Roy Morgan has ambushed its newspaper and magazine readership data rival. It is going to market with a beefed-up offering across media, including monthly data releases for agencies and the ability to plug in third party data sets and population profiling, three days before the launch of the Readership Works' new metric.
CEO Michele Levine, who said the company decided "very early on not to get involved in mud slinging" with The Readership Works, has also warned that publishers and agencies will get what they pay for.
"This is our core business, not some survey that someone has asked us to do and they pay us."
While she accepted that increased competition could lead to price pressure, she said that Roy Morgan's offering was not about to become "low cost" and that weekend face-to-face interviews upon which the data was based did not come cheap, but yielded the most accurate results.
Instead, agencies would get better value from the new products, she suggested. It's all about better granularity, flexibility and big data, said the company.
Buyers, she said, aren't looking at magazines and newspapers in isolation anymore. "They are looking at a 360 degree picture so it is threfore critical for us to get to granular time-based measurement across 360 degrees for people planning their media buying."
Levine said "nobody [else] bothers to get the whole thing right for media [across all platforms]," with some data providers skewing their results depending on the media they were currently surveying. "If you are doing a survey on people who drink orange juice, it tends to skew to orange juice drinkers. Similarly, if you are doing a TV survey, it tends to skew to those who watch television."
Roy Morgan will also release media and agency databases to market weeks earlier, at the start of August rather than the end.
As well as monthly category and product data, another new product is multi-year trending databases. "Agencies have not had that before," save Levine. They will be able to look over multiple years to measure trends, events, seasonality and the like.
The company will also unveil data integration initiatives to major clients on 16 August, including dedicated Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) with agency systems and new products that can integrate third party and big datasets plus detailed profiling and segmentation of the Australian population.
The Readership Works launches its new measurement system, EMMA, on 19 August. It will be release quarterly data for the rest of this year, plus "top line" monthly data, according to a spokesperson.
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