Readership Works boss admits they would have liked to launch EMMA five years earlier
The head of the Readership Works admitted it would have been ideal to have its Enhanced Media Metrics Australia (EMMA) metric launched five to six years ago, also blaming the metric’s struggle to gain traction on a changing environment within media agencies.
“We would have liked to have done everything five or six years ago, without a doubt. But again, that’s such an easy thing to say,” Mark Hollands, CEO of The Newspaper Works and The Readership Works, said during a video hangout this afternoon.
Due to a technical difficulty the video finishes at 41.34 mins. We apologise for the abrupt end.
There are lots of problems with the Emma survey. Launching five years earlier wouldn’t have fixed a thing. Research needs to be credible. Full stop. Urging agencies to spend more on print is never going to happen while inflated numbers are used in negotiations.
Always nice to see someone with a limited grasp of the research concept in charge of an industry currency. To suggest there is no relationship between circulation and readership, because ‘if I stop buying a newspaper it doesn’t mean I don’t read one’, is foolish. Ahh the sample of one.
The relationship between the two (circulation and readership) should be and has been in most readership surveys demonstrated over decades. The fact that in a single release they may conflict for a title is a result of using a sample, however when comparing the two over time these biases are rarely repeated and the relationship is re-established. Readership often uncovers sample bias that demographic weighting cannot always account for, that especially effects specific niche titles. My guess in the case of ZOO is that you have a specific demographic niche reading the publication, this group are known to be heavily under-represented in these surveys (16-24 year old males), they therefore attract huge weights with very small samples, this means this group is open to huge fluctuation. You only need a small over-representation of Zoo readers in the 16-24 sample of the survey to account for the discrepancies seen. Who would have thought that the easiest 16-24 year old males to interview would be Zoo readers. Mind you I have a feeling they will be the easiest to reach by in home interviewing as they are the sort of high flying ladies men who may often be found hanging around in their rooms.
My favourite part of the interview (from a researchers perspective) was the failure to grasp the concept of currency. The basic premise is that it is an acceptable value on which buyers and sellers can trade. To say that EMMA is already a currency for the publishers but not the agencies, misses the whole point of the exercise.