Reading/watching times

© Arekmalang – 123RF.com

I've seen so many "conclusive" reports by various people and organisations. Most of them have only one thing in common, which is that I don't believe them.

In fact, nothing much new or convincing has emerged since before I was born (ref: Genesis) although some extremely interesting research (in other areas) has been developed. But the problem remains about how much time the potential customer will spend reading our advertisement.

Starch Noting Scores

Daniel Starch pioneered some fairly obvious stuff in the early 1920s and much of this is still used today. For example, in order for an advertising message to succeed, it must:

• Be seen
• Be read
• Be believed
• Be remembered

He created several models of readership behaviour, which would suggest that, for example, an advertisement on page 1 of a newspaper would be seen by more readers than if it had been placed, say, on page 20. And, following his logical progression, it will be read more, be believed by more and remembered by more. Thus, a page 1 advertisement will achieve a higher "Starch Noting Score" than a page 20 advertisement.

The Starch Readership Programme was established in the USA in 1931 and measures readership by three criteria: "noted", "seen-associated" and "read-most" - all of which are expressed as percentages.

Starch also found that in print advertising, a double-page advertisement may cost twice as much as a single page but it does not get twice the recall. (Frequency may be a far more important factor than page size).

It's important, VERY important to note is that Starch models do not accept, in this context, any creative influence. Such influence comes after the first stage.

It has been well documented that Starch Noting Scores start at high levels on page 1 of a newspaper (97%, in fact) and they decline as the newspaper is paged through, with right-hand pages scoring higher than left-hand pages, until the back page, where the score is around 91%.

I've often wondered who the 3% of readers are who don't even notice the front-page headline. Maybe they just go straight to the sports pages?

Starch reached a lot of conclusions which are still revered today although it's quite common to see a prominent industry figure dismissing them out-of-hand because it's kind of trendy to do that. But the reality is that people like Starch, Gallup and others laid the foundations for modern research.

Gallup Noting and Reading

Developed by Dr George Gallup (more famous for his public opinion poll techniques), it operates in a similar way to Starch, wherein it measures audience noting and reading of editorial and advertising.

Essentially, the process examines:

Page traffic. The audience percentage looking at any item on a page.

Noting. The audience percentage noting any part of the advertisement.

Name notation. The audience percentage noting the advertiser's name.

Reading. The audience percentage reading two or more sentences of advertising copy.

Readership patterns

I intend only to briefly mention this because the data is, and always will be, in my opinion, spurious.

We know that primary readers (probably the people who bought the magazine or newspaper in the first place) are more likely to read it more thoroughly and longer than secondary readers, and so on.

We also know that "total readership" (that's the number of people we assume our advertisement will reach) is not instantaneous - it builds up of a period of time. Here is an approximation of typical exposure and how long it takes to reach total readership.

• Daily press: within 1 week.
• Sunday press: within 3 weeks.
• Monthly magazine: 8+ weeks.

Oh, that life could be simple!

az.oc.srewerb@sirhc

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