Marketing improvements for TAMS

Technical director, Piet Smit, explains: "Since the first TAMS reporting week of 2004, the old system of cell weighting has been replaced with the more flexible Random Iterative Method (RIM) weighting to gross the TAMS results up to represent the population. This method of weighting allows us to use more variables. The old system used only gender, age and language to their correct proportions of the South African adult population." Smit says that the highly technical details aside, what this means for users is that additional variables such as the SU-LSM, which could not be accommodated under the previous system, is now incorporated in weighting of the TAMS results.

"The new weighting method now makes TAMS even more valuable to marketers and media planners," he says. "This better weighting procedure can improve the effectiveness of users' media planning and consequently the efficiency of advertising spend." Smit indicates that the next step in the development of TAMS will be the inclusion of a geographic split aligned to the SABC's intended regional breakouts.

"SAARF continues to search for additional benefits for TAMS stakeholders," concludes Smit.

The costs for the SAARF TAMS 2004 weekly reports on CD for the period January to December 2004 are as follows:

Collected from SAARF @ R 13 310,00
Delivered in Jhb/Sandton area @ R 17 490,00
Delivered by Air Freight @ R 18 200,00

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