Tracking what plays out in the theatre of the mind
The Covid-19 pandemic has forced the Broadcast Research Council to change the way it measures radio and television audiences.
Another day, another story of how Covid-19 has thrown the world into disarray.
The Broadcast Research Council of South Africa commissions and oversees the delivery of radio and television audience measurement research for broadcasters as well as the advertising and marketing industries.
For years, it has released quarterly radio data, which have informed decisions in the sector. Then along came the pandemic, which made face-to-face research methods impossible. Respondents wouldn’t – and couldn’t – allow field researchers into their homes.
So while the second, third and fourth quarters of last year’s listening habits went unmeasured, it isn’t all bad news. The restrictions brought about by the pandemic forced the Broadcast Research Council to redefine its methodology and innovate.
On 29 October, the council finally released its Radio Audience Measurement Survey (RAMS) Amplify data to the industry, which was made available via third-party data providers Telmar and Nielsen.
Gary Whitaker, the council’s CEO, said the “currency” of earlier quarterly RAMS was based on face-to-face interviews and tracking listening habits across a week. During the pandemic, however, that was no longer possible for ethical and legal reasons. So they had to look at another methodology.
“We never wanted to be held captive by something outside of the study again, whether that was socioeconomic, a tragedy, a pandemic, whatever it might be.
“In conjunction with that, there are a number of needs that we wanted to fulfil – one of them being that the upper end of the market is extremely difficult to connect with and do interviews with for various reasons.”
Generally, the upper end of the market is not open to letting interviewers into their homes because of safety concerns. Many people also say they do not have time to do a face-to-face interview.
Quarterly stats simply become outdated too soon, and the council wanted – and needed – more frequent data.
“Going forward, we wanted to be able to say, okay, the likes of 5fm or Metro or any other station have either gone up or gone down and we know why. We now have more granular data.”
The pandemic was essentially a positive for the radio industry – and the study – in many ways, Whitaker said. It had forced the Broadcast Research Council to take a “giant leap” in terms of the methodology.
The methodology now includes telephonic interviews, “which could act as a standalone currency itself”.
This time around, the survey has gone through a rigorous data-scrutiny process, involving radio research experts and leading statistician Professor Ariane Neethling.
The latest RAMS Amplify is based on five months’ worth of data, from April to August 2021.
The new research methodology saw the face-to-face manual completion of seven-day diaries switched to a dual method of computer-aided telephonic interviews and a MediaCell Passive Listening Panel. Around 3,000 telephone interviews are conducted every month, aiming for a total of 36,000 nationally representative interviews a year.
This provides audience measurement in 15-minute segments, along with audience tracking on radio events and roadshows. More than 280 radio stations – including commercial, community and African language – were included. This new dataset is not comparable to previous RAM datasets.
For the MediaCell Passive Listening Panel, linear broadcast and digital consumption of 4,000 panellists were measured daily, with minute-by-minute tracking of activities. The MediaCell data will only be incorporated at the end of the first quarter 2022, once the fully recruited panel is in place.
This dual methodology will ensure the delivery of more granular data more frequently, Whitaker explained.
For now, the data, based on an achieved sample of 15,000 telephonic respondents, will only be available from Nielsen and Telmar. The full sample of 36,000 respondents will be realised after a full year of fieldwork has been completed.
Whitaker said they understood that the industry was eager to have access to the newest RAMS data, but they stood by their decision to delay the data release “in the interests of delivering a stable currency and taking a long-term view to realise the larger vision for the study”.
The pandemic has certainly shifted listening habits because audiences were no longer necessarily commuting to work. They were spending more time at home, limiting their movement and restricting social interactions. Such shifts in routines and habits had caused huge changes in media consumption generally, and for listening and viewing habits especially, he said.
The council wants to get to a point where it can merge both datasets so that it has a fully functional, robust data set that ticks the boxes.
“We’re also able to include more stations than we ever have before because the sample size has increased substantially. Before, we had a sample size of 30,000 respondents every year; that’s changed. The telephonic portion is 36,000 respondents and the panel is 4,000.”
The aim is to move to monthly releases, and possibly even more frequent releases. It will allow radio stations to determine more accurately which shows and segments are particularly popular, and those that are not.
“If, for example, you have a Bruce Whitfield show at a certain time, and you want to see if there was a peak in listenership, we’ll be able to see whether there was a blip in the data and the extent of that. We may even be able to determine where audiences shift to.”
Theoretically, that could extend to offering some guidance on the terrible placement of adverts (or even music popularity), but who truly knows what plays out in the theatre of the mind?
Such shifts in routines and habits have caused huge changes in media
consumption generally, and for listening and viewing
habits especially