The importance of media research data

Effectiveness of Advertising
The Value of Ad Media
Article No. 4 (by Hideaki Koizumi)

I believe the occurrence of a fairly recent incident where some television viewing ratings monitors were influenced by a 'third party' was of great regret to the entire advertising and marketing industry. Of course, this happened because of a lack of morals of one individual. But there are two other issues that played significant roles in this incident:

1. Currently, Video Research provides TV viewing ratings based on 600 households in the Kanto area, which is then supplemented with the use of common statistical methods. Therefore, there are no problems with the TV viewing ratings based on households. But this is not enough household (samples) to analyze by gender and age. In other words, the results can be heavily influenced by just one sample.

2. As for TV viewing ratings, currently there are no other sources for data, just those from Video Research. Taking this incident into account, it would have been beneficial had more than just one company provided this type of data. Actually, Nielsen Media used to offer TV viewing ratings in Japan, but terminated this service a few years ago. However, Single Source Japan (SSJ), which was established by the marketing research company Intage, started offering an advertising effectiveness measurement database that includes TV viewing ratings in January 2003. But the basic objective of SSJ is a bit different from that of Video Research's.

This month, I would like to talk about the data from SSJ. First, the differences between these services from Video Research and Intage's SSJ are listed below. Many people may already know about the service from Video Research, which offers minute-by-minute TV ratings data based on households and individuals (i.e., targets). Advertisers invest their money to get TV ad space based on these ratings. On the other hand, SSJ allows us to obtain advertising effectiveness measurement data by continuously tracking both television ratings and product purchasing behaviors. By using this data, we can more properly measure advertising effectiveness (i.e., response in the form of sales) of a TV commercial for a product by analyzing purchasing behavior with and without the TV commercial's exposure. We think this is very helpful data in that it allows us to evaluate more accurately the effectiveness of advertising. Video Research used to offer such 'single-source' survey data which used the same consumer panel for both surveys. One survey was for Reach, while the other was for product purchasing behavior. Currently, they've stopped offering this service. But we have heard that they are now considering a re-starting plan. The ACR survey from Video Research is also a form of single source data. But, unfortunately, it is only conducted once a year. Therefore, the current trend in media research is towards more surveys related to actual purchasing.

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