Media buyers divided on News Corp’s pull from AMAA audit
News Corp’s decision to pull out of the Audited Media Association of Australia’s audit has divided media agencies, with some claiming not to have been consulted in News Corp’s “extensive review”, while others have called into question the publisher’s commitment to transparency.
The global media giant – which runs mastheads such as The Australian, The Herald Sun and The Daily Telegraph – announced yesterday it would withdraw from the AMAA circulation audit, with Enhanced Media Metrics Australia (EMMA) to provide audience data.
At the time of the announcement, News Corp said the decision had come following an extensive review with more than 100 advertisers and agencies. But the publisher declined to divulge to Mumbrella which agencies reviewed while a number of agencies, who prefer to remain anonymous, claim to have been excluded from the process.
The absence of critical, comment from the large media buyers is odd. Why would anyone trading and professionally recommending expenditure in media passively accept less transparency and independent measurement of media than we have now.
Because buying media care fee is the place to be!
Andrew Sardini – the bigger question to ask Mumbrella would be, who did they approach? Did anyone deny the chance to respond?
Good piece Zoe. Nice to see someone not swallowing the News Corp spin.
Will NewsCorp be pursued by the ATO and forced to pay some tax in Australia?
How is this any different from Foxtel not publishing the amount of set top boxes? TV buyers use oztam ratings for audience on Foxtel, not an independantly audited amount of subscricptions.
Oh yeah, just like how everyone cares that Facebook reports on its own metrics with zero transparency. Or the time they overestimated video views by 90%. Or claimed they reached a million more Aussies than currently exist in the country.
Still a stupid but very telling move by News.
News’ circulation figures have always been a bit of a circus. How does it account for all the giveaways—if you’ve flown Qantas recently you will know what I mean. Its cover was blown with the problems it had explaining away the giveaway program with the European edition of the Wall Street Journal some years ago. And readership flows back through all this. Circulation is what matters: readership in newspapers is largely baloney.
The removal of circulation audits from magazines ignored the importance of the primary reader. Isn’t someone who has paid $5 for their magazine worth more than someone flicking through a year old publication in the hairdressers? A failure of publishers to sell an important difference of the core buyer.
Like wise with newspapers. Is the person who buys a newspaper daily worth more as a core reader than being measured equal to the ridiculously high 10th pass on reader, by Emma?
News Corp’s release is an excuse not the reason.
They now can disguise a huge fall off of circulation as they pull back from distributing free copies.They will save $10 million+ a year.
There are pros and cons to measuring both readership and circulation. As many will know, print readership data is traditionally collected by face to face interviewers asking ambiguous questions about how many times you read a specific paper in the last week or month. What classifies as reading? How big a sample is required to reflect readership accurately? Sure there are more advanced methods now for collecting aggregated print and digital audience data, but accuracy of the count is very questionable. Additional confusion exists around which source of readership data to use; the newer EMMA (Enhanced Media Metrics Australia) or Roy Morgan. When you review the print audience data (EMMA) versus the newspaper readership data (Morgan), the stated audience and readership numbers for print products differ substantially.
Circulation on the other hand added some accountability. Single copy and subscription copy sales are captured as average net paid sales, with transparency available on copies sold to non-traditional distribution channels (which are heavily discounted). Any growth in audience numbers would therefore imply more customers are now reading each copy sold. Something doesn’t add up. …. and this is what advertisers and buyers are rely on. Publishers changed the audited circulation reporting metric last year to go from quarterly to half yearly reporting in order to mask their circulation declines. Their sales dropped around -10% across the market; their discounted copies didn’t. Peel back the onion and you’ll see that this is about driving huge cost savings. Advertisers won’t have transparency over the huge cuts that News will not put through its production of newspapers. In August, The Sunday Telegraph reported weekly sales of 378,000 copies a week. That figure will be closer to 320,000 in the coming months, but you’ll never see it now. And News can now get on with selling positive stories whilst marking their own report card.