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Proposal for audience measurement in print media

University of British Columbia

A major concern among advertisers and media managers is the measurement of net audience coverage achieved by an advertising campaign over time and across combinations of publications. Measures of audience exposure for combinations of publications have been shown to be more accurate when based on audience segments associated with each publication than when based on aggregate exposure to all the publications in the group. This thesis argues that the concept of duplication among audience segments associated with a combination of individual publications is equally applicable to the segments associated with the sections of a single publication. Accordingly, it is the objective of this thesis to demonstrate that audience measures based on audience segments associated with sections of a publication are superior to those measures based on aggregate exposure to that publication. The fundamental measures of audience exposure are un-duplicated audience or net reach, duplicated audience and average frequency of exposure. The relationships among these measures were developed in a theoretical model of intersection duplication. The model was then applied to data drawn from a recent study on a major Canadian newspaper. As any application of the segmented audience concept depends on a simple and accurate method of estimating net reach for a combination of sections, considerable effort was expended to describe recent research concerning estimation of net reach for combinations of publications and to relate such research to the objectives of this thesis. It was concluded that segmented audience data are superior to aggregate data as a basis for audience measurement, and therefore, an advertiser must evaluate, according to advertising objectives, the placement of his advertisements and the inherent trade-off between net reach and frequency for a given advertising campaign. The paper closes with some suggestions for further study.

Text

2011-05-09

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/34378

Business Administration

University of British Columbia

Graduate