Keep reading on www.mediah.be

Hi,

There are too few hours in a day to keep two sites alive. That’s why I have decided to concentrate on www.mediah.be, my company website.

From now on you can find all news from Patrick Hermie and MEDIAH on http://www.mediah.be/en/news/news-179.aspx

My personal comments and views are published on the MEDIAHost page of my website http://www.mediah.be/en/mediahost/mediahost-198.aspx

You can respond directly by sending a comment or you can contribute yourself by clicking the ‘Start a new discussion’ link.

You can of course contact me directly by mail at: patrick@mediah.be

Very best,

Patrick

Attention please!

 MediaAnalyzer Software and Research GmbH and MEDIAH have just concluded a partnership for the Belgian market. MediaAnalyzer has developed the innovative AttentionTracking™ technology which has set classical eye tracking free from its laboratorium environment in 2002. With the MediaAnalyzer AttentionTracking™ methodology, large groups of respondents can participate online in attention tracking research. This online solution turns pre-testing the effectiveness of advertisements in their ability to draw the attention towards the most relevant elements of the advertisement into a quantitative research tool. The MediaAnalyzer methodology offers a complete and validated advertising effectiveness measurement which looks at attention in the first place, but also analyses the emotional and cognitive processing of the advertisement and its impact on branding and (buying) behaviour. For each medium a specific solution has been developed:

Print.Analyzer	For print advertisements
POS.Analyzer	For point-of-sale merchandising
Outdoor.Analyzer	For billboard and other environmental advertisements
Mailing.Analyzer	For direct mailings
WebAd.Analyzer	For web advertising and other interactive properties

Spot.Analyzer offers a ground breaking EmotionTracking technology to measure online the second by second emotional response to audio visual stimuli. As ‘emotion’ is the crucial element in TV advertisingeffectiveness, this research tool offers huge potential to understand and improve the impact of commercials.

For more information about the MediaAnalyzer products please send me a mail

Very best,

Patrick

Join the MEDIAHost community

The first ever community of advertising and media specialist in Belgium has been started as a group on LinkedIn. This is a group for marketing, media planning and research professionals with a holistic view who want to expand their network and ideas about communication and advertising effectiveness, new and traditional media, channel planning and research, consumer insights, media creativity, etc.

It is my ambition to turn this group into an active community of professionals who can exchange ideas and know how. This summer the community will further expand. In September, when the www.mediah.be website will be online, a page will be dedicated to the MEDIAHost community. Members of the community can then post questions, answers and comments they want to share with the community.

So, be my guest!

Click the link to join now!

Very best,

 

Patrick

The CHEETA project: introducing the concept of channel exposure - effectiveness tracking & analysis

In tracking and evaluating communication effects (awareness, attitude or behavior changes) it is crucial to make a distinction between exposed and non-exposed parts of the target group or population to be able to isolate the effect. Therefore, most surveys include questions on the past or general media behavior of respondents. These questions give an approximate idea of the respondent’s opportunity to see the campaign during the last weeks or the campaign period. In the case of day after recall of television campaigns, the respondents can be asked precise questions about their viewing behavior in defined day parts or even quarter hour per quarter hour. In that case the OTS can be estimated very precisely.  Most tracking research however, is more focused on tracking changes in effects over longer campaign periods. In that case it is more difficult to ask the respondents very precise day per day and day part per day part questions about their viewing behavior. Therefore the media questionnaire is most commonly limited to channel by channel frequency of viewing questions to measure whether a respondent has had an opportunity to see the campaign or not. Based on that frequency question, heavy and light exposure groups can be isolated in a very approximate way.

In most communication effect studies new samples are drawn for every new wave. Most of the time the questions are asked in continuous, multi-client omnibus surveys. Face-to-face or telephone interviewing were until recently the preferred methods. Today running research via the internet offers a number of advantages in terms of cost, speed and possibilities to use all kinds of stimuli (except smell and taste). But, just changing the data collection ‘medium’ does not necessarily solve the problem of the missing link between exposure and effect. MEDIAH is therefore developing ‘CHEETA’, a tracking and analysis tool that will lift communication effect tracking and analysis to a higher level.

The central engine, without revealing too much detail at this stage, consists of cross channel behaviour data from a proprietary questionnaire (including all traditional media and more) available on all members of a large online panel and a tool to evaluate the exposure level of the panel members to communication campaigns (based on the detailed campaign schedule). The campaign effects (tracking of brand and campaign awareness, attitudes, buying intention,… through samples from the panel) can in such a way be directly linked to the real exposures of the respondents with the campaign. The exposure-effect analysis programm then allows to evaluate the contribution of the exposures by channel or combination of channnels to the overall campaign effect. Besides the channel exposure evaluation the CHEETA programm also includes the assessment of the creative work by communication channel. In this way the advertiser can dispose of a complete and accurate tool to track the ROI of his communication investments.

If you want to comment on this or you want know more about this, feel free to leave a comment or send me an e-mail mediah@skynet.be

 

 

Media or consumer centric research? Is there realy a choice to be made?

Media owners and sales houses have been working hard and paying a lot to offer the market audience measures for all major media that have reached a certain degree of perfection. Technological changes and changing needs keep pushing these measurements and currencies further into sophistication. This -somewhat autistic - view on media research should be supported by everybody; be it media, agencies or advertisers. Without this strive for perfection there would have been no PPM (personal people meter), no WAR (weekly advertising reach) for magazines, no TV audience measures that includes the delayed viewing of digitaly recorded programmes, no measures of the profile of website visitors, no ‘brand’ reach of newspapers and their news websites and so on…

Consumer centric media research and planning tools are not meant to replace these perfect media centric studies. On the contrary! Without these media specific audience surveys it would be impossible to offer the advertiser a holistic view on the reach of mono or cross media campaigns. The problem howerver is that the silo approach of media research does not give a satisfying answer to the advertiser about the combined reach of his campaigns that run in a mix of media and communication channels. In times of growing accountability and maximisation of the return on investment of marketing money it is no longer acceptable for advertisers not to have a clue about the way different media work together to get the message across.

That’s where single-source media hub surveys and planning tools get in the picture. The role of hub surveys is to find a way to link media currencies together to give a real view on the combined result of cross media plans. Therefore it is necessary to start from a consumer centric view: what media does the individual consumer use in what way and what doses during the day and the week. Only by putting the consumer at the centre, duplications between media and communication channels can be controlled. 

The Vdiary & Calibration method we propose, collects single source media behaviour of consumers in such a way that it allows to control duplications between media and preserves the currency reach levels acrross target groups from the original media surveys. The crucial element in creating a cross media planning tool is TIME. Not just the time spent with each medium, but the consumption of media across days and day parts has to be studied. For audiovisual media this type of data is already standard. For press, especially magazines, this type of data is not yet available as the currency in most countries. Although there have been attempts in several countries since the end of the ‘90ies to measure the accumulation of magazine reach over time, this type of information is still not the standard for magazine research. Publishers should be aware that this lack of data that expresses the specificity of magazines puts them in an uncomfortable position.  Especially now that television starts to study the delayed viewing of broadcast programms…

To conclude this post and to answer the question wether there is realy a trade-off between media or consumer centric media research to be made, my view clearly is that it is not a trade off. Media centric, media specific research is realy needed to provide the most accurate currencies possible, but it has to be complemented with consumer centric measures of how consumers use media in what doses and in what combinations. That research should be designed in such a way that it allows the creation of links between the existing media silos. The final goal is to offer advertisers the information they need to realy evaluate and know what they are spending their advertising money on!

Official start of the ‘MEDIAH & Sesame Systems Limited’ partnership

Today, April 1, 2008 is the day this weblog takes a new start. After 6 months of preparation MEDIAH is now fully operational and ready to launch new products and projects. I will mainly use this tool to communicate about the projects I am working on and to promote the solutions I can offer. I will continue this blog in English only. This looks more convenient to me in a bilingual market and it has the advantage that I don’t have to translate things for and from my English partner, Peter Masson, and my international contacts. 

Sesame Systems Limited 

From today, as Sesame Systems Limited (SSL) Partner, I will start to promote, sell and service the SESAME media planning solutions (previously marketed through TNS Media. A press release about the practical arrangements of the transfer will be communicated shortly).  Through this strategic alliance with SSL and Bucknull & Masson I can count on the full know how and technical support of a complete team. Data setup and on site technical support will be provided directly from the Brussels office. The software development team and the statistical experts are located in the UK. An extra data setup and control team is located in Bucharest. We can rely on the expertise built through innovative projects in Belgium (dynamic press model, cross media planning magazines & television) and other markets (Sweden, Finland, Greece, South Africa, Singapore,…) and for different channels (press, television, radio, internet, poster, direct marketing,…) to extend the cross media planning offer of the software in line with our vision on communication channel research and planning. As independent service providers we can integrate any proprietary study (done through any research company) in the analysis tool and help to market it to your clients. As experienced research consultants we can of course also help you to set up your innovative ‘consumer-centric’ research projects and more…

I know Peter Masson for about 14 years now. We worked together for the first time in 1994 on the EMS (European Media and Marketing Survey). At that time Peter was consultant for Interview (the Netherlands) on that study and I was working on the client side for the Reader’s Digest. Since then we kept in touch, regularly met at international conferences and became real friends. 10 years after our first encounter we started the WAR project, which was the start of an intense working relationship and resulted in the partnership we have today.

For any information request, please call (0473 227 601) or mail (mediah@skynet.be).

Very best, 

Patrick

Persbericht: Patrick Hermie start MEDIAH bvba

Vandaag, 31oktober 2007, is het dan eindelijk zo ver: de start van MEDIAH bvba wordt bekend gemaakt via een Persbericht. Ik wens mezelf alvast veel succes!

Real Cross Media Planning for Television and Magazines

At the Worldwide Readership Symposium in Veinna we presented a paper describing how we succeeded to create a real cross media planning tool for magazines and television. This tool builds further on the Weekly Advertising page Reach project that was presented at the previous symposium in Prague.WAR reports the daily reach of an average page in a specific issue (not issue specific reach but an average of specific issues) for magazines. Three elements are crucial: time (day and daypart), proportion of pages looked at and number of pick ups of the issue per day. The data were collected through a traditional recent reading questionnaire and a two weeks reading diary. In the recent reading questionnaire we had put some questions about the tv viewing behaviour of the respondents. The idea was that maybe, if the magazine planning tool proved to work, we could later develop it further into a cross media planning tool…And that is exactly what we have done. The full paper reports on the background and the methodology of the project. And, it also reports on two practical cases that illustrate how the data can be used to improve the effectiveness of tv + magazine plans.To download the paper: Real Cross Media Planning for Television and Magazines