After a rigorous six month tender process, facilitated by external consulting group Yardstick, the Publisher Research Council (PRC) has confirmed the appointment of Nielsen to conduct the PAMS reading currency in 2017.
The sampling design for PAMS will consist of a core face-to-face interview, using a stratified probability sample of 10,000 households but in a significant departure from past practices, Nielsen will use a household flooding technique which will boost the respondent sample to 20,000. Flooding allows for the interviewing of more than one respondent in a household.
“If you’re measuring reading behaviour, then flooding makes perfect sense,” says Gordon Muller Joint General Manager of the PRC, “not only because it’s a cost-efficient way to boost the respondent sample size but because it measures the reality of the title’s reader journey within the home. In-home pass-along reading is an inherent property of the medium’s audience delivery.”
Bryan Sun, Managing Director of Nielsen Southern Africa says: “Nielsen is thrilled to be working with the PRC and we look forward to a long-term relationship to build a best in class, quality, future-proofed audience measurement currency for readership in South Africa.”
Nielsen offers a combination of world class best practices in total audience measurement, an innovative approach combining new methodologies and digital offerings to provide the most complete view of readership in South Africa.
“Publishers have accepted the need to move away from measuring exposure to paper, towards measuring platform-agnostic reading behaviour. You can see that in the ES (Establishment Survey) reading question,” says Peter Langschmidt Joint General Manager of the PRC.
As its primary mandate, PAMS will provide a reading currency for over 250 titles and supplements but in addition, the PAMS questionnaire will contain demographics and the necessary hooks for multi-basing onto the ES hub-survey, as well as the new ES lifestyle measure which will replace LSM’s.
In addition to the 20,000 Face-to-Face respondents PAMS will be supplemented by a panel of 5000 reader respondents which will be directly managed by the PRC.
“Panels will give publishers and planners a continuous stream of agile data about readers. Not just dated static readerships. Ultimately consumer panels represent the future of reader research,” confirms Langschmidt.
A series of pilots will be conducted and fieldwork for PAMS will begin in March 2017. There will be one release of reader data in September 2017 to coincide with the release of the first full year ES survey. From 2018 onwards PAMS data will be released twice annually on a rolling six month basis.
Issued on behalf of: Gordon Muller gordon@prc.za.com
Peter Langschmidt peter@prc.za.com
Issued by: Owlhurst Communications
Chirene / Mark Campbell
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chirene@owlhurst.com
mark@owlhurst.com
