Media owners and sales houses have been working hard and paying a lot to offer the market audience measures for all major media that have reached a certain degree of perfection. Technological changes and changing needs keep pushing these measurements and currencies further into sophistication. This -somewhat autistic – view on media research should be supported by everybody; be it media, agencies or advertisers. Without this strive for perfection there would have been no PPM (personal people meter), no WAR (weekly advertising reach) for magazines, no TV audience measures that includes the delayed viewing of digitaly recorded programmes, no measures of the profile of website visitors, no ‘brand’ reach of newspapers and their news websites and so on…

Consumer centric media research and planning tools are not meant to replace these perfect media centric studies. On the contrary! Without these media specific audience surveys it would be impossible to offer the advertiser a holistic view on the reach of mono or cross media campaigns. The problem howerver is that the silo approach of media research does not give a satisfying answer to the advertiser about the combined reach of his campaigns that run in a mix of media and communication channels. In times of growing accountability and maximisation of the return on investment of marketing money it is no longer acceptable for advertisers not to have a clue about the way different media work together to get the message across.

That’s where single-source media hub surveys and planning tools get in the picture. The role of hub surveys is to find a way to link media currencies together to give a real view on the combined result of cross media plans. Therefore it is necessary to start from a consumer centric view: what media does the individual consumer use in what way and what doses during the day and the week. Only by putting the consumer at the centre, duplications between media and communication channels can be controlled. 

The Vdiary & Calibration method we propose, collects single source media behaviour of consumers in such a way that it allows to control duplications between media and preserves the currency reach levels acrross target groups from the original media surveys. The crucial element in creating a cross media planning tool is TIME. Not just the time spent with each medium, but the consumption of media across days and day parts has to be studied. For audiovisual media this type of data is already standard. For press, especially magazines, this type of data is not yet available as the currency in most countries. Although there have been attempts in several countries since the end of the ‘90ies to measure the accumulation of magazine reach over time, this type of information is still not the standard for magazine research. Publishers should be aware that this lack of data that expresses the specificity of magazines puts them in an uncomfortable position.  Especially now that television starts to study the delayed viewing of broadcast programms…

To conclude this post and to answer the question wether there is realy a trade-off between media or consumer centric media research to be made, my view clearly is that it is not a trade off. Media centric, media specific research is realy needed to provide the most accurate currencies possible, but it has to be complemented with consumer centric measures of how consumers use media in what doses and in what combinations. That research should be designed in such a way that it allows the creation of links between the existing media silos. The final goal is to offer advertisers the information they need to realy evaluate and know what they are spending their advertising money on!