Report from ARF Audience Measurement

Correspondent Professor Byron Sharp, Director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, University of South Australia reports from the ARF audience measurement conference(edited) :

Rachel Kennedy and Virginia Beal from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute were there presenting. Here's their report on key highlights:

1. Tivo and TRA - creation of a joint venture to create a single source panel with tivo set-top box viewing data combined with store loyalty card data for the same people to track exposure and purchasing.

2. Announcement of the establishment of 'The Media Behaviour Institute' - a joint venture between Sequent Partners and Mike Bloxham from Ball State University. They plan to roll out a USA version of UK's TouchPoints.

3. Launch of Google TV - Google is now in to the business of planning and buying TV ad space and allowing more timely measurement.

The 3 Quotes or phrases that we liked from the conference:

1. Media measurement needs an equivalent of the Euro
2. The mobile phone is the remote control to your life
3. What is required to bring about change in media is intellectual curiosity combined with desperation.

Key things that were talked about:

1. About Jeffery Cole from the Centre for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School...key insight was that the internet usage did start to affect TV viewing in the US but that was a function of dial up - with broadband and wireless TV viewing is stronger than ever. ()
2. Internet users starting to accept advertising as the price for free content on the web.
3. Internet allows Magazines and Newspapers to become more like TV - ie 'LIve news' not 6 hour or more old content - so a great opportunity for them
4. Media brands are more important than ever in the digital realm - ie NY Times for news online although you may have never read the paper - but know the reputation as good source of news.
5. 91% of Americans pay for TV (ie cable or satellite) and spend $260 per household per month on content devices - ie Mobile ph, broadband, TV subs
6. Mobile phones being used to interact with outdoor, print and ambient media in terms of texting in codes or photographing / scanning barcodes for vouchers, and also transacting with it like a credit card
7. Much talk about the 3 Screens - TV, Computer/laptop, Mobile (and the complexity of measuring)
8. 90% of US channels have audience shares of less that 1%.
9. Every minute 10 hours of content is uploaded to YouTube! YouTube is now offering cut of ad revenue to posts that are popular and bringing users to the site. Great tool to use to pretest ad creative - calling it 'the worlds largest focus group'
10 88% of online reviews of products in the UK are positive - reinforcing Institute report 34.
11. Rise of the Infopinion Age - ie online reviews etc - Trusted info comes from: 1. Friends and Family, 2. Credentialized expert (ie ebay, reviewers etc) or strangers with experience.
12. Introduction of the C3 measure for TV ratings during the ad break - essentially min-by-min rating and how they are now looking at the performance of ads in the pods and discussing how they should charge a premium for space that is taken by poor ads that turn the audience away.
13. High involvement categories (cars, phones, elec's etc) spending about 10% of ad budget on digital, low involvement about 2%
14. with 250 channels in UK there is 42,000 hours of content a week - with 2000 there is 333,000 hours of content broadcast - raises the Q of what is appropriate to track?? What is the threshold of significance - what is big enough to be worth reporting? .... "