This paper offers a brief review of the research techniques that are available to the media researcher who is interested in discovering what happens in front of the television. It then describes the C-Box, a piece of equipment which produces a video-recording of the viewing area in front of the TV, together with a visual image of the programme on the set, and the channel number, date and time of day. The C-Box has been used to examine the relationship between the amount of TV people claim to watch and the amount of TV they actually watch, and to generate material that is relevant to several areas of interest to media researchers. Two of these areas, namely the ratings and viewers' reactions to commercials, are singled out for special attention. The paper concludes with a summary of the advantages that video-analysis has to offer to our understanding of television viewing.
JICNARS has, through its Diary Panels Technical Study Group, reviewed previous Diary Panel experience relevant to the use of this technique in readership research and has carried out a small scale pilot test of three different methods for keeping Readership Diaries. This paper sets out the thinking that led up to the test and summarizes the conclusions drawn from it. A major conclusion was that future work on Diary Panels should concentrate on its role as an adjunct to the NRS rather than as a substitute for it. The paper concludes by describing how the Technical Study Group considers that Diary Panels can best be used in this complementary role.
This paper describes how AGB Cable & Viewdata have applied a high tech data capture vehicle (Videotex) to media research. Panels are already established using Videotex terminals to allow respondents, on-line to a computer, to complete diaries or to be taken through questionnaires.
We emphasise in our paper especially the VCR- playback behavior: when do recording and play back occurs, what will be recorded, when does time-shift-viewing happen. We conducted finally a special analyses to the effects of remote control on watching advertising blocks. As the main result we show that "zapping" is hardly evident during advertising blocks. If there is any "zapping" then it happens before and after commercials.
Helsingin Sanomat is the largest newspaper in Finland with a circulation of over half a million copies on Sundays and over 427.000 on weekdays. A major share of the newspaper's advertising sales consists of classified advertising, mainly real estate, cars and recruitment advertising. The role of recruitment advertising has recently changed in Scandinavia leading to an extension of the original advertising concept. The recruitment ad pages are no longer considered only a list of available jobs but more or less an extension of the newspaper's business news pages containing interesting information about the business community. This would indicate that these ad pages are read not only by actual job seekers but anyone interested in what is going on in business. These assumptions were known by the advertising sales people at Helsingin Sanomat, but advertisers tend to base their decisions on facts, not assumptions. With over 1,3 million readers in a country where the population is just under 5 million it is not hard to produce high readership figures in most categories. But the readership survey provides information only about the total readership of different media and advertisers required more detailed information about the readership of these particular ads and ad pages.
The following paper starts by describing the change of the Swiss media situation since the late seventies. As a consequence the system to measure TV-consumption did not suit the needs of media researchers and data users any longer. Therefore a new "Telecontrol" TV-measurement-system had been developed in Switzerland. But before its introduction a pilot comparison test between existing and the new system was arranged to find out the most efficient system. How it works and what data it produces but also what questions it arises for future media planning is discussed.
The discussions and planning sessions all led to the formation of a 'partnership model'. This is built up from the data acquired from separate samples using various measurement techniques. They were then merged, using a mathematical process suitable for intermedia planning. The fixed blue-print of the partnership model shows the breakdown of the oral questioning into two tranches. One takes in the performance against the broadcast media with the best tool for this purpose - the behaviour yesterday. The other tranche surveys the reading behaviour of consumer magazines with the proven methods. Daily papers and a raft of demographic data are included in both tranches, and are combined into a single data set by the addition of samples.
In this paper we look at two such developments, one affecting the way in which people use television and the other their purchasing patterns, related particularly to grocery products. We then consider the ways in which market research has to adapt its techniques to take account of these changes, and in particular to consider how the interaction of these developments affect countries with commercial television.
There has been for several years a lot of speculations in Finland on direct marketing and direct mail advertising. Many advertisers have seen direct mail as a new possibility to reach their target groups more efficiently and at a lower price than by using the conventional media advertising. On the other hand many media have seen the situation as one of the future threats. At the same time there has not been any research figures neither on the volume of direct mail or on people's reactions on it. That is why the Finnish Newspaper Publishers Association decided two years ago to carry out a series of surveys on direct mail. This very short paper is concentrating on the panel survey carried out by Finnpanel Oy.
Through-the-Book and Recent Reading are the current "hot potatoes" in media research and we constantly see them being thrown from hand to hand. The following paper attempts to show the advantages and disadvantages of both TTB and RR. In doing so, we have listed the state of art around the world and went a little into the history. The paper brings out into the open, the arguments put forward by both sides and shows how weak some of them can be. for example, as is the case with TTB, basing future strategies on the historic performances of particular issues leaves a lot of questions un- answered. This seems to be better served by using average issues. But in the case of RR we stumble over problems associated with time and title identity.
Over recent years, our company has been engaged in several readership studies both by personal face to face and by telephone methods amongst businessmen in general and amongst specific target groups of businessmen. In the following, I should like to describe the principles we applied when we tried to adapt the standard readership questions in use in the United Kingdom for the telephone interviews; present some results by comparing as far as is possible readership levels of the same publications and amongst similar universes obtained by either method, and draw some general conclusions. I should like to make clear that the following is in no way a report on a series of studies of any planned experimental character but rather a pooling of our experiences related to the subject.
In the Autumn of 1984, TVS and JWT commissioned AGE to conduct a study on a single panel which measured purchasing and television viewing over 12 weeks. This was to a certain extent a continuation of earlier work commissioned by JWT in 1966. The objective was to attempt to understand a little more about the short-term effects of advertising on sales; to attempt to identify Effective Frequency; and to test the logistics of having joint, detailed viewing and purchasing data on one panel. The results of the study illustrate, amongst other things, the role of TV advertising in attracting new buyers to a brand and the logistics of conducting this kind of research.