As the Ratings Experts, we tend to nerd out on the process of gathering radio ratings. James Cridland’s excellent newsletter revealed how the diary process works in Australia. According to his writings, the paper diary only represents about 20% of all participants.
Compare this to Nielsen’s mSurvey which, at least initially, will only represent about 10% of the sample.
The folks at GFK, who conduct the ratings, were nice enough to produce a “how-to” video for potential diary keepers. The link to the video is below, and if you’re a ratings/research geek like me, I encourage you to invest six-plus minutes in watching it.
What you will see is an incredibly complicated process that involves stickers. I would say it’s more work than the average person would undertake, but then my attention span is short.
The video also reveals that by participating in this process you’ll be entered into a drawing to win one thousand Australian dollars. Sounds as enticing as a text to win a national contest, no?
Their diary “week” is eight days long (perhaps an homage to a certain British group?). It runs from Friday through the following Saturday. Oh, and the diary is about 26 pages long.
Listening credit is granted to a station as long as the listener spends at least eight minutes with the station within a given quarter hour. That means only one station can get credit for a given quarter hour. I wonder how much listening gets left on the cutting room floor.
GFK asks participants for a lot of information. Besides the usual quarter-hour listening, they ask for the usual locations: home, car, work, or elsewhere. They ask how you are listening: AM/FM radio, DAB+, Mobile, PC/Tablet, Smart speaker, or other. Lastly, they ask if you are listening via headphones. This is a lot of work for a diary keeper, but if this is consistent with their online version and we assume the respondent “ticks” the boxes, there is a lot of valuable information for broadcasters.
Finally, there is a detailed lifestyle questionnaire that covers a variety of topics like podcast listening, where you plan to spend your next holiday, and what type of takeaway food you purchased.
The data set is huge, as it encompasses 50,000 annual participants in five markets. That means about 10,000 people are filling out paper diaries a year. But wait, there’s more. They also record streaming listening directly from streaming logs. Plus, they have a system of “watches,” which I assume are a version of PPM, that are not currently included in the data.
Could/should some of this be incorporated into Nielsen’s version of the diary? It’s certainly worthy of a discussion.
You can watch the video here (and be amazed that the demonstrator is filling it out with a Sharpie).
