Tele-Metric Research Bureau Limited was founded specifically to tender for the continuous Television audience measurement contract in the United Kingdom. The two partners in the new company were the British Market Research Bureau Limited - which has wide experience of media research - and Telemetric S.A., a Swiss electronics company which developed and supplied the new audience composition meters (telemetron) used to monitor television audiences in the Federal Republic of Germany. The measurement of television audiences in the UK has relied since the late 1950's on various forms of set meters to monitor to which channel the TV set was turned and self-completion diaries to report, quarter hour by quarter hour, which members of the panel households were viewing television.
This paper concerns the data which are available for Financial Services through the Target Group Index. Following a brief introduction - which covers the size and scope of the TGI - it illustrates the types of data which are available in the report, some trend data and data on media selection. Because the TGI covers many product fields other than financial services, it is possible to cross analyse savings or credit with activity in other areas. Some examples of the use of the data in this way are also shown. Finally, the advantages - and disadvantages - of the TGI are discussed and compared with the type of syndicated surveys which are more usually considered in specialised fields.
Information about events which happen with great regularity are, individually, of such small importance that no individual could be relied on to list them accurately from memory. But each individual event, when added together, can have very important implications from a marketing point of view. In order to collect data related to such events, we have used a diary technique - asking an individual, generally the housewife, to ensure that a complete record is kept of each event over a limited period - not only for those events for which she, herself, is responsible but also for all those involving other members of the household. In this paper, we shall-refer to some cases where this technique has been used successfully, and also discuss briefly, some of the pitfalls which might occur. We shall emphasize that this is an ad hoc technique, but it does not replace the more usual ad hoc surveys using normal aided or un-aided recall methods. It is a slightly more expensive tool to be used for problems where memory failure is likely to be acute, and where data are required from all household members, rather than from an individual within the household.