Readership Works boss admits they would have liked to launch EMMA five years earlier
The head of the Readership Works admitted it would have been ideal to have its Enhanced Media Metrics Australia (EMMA) metric launched five to six years ago, also blaming the metric’s struggle to gain traction on a changing environment within media agencies.
“We would have liked to have done everything five or six years ago, without a doubt. But again, that’s such an easy thing to say,” Mark Hollands, CEO of The Newspaper Works and The Readership Works, said during a video hangout this afternoon.
Due to a technical difficulty the video finishes at 41.34 mins. We apologise for the abrupt end.
On where the metric stands today Hollands said it has been in market for 18 months and is “currency” for publishers and put difficulties of EMMA gaining traction in market down to a changing environment within media agencies.
“From our perspective there are four out of five of the big agencies that use it, we’d like it used more and in greater usage but one might say that the usage will be driven by how newspapers approach the market and continue to step up in terms of taking their value propositions into the market,” he said.
“EMMA has walked into a bit of a perfect storm which isn’t of our making. And part of that perfect storm is in fact the change going on within media agencies and its very serious and significant change so getting traction in that kind of environment is exceptionally difficult. And particularly when there is transformation on your side of fence as well. “
Hollands
When quizzed on why some publications report a fall in circulation but a rise in readership according to the EMMA data, Hollands said: “Fall in circulation does not correlate in a fall of readership that is to say if I stop buying a newspaper does that mean I don’t read one? That’s highly unlikely.
“To that end things don’t always go in lockstep. Every one of these surveys, not just ours, has outliers.”
Hollands cited the example of Bauer Media’s Zoo Weekly, which in the first year of readership data from EMMA released in August last year saw its readers-per-copy rise from 9.44 to 15.24 despite a circulation decline of 36.36 per cent.
“One of the key things about that is what happens with these outliers is generalisations get made about the performance of outliers. These generalisations are often inaccurate even though the outlier is actually true,” he said.
“There is too much generalisation and observation made about the outliers when you look at the overall survey and measure it to Morgan there are similarities.”
Among other topics covered by Hollands was the campaign launched by the body this week urging media agencies to spend more on print – using the influence of the medium as a hook.
Hollands oversees The Readership Works, the body responsible for readership measurement metric EMMA, which was launched in a bid to show the strength retained by the mastheads and the Newspaper Works, the body which represents the four biggest newspaper groups in Australia
He joined The Newspaper Works in mid-2013 as CEO from the Pacific Area Newspapers Publishers’ Association (PANPA), which he was also head of.
He has worked as a journalist for The Australian as well as a string of Fleet Street titles, and has also been head of Asia sales for Dow Jones and Asia Pacific vice president for Gartner.
There are lots of problems with the Emma survey. Launching five years earlier wouldn’t have fixed a thing. Research needs to be credible. Full stop. Urging agencies to spend more on print is never going to happen while inflated numbers are used in negotiations.
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Always nice to see someone with a limited grasp of the research concept in charge of an industry currency. To suggest there is no relationship between circulation and readership, because ‘if I stop buying a newspaper it doesn’t mean I don’t read one’, is foolish. Ahh the sample of one.
The relationship between the two (circulation and readership) should be and has been in most readership surveys demonstrated over decades. The fact that in a single release they may conflict for a title is a result of using a sample, however when comparing the two over time these biases are rarely repeated and the relationship is re-established. Readership often uncovers sample bias that demographic weighting cannot always account for, that especially effects specific niche titles. My guess in the case of ZOO is that you have a specific demographic niche reading the publication, this group are known to be heavily under-represented in these surveys (16-24 year old males), they therefore attract huge weights with very small samples, this means this group is open to huge fluctuation. You only need a small over-representation of Zoo readers in the 16-24 sample of the survey to account for the discrepancies seen. Who would have thought that the easiest 16-24 year old males to interview would be Zoo readers. Mind you I have a feeling they will be the easiest to reach by in home interviewing as they are the sort of high flying ladies men who may often be found hanging around in their rooms.
My favourite part of the interview (from a researchers perspective) was the failure to grasp the concept of currency. The basic premise is that it is an acceptable value on which buyers and sellers can trade. To say that EMMA is already a currency for the publishers but not the agencies, misses the whole point of the exercise.
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