and distribute the media content, other industries to pump that content for commercial value and, sitting in the middle, the media research industry counting the winners and losers.

And it’s research that takes the high ground. It independently audits audience sizes and profiles and even when called to measure commercial effectiveness, research is usually seen as objective and beyond reproach. It’s an industry determined to keep its hands clean when faced with the dirty discipline of marketing.

So called social media are very different to their traditional forebears. They are open channels where media content can be created by anyone and passed around freely. Brands are increasingly in the business of creating their own content rather than just advertising around someone else’s (Nike is a great example). Social media are also comparable in scale to traditional media, at least in terms of reach if not time spent, so they are increasingly taken seriously by brands looking to connect with audiences in new ways.

In this new environment a new type of media research is emerging, one where the space between ‘clean’ research and ‘dirty’ marketing all but disappears. I’m talking more and more to these new breed of agencies about hybrid projects that start with research and end with marketing. A typical brief might flow like this:

- Identify key opinion formers/influencers within specific social media communities

- Recruit them to help refine strategy and develop content

- Turn these influencers into advocates to help mobilise communities and generate maximum word of mouth/mouse

To do this requires an agency that knows how to move between observation and participation. An agency that knows how to report demand but also how to stimulate it. This is completely alien to an industry built around objectivity and the need to neutralise a research effect. But looking at where things are heading there is plenty of business to be had for an agency that is prepared to get its hands dirty.

True Superbrands

This is a true story.

The Offical Top 500 Superbrands for 2009/10 (2010?) will be published in the Sunday Telegraph this weekend. Here are the top 10:

Microsoft

Rolex

Google

British Airways

BBC

Mercedes

Coca Cola

Lego

Apple

Encyclopaedia Britannica

You read it correctly. Storming in at number 10 is a resurgent Encyclopaedia Britannica. Forget those Wikipedia cowboys and their open-sourced oddball, this is the real thing. There is such a buzz on the street about good old EB. Sure, no-one actually buys it and its only got around 400k people visiting it online each month, compared to the 15 million who use Wikipedia, but it’s been around since the 18^th century and that counts for a lot when it comes to knowing stuff.

And isn’t it nice to see Microsoft at number one. Bill Gates is loved and cherished the world over for giving us the Internet and other things like that. And in those slacks he looks just like an ordinary guy!

This splendid survey also puts those foolish internet startups (upstarts more like!) in their place. Granted those Google folk got third place but The Facebook was ranked 248^th !, behind Alka-Seltzer and Tampax – real brands that you can actually buy in a shop. 300 million people can be wrong! And Amazon only got 155^th place, they should try building some proper bookstores.

The doomed internet TV website YouTube also gets put in its rightful place, at 169. It’ll never catch on. The venue for legitimate entertainment is the Royal Albert Hall, at number 36 (just behind John Lewis, another personal favourite).

Well done Superbrands for standing up for the brands that we really care about.

The Credit Crunch Explained

Last week a fifteen year old on work experience at Morgan Stanley wrote a summary of his media behaviour as part of his internship. It contains nothing very new or interesting. Read about it here if you want http://is.gd/1xagI or see the actual report here http://is.gd/1xalG.

Some of its key revelations were:
- Teens listen to the radio for music and think the ads get in the way
- Most teens watch TV
- They don’t read newspapers, apart from the freesheets which they read a lot, as well as The Sun now it’s 20p [so in fact they are seeing more newsprint than ever before!]
- They like console games and play them lots
- They use Facebook, but they don’t use Twitter very much
- They search for stuff using a search engine called Google
- They don’t like outdoor ads…hate them in fact [oh, apart from ones aimed at them, like for GTA, which they think are cool]

And yet Morgan Stanley were so blown away by the ‘insights’ it contained they immediately issued it to their clients on their research wire and described it as “one of the clearest and most thought provoking insights we have seen”. Apparently they have since had “dozens and dozens of fund managers, and several CEO’s, calling about it”.

Morgan Stanley went on to describe the latest album by Girls Aloud as “without doubt the finest contemporary recording since Dylan went electric”, they also commented on the new Dan Brown novel as “ranking up there with Philip Roth at his peak” and Ice Age 3D as “so amazing it just really feels like you’re actually in the real ice age!”.

The Buzz Around Buzz

I’ve recently been talking to some of the new kids on the research block, the social media monitors. The likes of Market Sentinel, MotiveQuest, Cymfony, etc. They each have their own approach, but their core offer is the same: they listen to brand related conversations on the web and aggregate them for analysis. Volume, trend, sentiment, and so on.

They put forward a compelling argument for their services and they claim they are furiously busy (which I believe). But a couple of things struck me after seeing their pitches.

1) Scale. You rapidly lose any sense of volume or context when you look at the data produced by these guys – if you had any to begin with that is. How many people does this buzz come from? How much of the ‘conversation’ are you listening to? And, of course, who the hell are these people and who do they represent? How would you feel if your strategy was influenced by people who call radio phone-in shows? OK, extreme example, but you get my point.

2) Depth. The power of this stuff lies in its authenticity. It’s unsolicited. Raw and pure. But that also means you have no way of really digging into why people say the things they do. It’s a bit like a focus group with no moderator and you just watching through the mirror. Except that with a focus group at least you know exactly who you are listening to.

This is an important new tool for sure – Google’s mantra that ‘more data is better data’ applies. But it’s not going to give you all the answers. So why are these guys so busy…

1) It sounds sexy
2) It looks great – opportunity for nice data visualisation
3) Most importantly it doesn’t require anyone to spend their Tuesday evenings eating crisps in a recruiters chintz palace in Solihull

PS The image is from a case study presented by one agency. Sadly they couldn’t explain what the chart actually showed.

Did 1bn People Really Watch This?

Headline in yesterdays paper read: 1bn tune in to watch Michael Jackson memorial.

If there is one area where fact and fiction are furthest apart it is global viewing estimates. 1bn is almost one in six of every being on the planet. Give me strength.

A glance at some proper numbers: US viewing estimate: 30m. UK viewing: 6m. And they are probably the markets most passionate about his music. Where are the other 964m coming from?

In reality the Jackson memorial pulled in about the same as the Pop Idol final in the US. And around one-third of the annual Superbowl audience of 100m or so. In the UK 6m is the same as Top Gear. So if audiences were moderate in the US and UK why would they be any different elsewhere? They wouldn't, they would be even smaller proportionately.

What about online? A few million globally at most.

PS One phrase to watch out for in this area is 'potential audience'. It simply means what the audience would be if everyone who could receive the channel the event was broadcast on tuned in to it. Utterly meaningless.

Daft Questions

We all talk a lot about how brands need to behave in the digital age (try explaining that to your 4 year old when she asks what you actually do at work). We go on and on about how we need to build a conversation with the consumer rather than heckle them from afar, the need to offer something in return for the time a consumer might spend with us, and so on.

But every now and again we’re yanked from the cutting edge of brand communications and thrown back into a time gone by. This happened today when I saw research into the ‘effectiveness’ of different channels. Here’s the question they asked:

"There are many different types of ads and many venues for them. Which one of the following do you find most helpful in deciding what products or services to purchase?"

The possible answers were ‘TV ads’, ‘newspaper ads’, ‘search engine ads’ and so on.

Oh dear.

Ask yourself this question and then try and give an honest answer. Firstly, it assumes people find ads helpful. They don’t. The vast majority of ads just get in the way of the stuff that people really want.

Secondly, it appears to treat all ads, for all products and services, the same. The ad could be for a car, a pension or a ringtone.

I could go on, and on.

FYI Harris Interactive in the US press released the results. Like it matters.

This is a blog about the world of media research (at last, I hear you cry). It's a bit like Ben Goldacre's Bad Science http://www.badscience.net/, but for media and brands rather than cancer and herbal remedies. It'll be about the sort of stuff planners and strategists wet their pants about when they see something really good. The trouble is, a lot of it's rubbish, so I thought I'd use this space to grumble about it...