Morgan won't be pressed on readership audits
By Julian Lee | smh.com.au | 24 August
Morgan has been measuring newspaper readership for three decades but this week said it was unwilling to bid for a new contract that is to be managed by the newspaper industry body, The Newspaper Works.
The Newspaper Works last week called for expressions of interest from Australian and overseas companies to manage the contract for newspaper and magazine readership.
Nielsen and TNS have confirmed they will throw their hat in the ring. French market research company Ipsos did not return calls.
Morgan said it was unlikely to enter the race and that it would continue publishing its survey — which is paid for by individual media agencies and publishers — rather than back the new survey which is due to be in market by 2011.
Roy Morgan chief executive Michele Levine said it was business as usual for Morgan, which has been the currency for the newspaper advertising market for years.
"We will continue to do our survey . . . so there will be a second survey in the market and it doesn't make a lot of sense for us to be doing the second survey. "There's already a lack of clarity about what they [Newspaper Works] want to achieve. It will be confusing if there are two surveys and doubly so if Roy Morgan is doing the second one."
She said that she would not break contracts with individual media clients in order to compete for the contract for the new survey, which was backed by Newspaper Works members Fairfax Media, owner of The Age, News Limited, APN News & Media and West Australian Newspapers.
While many media buyers value Morgan's survey size — at 50,000 face-to-face interviews it is one of the world's largest — they have also been pushing for more information from the company; namely greater frequency than the current quarterly reports, more information on who is reading which sections, who the primary reader is, and what overlap there is between readers of the newspapers online and in print.
John Sintras, the CEO of media buyer Starcom, said the current survey was giving media buyers insufficient information.
“It's a bit like saying we know how many people are watching Channel Nine but we don't know what programs."
Mr Sintras, who is also a board member of media buying lobby group Media Federation of Australia, which is being consulted in the tender process, said: "Roy Morgan has a huge advantage and it would be a shame if they didn't participate. But we really don't need two competing surveys out there."
Head of print at media buyer MediaCom Nick Keenan predicted that Morgan would be forced to enter the race. "I don't want to give that [audience] up. They have to come to the party but they have to start doing things like measuring mobile content.
"If they [Morgan] can satisfy the buying agencies who have been asking for additional data then it will make The Newspaper Works survey irrelevant."
The process of devising a new survey has already been dogged by controversy. On Friday, the magazine industry finally threw its weight behind The Newspaper Works survey after initially saying it backed Morgan.
Magazines Publishers of Australia changed its mind when it realised that, if it did so, then advertisers might be confused by the appearance of two conflicting surveys in the market place.
First published by Smh.com.au on August 24 2009
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