This paper begins with a very brief summary of new developments in the television medium and their effect on the likely stracture of the television market going into the next century from the perspective of the viewer and the advertising industry. We explore a hypothesis that by the year 2010 at least, the shape of the television market will be very different. Thus, new challenges will face the market research industry in its continuing attempts to satisfy the needs and requirements of European broadcasters and advertisers. Whilst it is now clear that new metering technology is required to cope with these technical developments in the television medium, we argue that the various parties that currently fund television audience research will have increasingly divergent measurement requirements in future. Some may also have new means at their disposal whereby they can directly satisfy the advertising industry, who, in its turn, may have different reporting needs and requirements in future. The paper then considers the size of the current market for television audience measurement research in Europe and asks whether sufficient funds will be still be available in the future to cover the necessary research and development into new audience measurement technology. The paper concludes with some hints for a new audience measurement system in which there is a supplementary role for a basic utility meter.
The paper outlines what has happened to Media Planning, Media Buying and Advertisement Sales as a result of the impact and wide-spread proliferation of micro computers. The paper also highlights the practical problems still prevalent with Users that inhibit the fullest exploitation of such facilities and may limit future developments. The paper argues that, as with on-line facilities in the early 1970's, the advertising and marketing industry is one of the slowest and most reactionary when it comes to change and that the users sadly lag behind the rate of the product development. Finally, the paper offers some friendly advice for those about to enter the market or considering developing their own micro software for these purposes and forecasts some likely, some unlikely and some controversial directions for the next five years.
One of the advantages of a panel system of media measurement is that we can examine the exposure of a whole schedule and not just individual spots or programmes. Advantage has been taken of this by several so-called 'cover and frequency guides'. These go a step further. In addition to each schedule being analysed, it is possible to generalise across schedules. Regularity in the results is in fact high.
This paper traces the development of Predictive Models for establishing the coverage and frequency of viewing Advertising campaigns on Television. Most of these models were designed with the need for accuracy taking precedence over the need for flexibility, with a result that it was necessary to take into account many short term variable factors. In 1971 JWT finished work on their 'PREFACE' model by using the Negative Binomial Distribution predicting the full frequency patterns using the sole criterion of total ratings. The paper then proceeds to demonstrate how this simple concept is applicable in many other countries - irrespective of the method of time buying, the number of channels and the availability of advertising. This leads the authors to suggest that in order to use such predictive formulae in a country it may no longer be necessary to incur the considerable expenditure of continuous panel and meter data collection.