Not All Consumer Studies Are Created Equal

TVB relies on consumer media usage studies to illustrate the on-going appeal of television relative to other media. Similarly, advertising professionals rely on these studies to help determine how millions of dollars will be allocated across the various media options. Unfortunately, most of these studies are dependent on self-report methodologies, where Canadians report what they think they do.

For the broadcast industry, the gold standard is metered measurement that removes the human error (or judgement) factor. Further, they are not subject to influences which result in under or over reporting of media consumption, such as people not wanting to admit how much or how little time they spend with any given medium.  With the recently launched PPMs, great measurement got even better.  PPM's are passive, requiring panel members to simply wear a pager-like device, and the device does all the work of "listening" for any encoded television or radio signal that is audible to the panel member.  The result is that most if not all exposure to broadcast media is now being captured which, not surprisingly, translates into higher reported audiences compared to set-top meters or diaries. Over the first 13 weeks of PPM measurement, the overall audience to Canadian commercial television is up 22% compared to the same period last year.

Unfortunately, meter measurement is not available for all media.  While online measurement is good, it is typically campaign or site-specific, and does not provide an overall view of the medium.  Within the strategic planning process, media planners rely on side-by-side comparisons of media usage data to guide their thinking. These types of comparisons are provided within RTS, PMB, and NADbank databases. However, all are self-reported surveys, and they produce significantly diverse results in many areas, notably in the areas of reach and time spent.

RTS (a BBM Analytics product and media usage database) is a survey which returns to those who filled out the spring and fall radio measurement diaries.  It is released twice a year, and each release rolls together the results of the two previous Return To Sample studies. Therefore each release contains data from the previous 12 months and is based on a combined sample of 65K people aged 12+/60K people aged 18+.

PMB (the Print Measurement Bureau's product and media usage database) is a survey released twice a year as of Fall 2009.  Each release rolls together 2 years of readership and product data, and also contains a 1 year product database.  The two year PMB data is based on a combined sample of 25K people aged 12+/23K people aged 18+.  The one year data is based on a 12+ sample of 12K.

NADbank (the product and media usage database for the Canadian daily newspaper industry) is an annual survey.  It is released once a year and is based on two waves of research.  Therefore each release contains data from the prior 12 months, and has a combined sample of 38K people aged 18+.

In a side by side comparison, we analyzed the reach and time spent data available within each database.  While RTS can produce reach & time spent data for TV, Radio, Online, Daily Newspapers, Magazines, and Community Newspapers, to produce an equitable comparison, we  removed Community Newspapers. Also, PMB does not provide time spent for daily newspapers.

These are the results for several key demo's:

The point of this exercise is to illustrate the risks for advertising decision-makers of placing all their planning "eggs" into one basket. It behooves all of us to reinforce the consideration of all available data in order to make the best informed decision.