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Although ethnic programming is growing to meet the demand of Canada's diverse population, audience measurements are skewed towards English- and French-language households, leaving multi-lingual broadcasters without the numbers they need to justify charging higher advertising rates.
Art Reitmayer, CEO of Channel M, explains that " 'although there are advertisers and content producers for ethnic programming, the currency that exists is these rating services. We have to see more clean-up of this issue so that rating services in Canada actually mirror the market.' "
Jim Macleod, CEO of BBM Canada, says that from a statistical perspective, it is difficult to get a representative sample of any group that makes up less than 10% of the population into BBM's surveys. In Vancouver, only Punjabi, Mandarin, and Cantonese are over this mark, which leaves half of the ethnic population out. Toronto and Montreal have similar issues.
Macleod says that the solution to this problem would be to have the enrolments in measurement programs conducted in several different languages.
One of of the problems with taking on a new approach to measuring the third-language audience is money, says Bob Reaume, vice-president of policy and research at the Association of Canadian Advertisers. He points out that it would be hard to get representative samples from every small group.
Source: Tech Media Reports, 02/26/2008
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