Radio left behind in audience measurement

Radio can only dream about such sophistication - right now its basic audience numbers, reported only once every three months, are dependent on consumers remembering to record their listening habits in a diary. And after measurement body Rajar announced that its proposed electronic meter system has been axed after three years of trials costing £3.5m, the only promised improvement to the current Heath Robinson-esque system is that the recording will be done online and not in paper diaries.

Sally de la Bedoyere, managing director of Rajar, says human compliance was the main issue prohibiting electronic devices such as the wristwatch and the PPM (personal people meter) from being adopted. "People just weren't wearing the devices in the morning. We were seeing a disproportionate fall in the figures around breakfast, which is the biggest time for radio in the UK," she explains.

Online prospects
She is excited about the prospects for the old system going online, believing it will attract a younger demographic and make it easier to add changes to the format, keeping Rajar up to date and flexible.

"Now it's online, our system is miles ahead of other audience measurement systems struggling to keep up with the multimedia world. Radio has always been portable, so our system has always catered for that. We are better placed than newspapers and TV to capture activity on mobiles or MP3 players."

The claims are breathtaking and one wonders how many people outside Rajar would agree with them.

One such is Simon Daglish, GCap Media's national sales and trade marketing director, who says: "The issue is about what's better than the current system and, so far, devices such as the wristwatches have not stood up. Rajar won't stop trying other measures, so it's not regressing - more staying in the same place until it finds something better."

However, it will still rely on listeners' memories for its accuracy and with the proliferation of stations, the ease of station-hopping on DAB sets and the growth in simultaneous multiple media consumption, this is regarded by some as a major flaw.

Those who doubt the accuracy of Rajar figures cite their recent unexplained volatility, for example in the London market.

Kelvin MacKenzie, former Wireless Group chairman who once tried to sue Rajar over the issue, believes the lack of change is "an absolute disgrace", calling the industry backward and behind the times. "If Bill Gates had been in radio, we would never have got Windows, as someone would have said ‘no - let's keep it the way it is'," he says.

He advocates the installation of chips in every radio, facilitating digital monitoring. "How can we live in a digital world and not measure our radio digitally?" he asks.  "The reason Rajar has gone back to diaries is because it suits their book to maintain the status quo and show the same few radio stations at the top of the (audience) table."

Scott Taunton, managing director of UTV Radio, agrees with MacKenzie's sentiments and questions whether the electronic trials were thorough enough.

"Why couldn't Rajar spend a little more money on monitoring the people with PPMs to check if they definitely weren't using them in the mornings? It needed to go further with this, having already put our fees up in 2007 to fund this project," he argues.

Archaic system
Amanda Barrett, Universal McCann's radio engagement specialist, sees merits in putting the diary system online, but still thinks the system is "archaic" and "fairly biased" and leaves smaller stations misrepresented.

She also believes the need for a combined measurement system, which can monitor multiple consumption of media, has never been more necessary, especially as radio is often used as a complementary medium by advertisers.

Bjarne Thelin, chief executive of TV measurement body Barb, thinks such a system is near "undiscoverable": "We each have to focus on the media we are held responsible for and the only hope for combined measurement is something like the IPA TouchPoints programme, which unites some of our data already."

Barb, which joined Rajar on a test of personal people meters in 2006, has not ruled out these wireless techniques yet and "is still considering using them alongside its fixed metering system".

So, maybe Kelvin MacKenzie's suggestion isn't so far off the mark. A fixed chip in wireless devices could be the way forward for the most accurate audience measurement system. But it might be Barb, and not Rajar, that discovers this first.