NRS Survey To Move Online

Speaking at the MRG conference in London yesterday, Roger Pratt, managing director of the National Readership Survey surprised delegates with a list of radical new proposals for how the print measurement survey could operate in the future, with face to face interviews abandoned and the research being conducted primarily online.

The proposals had been put to the NRS board and were briefly aired at an overseas conference last week, but this was the first public proclamation to the UK media community. It is now up to the board whether, or how, they take these forward.

Pratt revealed that audience response levels were dropping – below 50% nationally for the first time, and below 30% in London. This has “bad long-term implications.”

Research amongst users, conducted by TNS and Ocean Consulting, had indicated a frustration with the number of titles covered, with the lack of quality of reading data and with the inflexibility of the survey when it came to measuring significant short-term changes.

Pratt promised listeners a “radical vision” and that was exactly what he and colleagues on the four-man executive were proposing, via a new web-based survey, with 2,000-3,000 respondents used in two samples monthly, from a pool of 150,000-250,000 adults. Newspapers and magazines will be split into separate surveys and then the data will be fused to produce a single NRS database.

Additional titles will be added to the survey, and more quality of reading questions included. The larger pool and the online methodology will enable short-term topical “boosts” to answer those strategic questions, and would give agencies and publishers the chance to add private questions.

The average issue readership questions would be reshaped, dropping the current “recency” question and replacing it with a new frequency and scale question – no longer when did you last read, now how often do you read.

Whilst acknowledging that these changes meant a radical shake up in the way the NRS researched and offered data to its users, Pratt asserted that they were necessary. “It was very clear from the surveys of users that doing nothing was not an option” he said.

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