Because of the increasing number of channels available to subscribers in the pay TV environment in South Africa, including niche channels, information on viewing habits with regard to cross channel-viewing becomes important. This paper focuses on channel repertoires in a multi-channel TV environment, specifically digital satellite television (pay TV) in South Africa. It addresses the issue that, although faced with a plethora of channel choices, viewers typically watch a set number of channels which form their own personal repertoire. It explores different sets of data to determine which common repertoires may exist, and among which market segments.
In television audience research in The Netherlands (and similarly in other European countries) viewing behaviour is registered by the meter on a Per second basis. A change in channels is noted from the moment a viewer watches a channel for fifteen seconds or longer. Audience behaviour during channel changes lasting less than fifteen seconds is attributed to the last channel the viewer watched for fifteen seconds or longer. As consequence, in the case of a series of quick channel changes, a delay in the registration of channel changes occurs. Assuming that relatively more switching occurs during commercial blocks than during programs, it can be expected that audience ratings for commercial blocks would benefit more from a persistence threshold than audience ratings for programmes. A study was carried out to determine the effects of a fifteen second threshold on the viewing behaviour reported, and found this threshold has no effect on audience rating for commercials. The only effect was a very small increase in the audience ratings for the ten national Dutch channels in relation to the other, foreign channels.
In recent years, television broadcasting in Europe has often been accused low quality, and of providing the audience with a product increasingly lacking in innovation. Much of the resistance to measuring customer satisfaction arose within e world of broadcasting experts, with the excuse that television programming is a product apart from all others, and that therefore quality cannot be analyzed with methods borrowed from other fields. However, the situation is changing. In 1996 RAI, Italys Italian public broadcasting service, and ACNielsen, a leader in market research, launched Italy's first experiment in interactive television interviews, and e first continuous television quality measurement system has been in operation at RAI since July 1997.
This paper discusses the method developed by Nielsen Media Research to gather out-of-home television viewing for children in daycare, school and other situations. Utilizing a personal diary data collection tool, information was gathered from families with children about their viewing both at home and away from home. In addition, viewing was collected directly from the out-of-home child-care providers for those same families in order to provide a validation for the out-of-home viewing ported by the children. The paper explores the extent to which children view TV in out-of-home locations that are not residences.
The paper describes working principles of the new equipment, the Sniffer, a singular conceptual update of old people meter systems that solves some emergent problems of TV audience measurement, mainly those related to the diversity of the dynamically changing tuning alternatives. The new meter is already implemented in a 600 household people meter TV panel running in Sao Paulo, Brazil since the second half of 1996. Authors provide data to evaluate its performance.
The United States trails most of the advertising world in the use of optimizers, the author believes, because of the complexity of its TV market with literally hundreds of suppliers and rapidly changing costs. But it is this very complexity that makes computerized media selection programs essential. Optimization is a simple idea which grows in complication as soon as we think through its effects on the total TV planning and buying process. This paper looks at the root question What should we optimize? and discusses optimizations impending collisions with current practices in the United States, among them: CPM planning, dayparts, brand allocation, posting, guarantees and the functional separation of planning and buying.
Currently there are two national people meter systems being developed in India: a joint venture between the Indian Market Research Bureau (IMRB) and AC Nielsen; and ORG-MARG (The Marketing and Research Group). The joint venture between IMRB and AC Nielsen has the backing of a joint industry board, consisting of media professionals elected by the Indian Society of Advertisers and the Advertising Agencies Association of India. ORG-MARG has decided on a solo venture with funding from partners VNU and trusting in the industry to rethink their decision and choose a system based on price and performance. The main body of this paper looks at the many issues involved in the development of the first Indian national people meter panel, a number of which remain in dispute at the time of this paper, despite the existence of the joint industry board.
This paper provides a framework for establishing an initial examination process and demonstrates how people from different countries can work together for the improvement of media research.
Traditionally, application of household panel data is almost completely limited to more or less descriptive purposes, like demographic consumer profiles, brand switching behaviour or parallel usage. Although the information drawn from these analyses is quite valuable, there are manufacturers with a need for a much deeper understanding of what drives their brands sales. In this context, marketing activities like television advertising, feature prices, promotions and combined actions Play a crucial role. For this reason, ACNielsen Germany has developed the brand choice and quantity model (BCQ), which is capable of measuring the short-term effectiveness of marketing activities on incremental sales. The following paper describes the methodological approach as well as first results and implications for marketing planning, obtained in a case study.
In the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s Arbitron was a significant provider of formation in the field of audience measurement of television (diaries, set meters and people meters) and radio (diaries). In order to develop a Complete economical multi-media metering solution, Arbitron began forking on a Multi-Media Personal Portable Meter (PPM) program. his program will provide each signal originator with an encoder which "sorts an inaudible identification code into the stations signal in real As survey respondents are exposed to various media, these codes are "on captured by a pager-size decoder which can easily be carried by respondents. This paper outlines our progress over the past five and more years developing a device small enough to be carried for an extended period of time, yet powerful enough to pick up the various codes to which e despondent is exposed. It will discuss Arbitrons most significant achievements in technological development, explaining why it works and how well. It will also discuss the all-important area of human factors search. The paper will conclude with 1998 plans.
This paper is designed to provide a summary of the various meter systems from eight companies which will present products at this seminar. First, the purpose of television meters and three new meter philosophies are identified and subsequently, the operational characteristics of the presenting companys nine meter systems are summarized.
This research examines television programme rescheduling to maximise total ratings for one network across a week. Respondents read these re scheduled programme schedules and choose the network to watch during prime time. Only a small but informative fraction of over seven million potential programme rearrangements are selected for the experiment to get meaningful information without introducing respondent fatigue. Models are used to predict ratings as a function of the Programmes offered at a particular time. The next stage uses the models to predict ratings for all the possible programme schedules and determine which rearrangement maximises the total weekly ratings for one network. For the data used in this study, the proposed optimal television scheduling method increased the predicted total weekly ratings during prime time for one network by 24% while average channel share increased by 19%. To validate the method, comparisons between actual and predicted ratings are made for a network that actually rescheduled some of its programmes.