Square-eyes gets measured

Johannesburg - There was a time when TV advertising was easy. You just put your ad on two SABC channels and you reached the entire nation. Now there are more than 100 channels available, and the difficulty in choosing the ones on which to place your ad is compounded by inadequate measurement of their viewing audiences.

But a new measurement system that addresses audience fragmentation was launched to the advertising marketplace on Wednesday. The more modern DStv-i system, as it's called, promises to revolutionise the buying of TV airtime.

Behind it is the M-Net/Multichoice/SuperSport group and its advertising sales agent, Oracle Airtime Sales.

For the first time, DStv will have ratings robust enough to underpin ad sales for its smaller channels.

Fundamentally, the problem comes down to sample size. The existing Television Audience Measurement System (Tams) is run by The Nielsen Company for the SA Advertising Research Foundation.

It records electronically the viewing habits of a panel of households, and the ratios are used to represent the viewing patterns of the entire nation. This worked fine when there were three TV channels, because the sample sizes were big enough.

But now the TV audience is hopelessly fragmented. "On the Tams panel, DStv's 5.3 million adult viewers are represented by approximately 400 homes," says Oracle MD Peter McKenzie.

"The reality is that for the majority of channels there is only a sample base of three or less individuals to use for planning." One goes to the toilet and the channel loses half its ratings.

Fan park viewers left out of the picture

The initial phase of  DStv-i has 2 000 reporting households, and the number will be increased later in the year.

Now, McKenzie says: "We will have ratings robust enough at an individual channel level to allow us to explore new sales policies and models, and move us towards some form of guaranteed audience delivery. This promises to revolutionise the business of buying commercial airtime, and introduce a host of efficiencies into the process."

Simply put, it will vastly increase the attractiveness of the many small niche channels in DStv, by giving advertisers more information about the nature of each channel's viewing audience.

It will deliver more accurate performance indicators and measurements such as audience ratings, reach, frequency and costs per thousand. This should allow DStv to increase its advertising sales.

The Genesis Report on TV last year predicted that by 2014 there will be 13 to 18 free-to-air channels and more than 200 subscription channels in SA. That's fragmentation enough, but it is further complicated by time-shift viewing (watching recorded programmes at a later time), out-of-home viewing and video on demand – none of which can be measured at present.
 
Huge numbers of 2010 FIFA World Cup viewers in fan parks were not recorded, resulting in distortion of total viewing figures.

 - Fin24.com