SAARF takes big strides with Branded AMPS and TAMS fusion

The SABC, Oracle Airtime Sales and e-tv decided late last year to support SAARF's Branded AMPS with the result that AMPS 2005 will have a record number of product categories and leading brands available on it. The good news for marketers and advertising agencies is that this information will be made available to them free of charge, offering for the first time, branded data on a massive scale to users of AMPS and TAMS.

As in the past, the branded information will be collected via the SAARF self-completion questionnaire, which over the past few years has become an integral part of the AMPS study. In total just over 120 product categories with over 1 200 brands will appear on AMPS 2005. As always, the SAARF Branded Data will cover the total adult population of South Africa - both urban and rural - providing a complete national picture.

For the TV media owners it gets even better as the AMPS data, including the branded information, will be fused to the TAMS data thus providing for the first time TV viewing data linked not only to demographics, but linked to product data right down to a brand level.

Major FMCG brand and other marketers such as those from the banking, insurance, credit card, cell phone and other industries, will be able to track the measure of their brand penetration with respect to "prompted awareness" and "claimed brand usage".

Individual brand data linked to media consumption as measured in AMPS and TAMS, will also give valuable media planning and targeting information, additional to LSMs, activities (life style), services, and retail detail and all other information as measured in AMPS.

Another new development is the addition of a new question to the branded data questionnaire that will give users valuable insight into the brands that users may consider in future versus their current brand usage.