SA research holds it own

As the South African Advertising Research Foundation (SAARF) prepared to award a new contract for RAMS (its Radio Audience Measurement Survey) [see Nielsen Media Research awarded AMPS/RAMS], there have been the usual general rumblings in the industry about the quality of our currency. How good is our methodology, should we be looking to move to a more technological solution, is our sample size adequate, how do we get more information for our money and what's the rest of the world doing that we can learn from?

International benchmarking is necessary, and it's always important to keep abreast with what's happening in the rest of the world - but once in a while you get a pleasant surprise and discover that you're on the right track and your international counterparts have more to learn from you - than you from them.

Biggest eye-opener

The biggest eye-opener for me at the conference this year was when you look at what everyone else is doing, we're actually very lucky with what we've got in RAMS.

We complain about our sample size - but because we flood our sample (a technique by which we collect radio listening behavior from all members in a household); we land up conducting about 48 000 interviews. In the new contract we'll be including an approximate 4000 additional rural households which should push the number of diaries that we have access to up to around 55 000 per annum.

We also have the added benefit of a radio diary where we collect seven days worth of radio listening behavior from the respondent, as opposed to conducting day-after telephone interviews where you're just asking them what they listened to yesterday. When you multiply this out, what it effectively means is that we have 385 000 days of listening behavior per annum to analyze.

Add to this, that during the second half of 2008, SAARF will be conducting interviews amongst 13 - 15 year olds to get an idea of what's happening in the urban youth market and not only do we land up with a survey that's bigger than what's happening in a lot of Europe, but we land up with one that's more comprehensive as well.

The household flooding technique allows us to maximise the amount of data that we collect from each household, thereby providing a cost effective solution for radio. The fact that RAMS and AMPS are conducted in the same households also provides the added benefit of SAARF being able to make a single source branded RAMS database available, linking the AMPS lifestyle, media usage and branded information back to the primary RAMS respondent.

Dying a slow death

As far as technology goes, the move to electronic measurement appears to be dying a bit of a slow death, the main reason for this being that it's so expensive it's not feasible to implement.

Having said that, there are a couple of countries that are using meters (in Denmark and Norway, for example), but the samples are very small (500 - 800) and the panels are always in conjunction with a traditional radio survey. In the UK they've recently ended their project looking into a combined meter for radio and television because the costs were running so high. In the Netherlands, after extensive tests the radio industry decided to stay with diaries because the meters changed the currency dramatically and their TV industry found that respondents didn't carry the meters and therefore just weren't compliant.

So, all in all, after being exposed to the current status of radio measurement across Europe, I'd say that South African radio research is looking pretty good. Nevertheless, there are lessons we can take for media research as a whole in terms of what we should be looking to in the future. Things such as: new media types, time-shifted viewing and listening, survey integration and in particular the “hot topics” of trying to understand how people consume media and how they spend their time.

Finland, France, the UK, Greece, Norway, Poland, Slovenia, Croatia and Switzerland are all working towards integrated surveys that go beyond mere audience measurement. In some instances, they are looking at integrating their audience measurement surveys with “Touch Points” - branded or lifestyle surveys - and in other instances they are looking at time diaries and how and when consumers are interacting with different media platforms.

The digital age is coming, and it's going to have a significant impact on not only how people consume media but how they live their lives and spend their time. From a media research perspective, when it arrives, we need to not only understand it, but must have already worked out how we're going to measure it.