It is particularly difficult to control the quality of the results obtained by the peoplemeter panels. Even though the technical resources to carry out a real control exist, no peoplemeter panel operator has so far used a simple system, known as the 'presence sensor', with the exception of the 'Auditrack' panel set up by the Reach Mass Institute in the Lebanon. This paper describes the advantages of using the presence sensor and provides a preliminary assessment of the measurement errors due to the poor input of the panellists. While waiting for the arrival of passive audience measurement, what is the error scale of declarative audience measurement based on the 'push button' and how is the day-to-day precision going to be improved with full knowledge of the facts?
The CESP has carried out two types of experiment on measuring First Reading Yesterday (FRY). The first was performed during the National Readership Survey (NRS) in 1988. A questionnaire on yesterday reading was given by phone three weeks after the face-to-face interview. The results calculated from FRY were compared to the Recency Reading results obtained on the same sample. Due to lack of consistency between the two sets of results, especially for the monthlies, this method has now been dropped. Following this initial experiment and research carried out in other countries such as the USA and Netherlands, the CESP introduced a new method for measuring FRY in the Multi-Media Time-Budget Survey. Carried out over the period 1991/1992, the survey was not intended to be an audience measurement survey, but a tool for inter-media comparison. Nevertheless, the time-budget approach has proved particularly useful in identifying FRY, which is notoriously difficult to measure. In this second experiment, the CESP used all the time-budget information acquired, i.e.: place of reading, time of reading, number of times the issue was picked up, etc., combined with a source of copy question. The FRY question was thus asked indirectly. Due to the sample size (18,000), the data collected could not be used as Average Issue Readership for each title. However, analysing the results showed a consistency with not only the NRS results but also the circulation figures in terms of market shares.
The present monograph on "media moments" objectively confirms that media contact depends in part on life-stvle. Preferred media moments with the press, television and radio are arranged differently according to the days of the week and how the various categories use their time. A few simple examples taken from the Tables illustrate well the cause and effect relation of the different targets' preferred media moments and the time they have available: - Employed people naturally prefer watching television after 10 pm during the weekend. - Women of the house with children listen to less radio on Wednesdays and Sundays. - People living in households of three or more have shorter and more sporadic media moments. All three behaviours are related to one and the same need: individual management of time. How much candle can be burned at each end varies from one person to the next, but choices still have to be made. This media decision-making depends, and will do more and more, on how well, or badly, they fit in with people's lives. This is especially TRUE for television, time-guzzler par excellence. The audiovisual media must pay attention to people's timetables and integrate target availability into their programming strategies now: it is not simply necessary, it is vital. When the targets are compared among themselves, the behaviour proves very similar for television, less so for radio and somewhat different for the press.