Week of October 13, 2008

Beyond The PPM?

Friday, October 17, 2008

A new tech startup, Integrated Media Measurement (IMMI) has come up with a cell phone based technology that will allow advertisers to track consumer exposure to advertising across multiple platforms. Unlike the PPM, which encodes individual radio stations and TV channels to monitor programming exposure, the IMMI service is recording user exposure to advertising messages. IMMI currently has a panel of about 5000 respondents in 6 cities (New York, LA, Chicago, Miami, Houston and Denver).

Software is loaded onto the user's cell phone, which then measures user's exposure to the audio in advertising. The data is uploaded to a central database and the technology can be used to track follow-up behavior. In other words, after finding out that a user has been exposed to a movie trailer, it can track usage to see if that person later goes to see the movie. The technology doesn't measure exposure to ads without audio, but it's an ambitious approach to combine multi-platform exposure with changes in consumer behavior.

PPM Respondent Study, Part 2

Thursday, October 16, 2008

Coleman Insights has just released a study that it did about PPM respondents. The presentation, called "Real PPM Panelists Tell All," is now available from the Coleman website. The study included interviews with actual PPM respondents. Along with some of the findings mentioned here yesterday, Coleman's interpretation of the findings for PPM shows a three-tiered view of respondent exposure:

* Invisible Listening - This is like the famous "phantom cume" from research studies, it's the listening (or exposure) that the respondents were exposed to, but that they don't remember afterwards.

* Incidental Listening - Listening that the respondents are aware of, but that wasn't specifically chosen by them (someone else at work chooses the station, the kids select the station when driving, etc.)

* Intentional Listening - The respondent chose the station they were listening to and/or chose the time to listen.

Read the entire report here.

PPM Respondent Study

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Coleman Insights has just released a study that it did about PPM respondents. The presentation, called "Real PPM Panelists Tell All," was first shown at an industry convention and is now available from the Coleman website. The study included interviews with actual PPM respondents. Here are a few of the findings from that study:

* Panelists liked having the chance to make their opinions known - The other side of this is that if a research company doesn't make clear right up front that "We're not selling you something; we just want your opinions on making this product/service/media outlet better," the person on the line is gone.

* Money was a strong factor for many of them - Even though it's not a lot of money, respondents appreciated the fact that they would get some compensation.

* Most new station discovery is done because of external market - Tuning around the dial appears to account for a small percentage of new station discovery.

* More listening occurs at work than the respondents think - Comparing the PPM data with the listeners comment shows a discrepancy. Respondents think that their in-car listening makes up a larger percentage of their total radio time than the PPM shows.

Tomorrow we'll have more tidbits from this study.

25 Years of Mobile Phones

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

October 13th was the 25th anniversary of the first cell phone call. On that date in 1983 the President of Ameritech Mobile Communications made a call from Chicago to a grandson of Alexander Graham Bell, who was in Berlin. The first commercially available cell phone weighed 28 ounces and cost $3995. Now, the phones weigh as little as 3 ounces and are available for free when purchasing some mobile phone plans.

Perhaps "phone" is a misnomer now. According to Nielsen Mobile, as of late 2007, the average user in the U.S. was sending more text messages than phone calls. The trend is most pronounced with teens, who send 7 times as many text messages as phone calls. Those 45 and over still use their devices mostly for making calls.

MySpace My Ads Feature Launched

Monday, October 13, 2008

Following closely on the heels of the launch of MySpace Music, MySpace has just launched its new web ads feature, My Ads. MySpace is getting into the game late, compared with its rival, Facebook, but MySpace has ambitious plans. There are some differences between the ad services by the two social networking giants.

First, in terms of the economics, MySpace ads are charged on a cost-per-click basis. Facebook has the option of cost-per-click as well as cost-per-impression. Another key difference is in MySpace's targeting methodology. Facebook bases its targeting on interests actively expressed in users profiles. MySpace, on the other hand, targets based on the behavior of their users.