Counting down to digital, and counting, in Oz

Michael Hedges February 3, 2009

Broadcasters and publishers dare not blink this week, next week or the nanosecond after that. Digital media is upon us. What we’ve learned is to look everywhere for learning.

Analogue to digital migration is well underway in Australia. Television will be fully converted by 2013. Digital radio starts in earnest this summer. An expanding channel universe puts stress on measurement systems and calls for change. 

Australian media measures itself very traditionally. Television audience is measured by metered panel, newspapers by circulation audit and qualitative survey and radio by aided-recall diary. The radio survey methods changed, slightly, at the first of this year.

Changes to the Australian radio surveys have been strikingly uncontroversial compared to a decade or more of squabbling between broadcasters and advertisers in the United States and much of Europe. Nielsen Media conducts the radio audience surveys and, beginning in January, is introducing its ‘sticker diary’. Other enhancements include single person placement rather than “household flooding,” a redesigned “look and feel” for the diary, platform identification and 24 hour capture. All changes apply to surveys in the five primary metropolitan areas: Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. These metropolitan areas are surveyed eight times a year, other regions less frequently with less detail.

“All Commercial broadcasters nationwide and the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Company) contribute as a collective towards this process,” said Commercial Radio Australia (CRA) Chief Executive Joan Warner in an email exchange. “The contract and tender process is managed by an industry Research Committee which includes ABC representation.” Also represented is media buyer association Media Federation of Australia (MFA). The ABC is owned by the Australian government and operates three national and 46 local radio stations. In 2002 ABC launched three digital-only channels.

Nielsen Media was awarded the current contract for radio measurement in 2008 extending to 2012. Also bidding on the contract were Ipsos and Roy Morgan Research, which conducts newspaper qualitative surveys. Nielsen Media or its predecessors have measured Australian radio for more than 20 years.

Nielsen’s ‘sticker diary’ allows respondents flexibility to add more stations, significant as Australian broadcasters power up digital radio this summer, adding more stations. Commercial broadcasters are expected to add one new DAB+ station for each FM channel, effectively doubling the radio shelf-space in major cities.

“Once digital radio has switched on in the five capital cities in mid-2009, the surveys will capture platform of listening to participating stations; via a digital radio device, via traditional AM/FM devices or via the Internet, audio streaming of digital and analogue stations,” said Ms Warner.  “Furthermore, the sticker diary will allow respondents to add new digital stations as they are broadcast so measurement of digital listening can begin from the survey after switch on.”  

All survey enhancements were pilot tested last year in Adelaide and Sydney, supervised by CRA. Not tested, but “monitored,” were electronic measurement devices, touted by their inventors as better equipped to measure audience behavior as channel choice goes to the extreme. The wary Australian eye, it seems, has not been impressed.

“CRA has been monitoring the development and limited use of all devices that have come and gone from the market over the past few years,” said CRA’s Warner. “Essentially, there is no device in the market that adequately reports on audience listening. Current devices exhibit data inconsistencies, low compliance levels and technical issues and cost 2-3 times as much to implement for what appear, from all reports, to be less than satisfactory results.”

The radio audience in Australia keeps growing. Figures from CRA show average cumulative audience up in each of the last three years, reported by CRA in early December. The effect of digital radio entering the major cites will wait until end of 2009 surveys.

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