Commercial Radio Australia calls tender for audience measure
Commercial Radio Australia has called a tender for the new contract of the industry’s audience measurement service. The current service is held by Nielsen.
The announcement:
Chief executive officer of Commercial Radio Australia, Joan Warner, said today tenders had been called for the next contract for the provision of radio audience measurement services to start in January 2014.
“While the industry expects that the global standard of paper diaries for collection of radio audience data will remain the main method of collection of radio audience measurement in the short term, the industry is also very open to proposals for supplementary data collection methods to enhance the basic methodology,“ Ms Warner said.
Recent investigations of supplementary data collection methods have included online diaries and the use of mobiles and tablets to record radio listening.
There are a whole lot of sphincters contracting right now ….. Everyone know that diary system is a farce….. And ‘people meters’ will show that all radio listening is less than what is claimed!….. But of course what’s the chance of actually doing something that might be more accurate?
I think you mean PPM, not peoplemeter which is a box attached to a TV set. I can’t see PPMs being adopted in this market. The stations are too regional and sample size requirements are too high, therefore the cost being prohibitive. Online diaries is the obvious step.
I don’t think we are likely to see a significant decline in listening if we did move to passive measurement. We would however see significant changes to the performance of stations. The total reach would remain constant for the large stations, but most likely increase for the smaller stations. It is the time spent with stations that is most likely to change. I have recently seen the comparative stats for a parrallel test of a new PPM panel against diary data, so this isn’t purely conjecture however it was not Australian data obviously.