'Now you listen here...', The Evening Standard

Wednesday, January 10, 2001

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Now you listen here; Kelvin MacKenzie's talkSport is at war with the BBC - and his commercial rivals - over how audiences are measured. By James Silver.

ASK Kelvin Mac-Kenzie, chairman of the Wireless Group and owner of talk-Sport, about ratings body Rajar and you get a world-weary sigh.

He dismisses the audience research used by the UK radio industry - which involves more than 130,000 people a year keeping "listening diaries" - as "nothing more than a sophisticated guess" and "akin to reading tea leaves".

"TalkSport is obviously event-driven, and, privately, Rajar admits the current system was not designed for event-led stations," he claims.

"My advertisers need to know exactly what the audience breakdown is on a daily basis for the different sporting events we run, just like TV. As things stand, I have to wait three months for figures for our coverage of the Test series in Pakistan. I want to know what happened to my listeners, who came in, who tuned out."

MacKenzie's beef is that diary-keeping is an inexact science. For example, he suggests, if a listener recalls hearing a cricket match on the radio, he or she often wrongly assumes it was on the BBC rather than talkSport.

"There's a huge amount of audience misattribution. The diary system favours the 'heritage stations' - Radios 1 through to Five Live - at our expense.

Let's face it, the BBC can cross-promote its radio networks on television - we can't. That means people are going to think they're listening to the BBC when they're not."

Now Rajar, which is jointly owned by the BBC and commercial radio, has bitten back. A spokeswoman suggests MacKenzie should look closer to home.

"This isn't our problem. If you're listening to cricket, you should know which station you're listening to. If not, then that station has got to look at its branding and marketing. We're the biggest audience survey in the world outside the US.

The rest of the radio industry feels it has the best system in place. And so far no one has come up with a better one."

But elsewhere in Europe they think they have. This month, the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation scrapped face-to-face interviews as its method for audience research, in favour of a small digital wristwatch called Radiocontrol. Its Swiss inventor, SRG SSR, advertises it as "radio research at the listener's pulse."

The watch has a built-in microphone which is activated for four seconds of every minute. It records all ambient sound, converts it into a digital sequence, compresses the data 120-fold and then stores it.

After a week, the watch is sent to an evaluation centre, where it is matched against radio output, which has been similarly recorded and stored. Initial signs are that a switchover to this system changes the research picture: overall audience reach tends to go up, while the number of listening hours goes down.

Meanwhile in Philadelphia, American audience-research company Arbritron is in the process of "field testing" its Portable People Meters - which are similar to pagers and can be clipped onto belts and bags.

Rajar says it is monitoring all progress in audience-metering, but has reservations. "Any new system has to fulfill all the UK radio industry's requirements. The results of Arbitron's Philadelphia test won't be out for another year," says Rajar's spokeswoman.

"And there are problems with PPMs. Pagers discriminate against women. Where would a woman wear a pager in the summer? Radio listening is at its peak during breakfast, but what do you do with the pager when you're in the shower?"

The current Pounds 11 million four-year research contract comes to an end in December 2002. Demonstrations of all the latest technology will be made to Rajar in April.

(Evening Standard, January 10th 2001)

Posted by James Silver - On Wednesday, January 10, 2001

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