The Trouble With Media Measurement

The trouble with media measurement
When a certain report was released several months ago in Hong Kong and Singapore which suggested as much as 65% of marketing spend in the region was being wasted, and achieved no return at all, the marketing fraternity including clients, their agency brethren and media owners screamed blue murder.

How could this be when so much is invested in TV ratings reports, readership surveys, online analytics, in every kind of consumer sentiment and brand equity research and in emerging new measurement technologies?

The answer, at least to why we know so little about the effectiveness of marketing spend, lies in close analysis of the media measurement we either accept as the best possible method for aiming marketing messages at desirable targets, or begrudgingly use for want of a better system.

Across all the media marketers use there are inadequacies in the measurement systems. Some lie with stubborn media owners who refuse to consider standardised methodologies for fear they will be forced to financially wear the burden of improved research or worse, that standardised measurement might lower their audience, or the quality of their audience.

Other deficiencies include the inability to separate quality of audience from mere numbers, disparate methodologies for gathering data which penalise some media and unfairly favour others, and the simple fact that media measurement is failing to keep pace with changing media consumption habits.

Even online measurement, touted as the great hope for accuracy in measurement, is problematic, not only for the dozen or so measures of online effectiveness but right down to the question of what a marketer wants to measure in the online space.
And not only does measurement of each individual media have issues that inhibit strategic planning, it is very difficult for a marketer to measure one media against another media and assess ROI of spend placed across multiple channels.

Asia isn’t unique in its search for accurate measurement metrics and systems and the demise of the recently shelved ambitious Project Apollo in the US (see page 45) which sought to tie spend more closely with results and consumer actions shows despite the best intentions fully transparent and accurate measurement is an elusive, if desirable, goal globally.

But the industry can’t give up if media and agencies want to stand shoulder to shoulder with marketers in boardrooms across Asia to help them explain and justify marketing budgets and particularly that significant slice of it spent on media. This becomes even more important as the march of technology alerts CEOs to better measurement possibilities - even if they aren’t realised - and with the looming global slowdown where marketing budgets may be the first to get slashed by short sighted bosses if every cent can’t be accounted for.

PRINT MEASUREMENT
Print and be damned, audit and be saved

By Matt Eaton

One of the bitterest measurement debates in Asia is over circulation auditing, with those who do passionately berating those who see no value in it and who dismiss audit figures which, in many more mature media markets, are considered gospel. Those who support auditing see it as an honesty in publishing issue and view those who simply provide unsubstantiated circulation figures in their media kits with no audit certificate as misleading their advertisers.

Against the fierce criticism of publishers who believe auditing is the only true measure of a print publication’s reach and influence, those who refuse to audit often argue that they would be at a disadvantage if they audited because many of their competition don’t. It’s a weak retort, but there are other concerns in Asia over auditing procedures.

Cyril Pereira, principal of Telesis Consulting and executive board member & treasurer of Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA), argues that local advertisers and agencies are also to blame, for not demanding transparent data and as a result valuable advertising dollars are being spent on “unsubstantiated metrics”.

“It’s misrepresenting what quality media should really be about,” Pereira says.

“We have for a century or more settled on a thriving formula for advertisements based directly on the guaranteed circulation base, [but] large parts of the industry in Hong Kong and elsewhere are not audited, although auditing services are available.”

Hong Kong’s Audit Bureau of Circulations (HKABC) says its data and collection methods are rigorous and highly transparent - with PricewaterhouseCoopers holding the contract to audit all member titles and all data is made available online.
Pauline Yu, secretary of HKABC, says there are a number of moves to combat criticism and ensure the organisation is keeping pace with industry changes.

While the organisation can not force publishers to audit, she says the body can work a bit harder to get clients to demand audits.

Depending on who you talk to, the state of print measurement in the key markets of Asia is not in good shape. Criticism of the methods used to sample the quality and size of the audience including face-to-face interviews is strong, as is the criticism about the very rules governing the paid circulation system.

In the past few years, auditing bodies around the world have been forced (in many cases reluctantly) to review their circulation and readership rules. These reviews have resulted in sweeping changes to the way publishers collect and report circulation data.

The rapid emergence of content distribution tools like podcasts, RSS feeds, news blogs and social networking sites, together with a growing list of online media brands, have only added to the woes of publishers and auditing bodies.

Readership rewritten
It’s no secret that traditional reading habits are changing. Media is no longer consumed in a silo and is often just one of many activities being undertaken at a particular time.

Business readers are getting busier and harder to reach, the younger generation are migrating online and added to this is the harsh reality that older readers are simply dropping off the other end. While publishers are largely supportive of the research and measurement tools available in Asian markets, the way they use the research is changing.

William Adamopoulos, president & publisher, Forbes Asia, says today the magazine’s biggest clients are not buying on reader surveys.

“These days in a post-internet era, it’s not so much about paid circulation, it’s about proving you have an engaged readership. Quite frankly the agencies tend to buy on readership,” he says.

While the Forbes Asia edition, launched two years ago, will be audited later this year, Adamopoulos stresses that readership is more important.

“Both surveys in the market are good solid surveys, but they need to be applied correctly. If people using PAX are more of your broad base more mass market it makes a lot sense but if you’re talking about reaching C-suite executives then you better use BE:Asia or use your judgment to look at the title,” he advises.

Readership surveys around the region are today growing as a dominant tool for measuring not just the paid circulation numbers, but the overall quality of targeted demographics.

BE:Asia, formerly ABRS, along with the PAX and Media Atlas studies are the dominant players in this field. But the face-to-face and recall-based surveys these groups undertake have come under fire for being out of sync with the lifestyle changes of readers and bucking the natural trend of declining numbers of readers.

Moving targets
If your most valuable target audience is working well beyond traditional hours in the office, or is caught in a relentless travel cycle, they are unlikely to make themselves available, even if you catch them at home, for an interview on their media habits and brand recall knowledge.

However, Craig Harvey, director of media research Asia Pacific at Synovate, says there will always be a place for recall-based surveys in media measurement and argues a complete overhaul of the measurement system is unnecessary.

“The industry needs to understand how media works together, when multi-tasking of media is happening, which media they are more engaged with. It’s all about keeping up with the consumer. Today’s measurement systems need to understand how, where, when and why media fits into their lifestyles.”

Feli Tam, buying director, OMD Hong Kong, says today media planning and buying is a mix of client needs, research and in some cases personal opinion. She echoes publishers sentiments that circulation and readership are no longer the most important factor when developing a media schedule.

“We look at circulation, readership profile, readership image and the quality of the magazine. Every success factor will be taken into consideration, it’s not based on a single dimension,” she says.

“In Hong Kong not every publisher is being audited, so from our point of view it’s difficult to only use the circulation as the single dimension for measuring print titles. Some clients have their own experience in using the titles from response rankings and have their own preferences because of that image.”

TV MEASUREMENT
Crossing the channels: The regional cross platform TV
measurement tool that never was

By Marcus Chhan

The declining viewership trends which are shaking media owners in Europe and the US have yet to make any significant waves here in Asia and this means TV measurement is as contentious as it is important. It also gives measurement in other media many of its cues.

“By and large it is TV measurement which is the most advanced and most talked about. For the longest time TV was the dominant medium for advertising and so the most investment for measurement went to TV. It is only recently that people are exploring measurement in other media,” Rahul Welde, VP Media (Asia, Africa, Middle East & Turkey), Unilever, says.

It’s been ten years, and counting, since the serious discussions over of a pan-Asian or regional TV measurement system were gaining momentum. Today, says Turner International Asia Pacific’s VP of research, Duncan Morris, “we’d still be faced with the same question marks”. For a regional measurement system to work, the industry needs to come together but the pay TV channels aren’t on the same page - some want it, some don’t, others sit on the fence.

Morris isn’t a fence sitter though and admits that he is less interested in the development of a TV measurement system for the region, and is leaning more towards the development of a multi-media measurement system.

“It’s less of an issue than it used to be. At the time it didn’t go down too well because of the prohibitive costs involved and some question marks about the quality of the samples. Those question marks are still there but what has changed, as a whole, is media consumption. It’s not just about TV anymore,” he said.

However for some, like the Cable & Satellite Broadcasting Association of Asia (CASBAA), it is all about TV. Representing over 125 Asia-based corporations, CASBAA is one industry-based advocacy group that can push hard for a regional measurement system for TV. For years now it has been publishing the Power of Pay TV (POPTV) report which acts as a resource to illustrate the role that multi-channel pay TV plays in marketing.

Phillip Jones, regional director of SE Asia and Pacific for Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS), says although CASBAA would be the “obvious” pick to drive a standard TV measurement system for the region, it “can’t force” any of its members to do anything, like for example, put money into a pie to develop the mentioned system.

CASBAA has recently, thanks to some well publicised investigations into cable theft at pubs, gained more credibility as a force for protecting the rights of its members, prompting some to suggest it shouldn’t be underestimated as a positive force for driving measurement reform.

Apollo we have a problem
If there is to be a standard TV measurement system for the region, then media owners will be the ones to bear the brunt of the costs. For research, for example, media owners shell-out 80% of the costs. A substantial investment will be needed to develop and manage such a system. CSM Media Research’s business development director, Matt Brosenne likened the funding issues that dogged Project Apollo in the US with what the industry here may face.

When Project Apollo, a JV between VNU and Arbitron, was first announced, it was hailed as a potential breakthrough for ROI metrics but when it was revealed it could cost as much as US$100 million (S$135.87 million) to get the service off the ground - the industry balked, deciding it was too expensive an investment to make. Apollo was, technically, able to determine how exposure to a wide variety of media and marketing tactics influenced purchases but it shut in February this year, having failed to obtain the necessary seed funding needed. As if any further indication of the difficulty of getting a powerful consumer measurement tool off the ground was needed, the project not only saw The Nielsen Company and several major ad agencies championing and investing in it, but also major client marketers like Procter & Gamble, and yet it still failed to launch.

“As an industry do we have US$100 million to spare and then if I invest do we get US$150 million (S$203.81 million) back? The real critical issue moving forward is whether new technology will decrease costs involved but it’s not going to happen with the economic situation it looks like we’re going to be faced with. In tough economic circumstances, one of the first to go is additional money on research,” Brosenne said.

If this is the question the industry as a whole has about such a project, perhaps it ought to refer back to the above mentioned report about wasted marketing spend and consider how much money the industry is already expending on a lack of proper measurement.

Who picks up the tab?
New technology is likely to decrease the costs involved in developing a pan-Asian TV measurement system but it’s also unlikely to render popular existing currencies such as Synovate’s Pan Asian Cross Media (PAX) study or TNS’s people meter ratings system, useless.

“It’s very difficult for one system or methodology to answer all the questions, given the diversity of viewing platforms and the nature of business in all of these markets. While I think there’s no one adequate solution some of these methodologies need to evolve over time,” Anand Rego, director of research for ESPN Star Sports, says.

The people meter ratings system may be one such methodology that will need to evolve. Discovery Networks Asia uses both PAX and the people meter ratings system, and its VP of research, Wanda Gill, complains that while it gives real-time measurement - something which PAX cannot as a recall study - the people meter system is designed with terrestrial channels in mind and does not work to Discovery’s “full advantage”. But TNS’s Jones is unapologetic about it, saying “if the cable broadcasters and cable providers are not prepared to put their hands in their pocket and pay for it, then they can’t expect to be given services or have other people develop services for them”.

Jones explains that in most services the amount of dollars put in by the Free-To-Airs (FTAs) outweighs the cable group 6:1 and in some markets 10:1. He also calls on providers like the StarHubs to “get on board” for the development of a regional measurement system for TV but Singapore’s dominant pay TV operator isn’t keen on the idea.

“While we won’t outrightly say ‘No’ to a standardised system that already has the support of the entire pay TV industry, the impetus for such a project should come from regional players first, not local ones,” Germaine Ng-Ferguson, AGM advertising sales, corporate sales for StarHub, said.

However Gill says a “good scenario” would be an industry body comprising of broadcasters (both terrestrial and pay TV channels), cable operators, advertisers, ad agencies and TV regulatory bodies to “make it a truly syndicated study that can balance the needs of interested parties”.

Turner’s Morris, says these considerations were “outdated”. “The more pressing need is to look at things from a multi-media point of view and, clearly, if you want multi-media measurement you have to focus on the individual consumer rather than building separate measurements for each media and trying to combine them somehow,” he says.

Blue-sky thinking
A regional TV measurement system is unlikely to happen in the next few years, or even in time to be relevant, but according to Jones, “a major area of the industry going forward” will be TNS’s Return Path data services. The system requires digital, which means the roll-out will be critically-dependent on whether a market has adopted digital, and collects information from the remote control on how consumers use cable set top boxes in the home.

“There isn’t people data and so it has limitations, and we admit that, but it certainly gives you a lot more granularity in the data,” he says.

CASBAA CEO Simon Twiston Davies thinks what the industry needs right now is some blue-sky thinking on how to improve on existing platforms in each market and then implemented.

“One idea is to utilise the ‘personal meter’, either a watch or a mobile phone type apparatus, which a selected sample of viewers will carry around for a few weeks, recording their exposure to any electronic media which has been tagged with a recognition code. This is easily done at the broadcast end but so far none of the broadcasters here in Asia have picked up the challenge,” he says.

Media measurement is of course important to media agencies as well and Mediaedge:cia’s regional director for MEC MediaLab, Jon Wright, says “reliable media measurement is vitally important, even in the increasingly media fragmented markets, to be able to properly measure the potential delivery of channels and to form the basis of a trading currency.

“This responsibility I believe is on the media owners to establish this, albeit as part of an industry committee to include agencies and advertisers,” he said.

However, Synovate’s Harvey puts the responsibility on the advertisers to start demanding for the development, saying that “ultimately they pay the bills and have a vested interest in how their marketing budgets go down into the research they get”. He cited Vietnam as an example where advertisers took a more active role in driving TV ratings research.

In the end the biggest obstacle for a region-wide TV measurement system could simply be that Asia, with all its different markets, should not be clumped into one group which is what CASBAA’s Davies says is a “common error by critics of audience research”.

“Nobody is to blame, countries are just different and any service in operation today is given one primary mandate - reflect the market where you are,” Brosenne from CSM said.

OUT OF HOME MEASUREMENT
A problem as big as all outdoors

By Adaline Lau

Unlike TV, print and radio, the Out-of-Home (OOH) sector is a very fragmented media comprising many formats ranging from street furniture and transit to ads on office buildings. There are numerous challenges that the OOH media players face from defining the methodology of measuring the channel to finding a common measurement system which can be applied across the medium.

Jackson Kwok, managing director for OMD, says media vendors have the responsibility to prove the value of outdoor and they need to come out with a systematic approach to do so. He says the size of the Hong Kong market, where he is based, and the relative small size of budgets mean clients will be unwilling to foot the bill for common measurement systems to be developed.

Carrie Leung, marketing director for JCDecaux Texon, defends outdoor vendors saying individually they have their own measurement tools however, because each of the media owners have their own reach and frequency studies, there isn’t a common one for advertisers.

While more developed markets like Australia have an Outdoor Media Association, there is an absence of industry bodies for OOH to lobby for mutual cooperation among the outdoor players in Asia.

“Unlike TV ratings panels or circulation data, OOH measurement typically relies on self-claimed interview data which, as we know, are not always perfectly accurate,” Anne Woodhams, director, communications research centre for TNS says.
She adds some researchers have tried approaches using location-based traffic counts and estimates of opportunities to view, however no one as yet has come up with a solution that is broadly accepted in the industry.

Eye Corp marketing executive Richard Wee quotes a 2007 study by the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising in UK that distinguishes between effectiveness (doing the right thing) and accountability (being seen to do the right thing).

With accountability high on the corporate agenda, marketers are opting for measures that prove to the board that something is happening. It is not just a question of marketers measuring the wrong thing. It is about doing the right thing.
Brand awareness, brand image, consumer attitudes are some of the metrics that have become a marketer’s stock in trade but as proof of effectiveness they are fundamentally unreliable.

The report concluded marketers pay too much attention to these factors and too little on measures that directly affect the business, such as market share and they rely too heavily on intermediate metrics as they are easy to measure and move more dramatically in the short term.

Wee also challenges marketers that the concept of ROI is poorly understood in the marketing world.
He says many assume all sales growth is due to communication and all direct sales are purely the result of direct-response communications and adds payback should ultimately be about profit, but many confuse added profit with added revenue.
Another misconception is to see maximising ROI as a goal in itself. As ROI is a ratio, often the easiest way to improve the figure is to cut expenditure, yet that would damage the brand.

He says marketers should focus on goals that are defined in absolute terms, such as generating certain amounts of profit.
He adds measures of ROI also tend to focus on short-term changes, yet brand-building tends to require long-term investment and different measures may be required for calculating such long term payback.

Perhaps too with integrated campaigns becoming the trend for marketers, as Woodham says, the imperative for any metric that applies to one medium only is rapidly diminishing as marketers increasingly take a holistic view of their campaigns.
“Instead, the much bigger question for today’s advertisers is how to optimise and maximise ROI across multiple channels”, she says.

Woodhams adds there is also increasing recognition of the need to go beyond basic reach, frequency metrics to take into account that different media have different levels of influence as well as the need to demonstrate ROI beyond outputs such as eyeballs, towards outcomes such as brand preference and sales.

ONLINE MEASUREMENT
Farewell pageviews, but what now?

By Debbie Cai

It’s broadly known as the most measurable medium and with accountability becoming increasingly important not just in marketing, the pressure is on for online to be even more than what it proclaims to be.

While other more established media such as TV and print still use old economy measurement systems like diaries and telephone surveys, online has evolved beyond simplistic metrics such as page views.

In fact, in 2006, PR strategist Steve Rubel blogged about ‘The imminent demise of the page view’, a train of thought that has permeated through the ranks of marketers worldwide. The post says page views do not offer “a suitable way to measure the next generation of web sites” as these sites will be built with Ajax, Flash and other technologies that allow the user to conduct multiple functions within a single web page - examples include Gmail or Google Reader - “eliminating the need to click from one page to another”.

“As the page view platform crumbles, there’s going to be a shake out. Everyone is going to scramble to find a metric that helps them compete for ad dollars. Enjoy the show,” Rubel says.

And the show is just beginning, as online marketers, according to Interwoven’s VP of product marketing Seth Rosenblatt, get more aware of where their money is going and the results they get compared to other media.

“There is nowhere to hide anymore, and the expectations of management go up,” he says.
Management today has had to learn a brand new lingo, familiarising itself with terms such as CPC (cost per click), CTR (click-through rate), CPA (cost per action) and figuring out how they work together to paint an accurate picture of how well marketing dollars are being spent.

Rosenblatt says there are many tools available but they don’t all play nice together and it’s unclear what combination of tools is optimal. Each vendor has a different perspective of how the landscape will evolve.

Nielsen Online offers a market comparison tool, Market Intelligence, which places ‘tags’ on websites (by permission) to map where visitors are coming from, how they interact with the site, how long they dwell there, and the platform can even randomly survey them to gather demographics data which is then extrapolated to represent the entire population of visitors to a site.

This essentially provides marketers a micro-view of how sites, which have opted-in to be tagged, are performing.
On the other hand, the Hitwise model works with internet service providers (ISPs) to collect data on how people interact with about one million websites in over 160 industries, and presents the data in a market share analysis.

This offers a macro-view of how large numbers of websites are doing and how they rank against each other.

All or nothing?
One challenge for marketers is to understand how the data is collected and reported and, according to Hitwise chief marketing officer Tessa Court, the most sophisticated online marketers subscribe to everything and they paint a complete picture of how people are interacting online.

Media owners pick and choose which type of measurement to use according to which one ranks them higher and they present the corresponding data to client marketers. This means, not unlike other media measurement, marketers are faced with different websites offering different data which makes comparison across sites difficult.

“It’s a huge frustration for some marketers because they are looking for the gold standard - who’s number one,” Court says.
“The reality is, even if you took two companies with the same methodology, their ranking and data will be different.”

A simple question to a few online players of “How many internet users are there in Asia Pacific?” illustrates the situation perfectly.

Yahoo SE Asia quotes Comscore’s mid-2007 review of internet behavior covering 10 countries in Asia Pacific which states there are about 284 million people over 15 years old accessing the internet from home or work computers. Nielsen Media
Index 2007 states 65% of all Hong Kong people aged 12 to 64 and 58% of all Singaporeans aged 15+ accessed the internet in the past week; meanwhile Interwoven quotes Internet World Stats which states internet users in Asia account for 38.7% of all users globally, a growth of 350% since 2000.

Calls for a standard set of measurement tools for online media have intensified and while it may seem like the best solution to the problem, media owners and marketers do not exactly agree that a unified currency will make their lives easier. One route which some industry bodies in countries such as New Zealand and China have taken has been to pick one available methodology, in this case that of Nielsen Online, and stipulate that as the standard.

“Because we’re the standard in China and we’re in talks with Taiwan, I’d be very surprised if we don’t become the standard in Hong Kong,” Mark Long, executive director for media research, Nielsen Online APAC, says. “In Singapore, we’re very close to be able to do that as there aren’t many big commercial sites in Singapore.”

Long also says where such agreements have been made he has seen advertising revenues go up because ad agencies have been able to justify the amounts of money they are spending for clients online.

As much of the world races toward an online media future and Asia takes more cautious steps in the same direction the stakes are high in the race to become the gold standard for online media measurement.

With the era of open source and companies like Google and Linux and smaller creative commons evangelists pushing towards zero cost software and tools, the measurement market is further fragmented by do-it-yourself measurement tools like Google Analytics.

SPORTS SPONSORSHIP MEASUREMENT
Higher, faster, further: measuring investment in sports

By Cherisse Beh

"In an era of mass customisation and media fragmentation, aspiring global brands need to leverage on the world's common languages - music is one of them and so is sports," David Shaw, director, brand marketing & marketing communications at Lenovo, says.

He says Lenovo spends up to 15% of its sports marketing budget on media measurement depending on the country, sponsorship and marketing programme. It also depends on whether we have existing trackers or other measurement tolls that can give us a reading on how well we're achieving our objectives."

Sporting Spectrum's country head and regional manager Justin Sampson says, "Measurement is useful if it is benchmarked against goals. Media value is only one part of the equation, the full reason behind clients using sponsorship through sport is more wide and varied.

Even if we wanted to simplify the marketing strategy and pick a media best suited to sports marketing, most marketers could not identify a single media that is the most effective to reach out to its target audience. Most state that an integrated campaign with a mix of media and tactics - such as TV, online, on-air, on-ground, PR leveraging on each other - to meet different objectives is the key.

Anlene, owned by Fonterra Brands Singapore, title sponsor for the Orchard Mile Run, based on its experience with online last year, decided to adopt the same marketing strategy to reach the public. "We wanted a campaign that was simple, easy, convenient and cost efficient. EDMs were developed and sent out to the target segment that generated word-of-mouth buzz, providing instant results. Management and monitoring of campaign receptiveness was easy to track through bounced messages, un-subscribes, read-receipts, and click-throughs. These were used to measure positive or negative responses," Catherine Quek, senior brand manager, Fonterra Brands Singapore, said.

Samsung Asia director for corporate marketing David Henry, who works with Starcom and other research agencies, utilises an integrated marketing approach and uses a whole array of measurement tools to measure its campaigns. Brand ranking and reputation, attendees, database entries, consumer emails and calls, purchasing intent, unique visitors to properties from online to offline, hospitality events, media impressions, awareness and perception of the sponsorship events are used as success indicators on whether its campaign messages have reached the target audience.

Samsung believes its marketing campaigns have been successful as it attributes partially, its 21st position in the Business Week/Interbrand Annual rankings, to its sponsorship initiatives. Its brand value has grown five-fold over eight years hitting US$16.85 billion (S$22.17 billion) in 2007 from US$3.1 billion (S$4.23 billion) in 1999.

While sports is seen as a platform which can bring geographically disparate consumers together it also brings with it the complex issue of measuring the effectiveness of marketing efforts.

"The biggest problem is the complete absence of accountability and effective measurement systems. With regards to sports media measurement, in the world of print distribution, the number of copies is meaningless; in the world of TV, people meters are not representative and only measure in-home. PAX is also not representative and is based on recall which is wildly inaccurate. Online, we are often told the number of clicks or visitors, which again is a useless measure. So all the current measurements are hopeless and there are too many people with a vested interest in keeping them the same in hope that we'll see a significant improvement in the short term," World Sport Group SVP for group sales and marketing Adrian New, says.

Stewart Mison, UK-based senior consultant at Initiative Sports Futures, said, "The measurement tools need to be further developed, they are generally unsophisticated and in the Middle East they do not exist. Growth markets like India and China need proper evaluation and measurement tools."

Other problems Mison identified included the difficulties in measuring Out-of-Home viewing, "This is a direct and negative impart on understanding the value the teams and sponsors like Barclays Premiere League enjoy. Many of them are also taking the route of niche pay TV services that do not audit and publish their audience data. Finding the right sample group or panel size is also an issue - especially in areas of large geographical mass with a dispersed rural population - it is hard to research and understand consumer behaviour."

Over the past few decades, brands have been enthusiastic to align themselves with sporting properties. The cost in parallel with the enthusiastic has accelerated. Yet, despite the lack of any reliable measurement data or value insight companies continue their sports marketing initiatives.

"This is sometimes an area of marketing where the charm and appeal of the association give way to the usually tight commercial management rules," Mison concluded.