Are JICs facing an “existential crisis”?

Jerry Hill (RAJAR), James Whitmore (Route), Jerry Wright (ABC), Simon Redican (NRS) and Justin Sampson (BARB) at the Future of Media Research.

The future role of JICs – the Joint Industry Councils that manage the different audience measurement ‘currencies’ – was easily the biggest theme at this year’s Future of Media Research conference.

JICs – whose roles can be traced back some sixty years – are under renewed pressure ever since the Newspaper Publishers’ Association (now the NMA) served notice on the National Readership Survey (NRS) last year as it seeks a “contemporary” audience measurement system.

The problem is, a number of other essential industry sources, including TGI, UKOM, RAJAR and JICREG, are calibrated against the NRS population survey – opening up a wider debate on the way media research is heading.

There are also other major research challenges affecting all the JICs: from the rise of big data and the challenge of multi-platform research, to changing business models and the need for real-time data.

But whatever your view, JICs still underpin around £10bn worth of investment in UK media – making for a very sensitive commercial debate.

The chiefs of the five main JICs – Route, RAJAR, NRS and BARB, as well as ABC, which audits print, measures digital media brands and works on viewabilty and brand safety, amongst other things – were present at Tuesday’s conference, where there was talk of an “existential” crisis.

“If you look back 10 years ago, 90 per cent of revenue was planned using the JICs – by reach and frequency,” said Simon Redican, CEO of the NRS. “The market, increasingly, buys big data and proprietary research, and that that’s a challenge for all of us.

“When you listen to this debate you get the sense there is an existential crisis,” he said, adding that more must be done to engage the end user.

James Whitmore, managing director of Route, the JIC for out-of-home, told Newsline that it is like watching a slow motion car crash.

“Supplier or media owner datasets are powerfully seductive,” he said. “And being electronic or ‘big’ data, they often lead a charmed life with respect to scrutiny. The biggest media owners have access to the largest data pots. Understandably they will see value in this advantage and wish to invest behind it. That can mean less money for joint industry research.”

It will also leave the long tail of smaller media owners behind, Whitmore said, which means that they too will have less to invest in industry research.

“There is an inherent instability in that the biggest funders – the large media companies – have the greatest spread of alternative options.

“The end game could be a small number of huge media media owners, each transacting on their bespoke datasets – which are fed directly into agency trading platforms.”

In that case, the only JIC you might then need – if you need one at all – is one that allows planners to allocate budgets between the different forms of communication.

“The JICs must do more to engage with advertisers and agencies – and agree their purpose and value – plus a serious conversation about the source and level of funding,” Whitmore warned.

Future JICs

The pace of change might be frustrating for some, and the research alternatives might be expanding, but for some experts the idea of getting rid of joint industry research would be an “enormous mistake.”

Brain Jacobs, founder of BJ&A and a frequent blogger on The Cog Blog, said that the alternative would be an American-style system in which planning departments are endlessly “constipated” with discussions on research techniques, “when what they should be doing is discussing how best to spend their clients’ money best on advertising.”

Similarly, the IPA’s research director, Lynne Robinson said: “If you only use data produced by media owners, you basically have a marketing tool – you don’t have an industry currency.”

For Robinson, what awaits us will be very different to what we currently have, but it’s hard to know when to expect it to arrive.

“The future will be bold, but it won’t arrive as one thing,” she said. “It will come bit-by-bit.”

That “bit-by-bit” is well demonstrated by the arguably slow pace of Project Dovetail – BARB’s mission to achieve a comprehensive picture for cross-platform TV viewing measurement in the UK; or the NRS slowly adding mobile and tablet data for the biggest newsbrands and magazines.

For Jerry Hill, CEO of RAJAR, the JIC covering radio listening, there is simply a tension between the needs of today and the needs of tomorrow.

“We are, as an industry, going through a significant transitional process, but there is no doubt in my mind there will be JICs in the future,” he said.

However, these could be for different things: for instance, a JIC for hearing, another for seeing, watching, sharing and another still for searching.

“The JICs will be there in future,” he said, “but designed around a different construct which will be more reflective of how our industry is changing.”