MRG Conference: Readership Data Will Never Be The Same

The NRS audience accumulation initiative could fundamentally change the planning and buying of national press in the UK, according to director of NOP’s media division, Alan Higgs.

Addressing delegates on Friday afternoon’s session of the MRG Conference in Budapest, Higgs explained that the planning and buying of national press ad campaigns is currently largely based upon NRS average issue readership data.

He said that it is often assumed that this data may be used as surrogates for the number of people who will read specific issues and that all of the readership will occur within a title’s publication cycle.

However, Higgs told delegates that when publications have a medium to long shelf-life, these assumptions are not necessarily correct. He explained that as more and more campaigns are being designed to deliver results on a long term basis, it is “imperative” to know what proportion of a campaign’s exposure will occur during its shelf life and how much will effectively have been wasted.

He went on to tell delegates that “the problem is about to be resolved” as NOP has recently completed the first significant study of readership accumulation ever conducted in the UK. It is expected that the results will “throw new light” on UK accumulation issue and will challenge previously held assumptions.

Higgs said: “They will alter schedules based on weekly reach, particularly for monthly magazines. In essence they will provide media planners, for the first time, with up to date information on the rate at which the audiences to individual issue accumulate over time.”

The results of the study have not yet been released, but Higgs expects them to support the existing hypothesis, which he described as “robust” and “credible”.

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