News publishers partner with Nielsen for audience readership data Media Man Int

News publishers partner with Nielsen for audience readership data - 21st May 2018

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By Jennifer Duke

Australia’s biggest news organisations are partnering with global insights company Nielsen to add newspaper and magazine audience data to offer advertisers a multi-channel planning “hub” across television, radio, print and digital.

In the first major change to the industry-backed readership survey Emma (Enhanced Media Metrics Australia) since its launch, Nielsen will bring together its digital audience data with Ipsos’ print and demographic readership survey to create a total audience measure.

This will allow Nielsen to provide print audience currency data alongside other media data for the first time, with advertising agencies better able to plan multi-channel campaigns across print, magazines, television and radio.

The Readership Works general manager Mal Dale said the change was the biggest evolution in the Emma metric since it launched five years ago.

NewsMediaWorks subsidiary The Readership Works, co-founded in 2010 by Fairfax Media (owner of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age), News Corp and Seven West Media, conducted a tender in 2011 to start a new readership survey.

“Back then in 2010 it was obvious to everyone involved that there was massive disruption coming through, in particular for news media publishers from the digital channels,” Mr Dale said.

“We had to find a way of measuring and being able to report the cross-platform audiences across the devices of – at the time principally considered to be desktop and print back in 2010.”

Twelve companies tendered, four were shortlisted and Ipsos was selected to create the readership measurement survey Emma, fusing a print survey with Nielsen Online Ratings, launching in 2013 at a time when mobile audience growth was surging.

In December 2017, News Corp announced it would use Emma as its exclusive audience metric provider, saying print circulation metrics alone were not representative of cross-platform audiences.

Increasingly, advertisers have wanted data that goes beyond demographics and a “head count” of how many people are reading on different platforms, and into buying intentions and psychographics.

Take automotive, where News Corp profiles well against brands like Toyota and Holden, and Fairfax titles rate for Audi and Mercedes.

Emma data further delves into consumers’ attitudes, like what they think about immigration and “whether they think all immigrants should speak English before they arrive here", Mr Dale said.

Ipsos provided the data at launch, but under the new structure Nielsen will replace it with a multi-media database collected from a nationally representative sample survey of 22,000 people called Consumer and Media View (CMV).

The process of aligning the data sets has taken about 18 months, Nielsen managing director of media Monique Perry said, with a similar process undertaken in the past with television and radio ratings.

By adding print publications, including news and magazines, with the other media currencies a “hub” can be created for advertisers and media agencies.

“Our view is that that hub is really vital, but we don’t pretend to be the best at everything so we’ll fuse in the most appropriate and accurate data sources that we can onto that hub ... in this case it’s readership, so we’ll fuse the digital and the readership together and we’ll fuse the CMV on to that to bring it to life,” Ms Perry said.

Fairfax Media recently opted not to renew an agreement with Nielsen due to a disagreement about how it measured readership, including the exclusion of Google-backed Accelerated Mobile Pages, which allows articles to load more quickly on phones and other devices.

This has not affected the current agreement, with Mr Dale saying Fairfax is “fully committed” to the new measurement as a stakeholder.

Ipsos’ print readership currency survey was renewed for five years for Emma print audience data. The first set of new data comes out on June 4.

(The Sydney Morning Herald)