Deficit in media research demands attention specialist

Impartial and detailed media research is urgently needed, says the managing director of media specialists Carat Ireland.

Mr Alan Cox claims media research no longer serves the needs of advertisers. Carat Ireland is part of AIM/Carat, Ireland's largest independent media specialist.

He advocates the establishment of an independent research body funded in equal part by a levy on advertisers and by media. "If you take it that, broadly speaking, 20 per cent of any advertising budget goes on creative and 80 per cent goes on media, it doesn't make sense that £5 million (€6.35 million) is spent researching the effectiveness of a creative execution and only a few hundred thousand on the media effectiveness," he said.

At present, each medium is responsible for commissioning and issuing its own research. In some cases, the Institute of Advertising Practitioners (IAPI) contributes towards the cost but the lion's share is paid for by the particular medium.

"At AIM/Carat we would have issues with the quality of information supplied by various media," said Mr Cox. "And we feel this is a growing concern within some sectors of the advertising industry." But he added that some agencies were happy to settle for mediocrity in media research.

"Take the JNRR. A person is classified as a reader if they have read or looked at a publication. So, as advertisers, we don't know what pages they read, how long they were reading or if they read the supplements," he said. The JNRR, mainly funded by the Irish newspaper industry, does not measure the Irish readership of UK newspapers, a growing area of media consumption.

He believes TV research figures suffer from the same "broad stroke" approach. AC Nielsen figures for TV show how many people were in the room and for how long the TV was on, but do not measure whether the viewers were attentive or doing something else at the same time.

Mr Cox cites cinema as another area where media analysis is weak. Every year AIM/Carat conducts in-cinema research noting the time that 15,000 people sat down in their seats. Last year, it found that at most 73 per cent of attendees were in the cinema in time to see the advertising reel.

"We presented this call for an independent media research body at a Marketing Society meeting last week," said Mr Cox. "And we were pleased to get feedback from RTE, advertisers and advertising agencies that indicated an interest in moving the idea forward.

The next step is to get the media owners on board." A spokesperson for the National Newspapers of Ireland said it would be interested in looking at any proposal, and that any new research would be an addition, not an alternative to the JNRR, which had served the industry for 28 years.