Media buyers reserve judgment on readership metric EMMA as Roy Morgan bosses question independence
Senior media buyers are warning that a new readership metric bankrolled by Australia’s major publishers will struggle to get widespread takeup by agencies unless they get cut price access to the data.
Enhanced Media Metrics Australia (EMMA), has been underway for nearly four years as a project being run by industry body The Newspaper Works.
EMMA will offer readership statistics for Australia’s newspaper and magazine mastheads, in a move that seeks to challenge the existing industry readership metric provided by Roy Morgan Research. Some of Australia’s publishers – and News Corp in particular have been unhappy with Roy Morgan’s dominance of the readership metric since the 1970s.
if you were a buyer and report A said 20 thou eyes and report B said 2 thou eyes, how much difference would it make to your spend? I’m going with a lot. alota lot.
Because at root, thats what the question boils down to. Nobody wants to look a fool for buying two tracking results but if the one you spend on turns out to over count, then somebody else will be in your chair.
If the two metrics don’t vary by a significant degree then its just a duopoly of cost for measurement. If they vary, its going to be methodology fights at 20 paces, fill bore cannon.
So anyone saying “I’m only buying one” is betting their job the other one doesn’t turn out to project a lower cost of ad buy
And herein lies the problem ;
‘There is a lot of hype around Emma but the reality is we use Roy Morgan for channel planning purposes,” said one media agency buyer. “Morgan helps us decide what channels we use, how we use them and to get deep insight into product consumption and how it relates to purchasing’.
With all the data we have access to and all the tools we can use to manipulate that data, media planning is approached in the same way it was in 1995.
Very cool technique in the video.
How can anyone in the industry seriously complain about, finally having a choice of research provider?
I, for one, am fed up with the “We know better than you’ attitude of Morgan. It’s only now that there’s a big player in town questioning their archaic methods and attitudes that they polish the turd. Good luck with that!
Perhaps having a monopoly for so long has warped the reasoning I saw today from Morgan. Sure, Ipsos may have some wrinkles to iron out, but they haven’t been doing the NRS in the UK for god knows how long without having credibility and independence. I’ll form my own opinion over the weeks to come rather than be patronised by Michelle Levine. Sure, if I decide to stay with RMR, I’ll be pushing them harder than ever to get in the game and respect me as an agency subscriber.
I’ll make up my own mind, but I certainly think the fact that this new mob have allowed themselves to be audited and have involved the MFA fro the get-go means we’d have rocks in our heads to not take them seriously.
Morgan is incumbent. News wants to control its measure. It is easy to see where this ends.
Would EMMA have been as embraced if it reported lower numbers than Morgan for the key mastheads and titles?
All the major backers have seen significant uplift in reported readership.
Headline: Industry bankrolls new audience measurement system and sees lift in audience.
Frankly Roy Morgan figures have been dubious for years – every year circulation falls but readership increases for the major newspapers (I’ve got six years of figures from media kits published by the papers to show this). Every media buyer (and client) should have been asking “how so”? But not a murmur.
The test for emma will be when a few more data points come out and if they also trend with lower circ but higher readership we will know the truth. When something seems too good to be true it usually is.
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