- BLOG BEAG –

comScore in the US has just (22 March 10) released the results of a study on E-Reader and Apple iPad consumer attitudes, behaviours and purchase intent.

Over 2,000 internet users were surveyed regarding their awareness, attitudes and opinions of the Apple iPad and other e-readers/tablet devices. This Study and others to come are worth monitoring due to the potential such devices have to disrupt the way consumers currently access digital content.

Consumers were asked several questions regarding their awareness of various e-readers and tablet devices and their past purchase behaviour or intent to purchase these devices. The results showed very high awareness of the iPad, with an aided awareness of 65 percent, the same as that of the Amazon Kindle e-reader. Overall, consumers demonstrated a high level of interest in these types of devices with between 58 percent and 69 percent of consumers having conducted online research of the top five devices. Amazon Kindle rated highest in terms of current device ownership at 6 percent of all Internet users, followed by Sony Reader at 4 percent. The iPad rated highest in terms of consumers seriously considering purchase over the next three months at 15 percent of Internet users, with the Kindle at 14 percent.

While not many devices of the devices had been acquired yet, take a look at the figures in the “Seriously considering buying in the next 3 months” column.

It’s a long time coming and very much anticipated but the Internet Advertising Bureau of Ireland is working hard at finalising the inputs for their IAB/PwC Online Adspend Survey, according to the Institute of Advertising Practitioners in Ireland (IAPI). Survey participants include publishers/websites, sales houses and online advertising networks. As soon as there is something meaningful to share, we shall post.

While IAB Ireland is recently established, IAB Europe has been running since 1998. The IAB in the UK is streets ahead of Ireland and there is copious research available here. Hence the sense of expectancy for our market.

IAB Europe exists to support and promote the growth of the European digital and interactive marketing industry.

We have to thank Gerard O’Neill, Chairman of the Amarach Group for pointing us to two items of particular interest. We’ll cover the first one here – the make up of the modern consumer and what are there demands. The second, the potential of the over 50s market, will be covered in a later post following the Turning Silver into Gold Conference tomorrow in Kilmainham.

IBM’s Institute for Business Value has produced a research  surveying more than 30,000 consumers in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Brazil, India and China to determine how they choose where to shop, what shopping methods they prefer and what they will demand from retailers in the future. While Ireland is not covered specifically it would be foolish to imagine we are so different.

Consumers are getting smarter as they incorporate new technologies into their daily lives and information becomes more readily available. In IBM language, consumers are becoming more “instrumented”, “interconnected” and “intelligent”.

Today’s consumer knows:

• which retailers have the best prices and products
• how they (the consumer) want to interact with both retailers and other consumers
• what matters most to them as they decide where to shop
• which retailers need to improve
• where they want to spend their money.

To the question, what’s most important to you when deciding where to shop and what areas do you feel retailers need to improve upon the most, the answers were, in this order:

The good news is that smarter consumers are not only more demanding, they are also more willing to collaborate. They are ready to contribute to the development of new products and services and will reward those retailers that listen by giving them more of their spend.

If you have the time, the IBM Executive Summary is available for download here and the full version here.

Ever wondered about Neilsen, CPTs, TVRs, OTSs, conversions, Universes, Peoplemeters? The latest update to national TV broadcaster RTE’s very useful Guide to TV Audience Measurement including 2009 and 2010 detail, is out. Includes a Media A to Z, and importantly, explanation about how and why Cost Per Thousands fluctuate (a function of Impact and Revenue of course!). Keep your Agency on its toes – available from RTE or direct from Eason Advertising.

According to Interest over Time figures (below)  from Google covering the web search terms “george lee” cross referenced against “fine gael” for the last twelve months in Ireland, both terms reached highs together in May 2009. Fine Gael built on the interest and surged again in July 2009. Sadly neither capitalised on the other, with “George” flat-lining about a month after his election and “Fine Gael” unable to reach the levels of interest they had enjoyed up to George’s election in June 2009.

The numbers on the graph below reflect how many searches had been done for a particular term, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. They don’t represent absolute search volume numbers, because the data is normalized and presented on a scale from 0-100.

Run your cursor over the chart below to find the key dates. Significant news triggers for these high points to the search return figures were:

1. Search term “Fine Gael” [FG] – Feb 10, 2010 – George Lee resigns from Fine Gael
2. Search term “George Lee” [GL] – Feb 10, 2010 – George Lee resigns from Fine Gael
3. FG – Sep 27, 2009 – Fine Gael exit poll boost for Yes campaign
4. GL – Sep 20, 2009 – George Lee to speak on Lisbon
5. FG – June 7, 2009 – Fine Gael to heap pressure on Cowen with no-confidence vote
6. GL – May 31, 2009 – George Lee elected
7. FG – May 3rd, 2009 – George Lee may contest by-election for Fine Gael

Make up your own mind, but someone, by accident or design, missed an opportunity to explain their case or enhance their position.

Important initiative with both on and off-line circulations reported together for UK press.

Ever wondered about the on-line editions of the UK papers and how many unique users they have versus their traditional print circulations? In a move that should be followed by all Irish media, the excellent ABC who independently verifies and reports on media performance, has produced ABC Multi Platform Reports for January 2009. ABC offshoot ABC electronic Multi Platform Reports contain very useful tables showing the headline figures for the print and on line platforms by media owner. The reports provide an easy to read snapshot of the average circulation and monthly unique users/browsers, providing quick comparisons, trends and geographical breakouts for UK papers. Online users from the Republic of Ireland have not been broken out seperately yet. Of particular interest is the on-line/off-line year on year comparison.

See summary multi-platform-report-feb-091 (note copyright holder is ABC)

More detailed information for our clients is available from answers@easonadvert.ie covering

• Associated Newspapers Ltd  (Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday and Mail online)
• Guardian News and Media Limited (Guardian, The Observer, Guardian online and Guardian Weekly)
• Herald and Times Group (The Herald, Sunday Herald,Glasgow – Evening Times, Scottish Farmer, The Great Outdoors, herald.co.uk, sundayherald.com and eveningtimes.co.uk)
• Independent News and Media plc (The Independent, Independent on Sunday, The Independent)
• Mirror Group (Daily Mirror, Daily Record, Sunday Mirror, Sunday Mail, The People, Mirror Group Digital)
  News Group (The Sun, News of the World)
  Telegraph Group (The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph, telegraph.co.uk)
  Times Newspapers (The Times, The Sunday Times, Times Online)

For those who want to go into this in more depth, the ABC strict definitions for defining and recording on-line users are useful to know. They are summarised below:

UNIQUE USER/BROWSERS: Is defined as “The total number of unique combinations of a valid identifier eg a cookie. Sites may use:

IP address + UserAgent

Cookie and/or

Registration ID.

Note that where USERS are allocated IP addresses dynamically (for example by dial-up Internet Service Providers), this definition may overstate or understate the real number of individual USERS concerned.

MONTHLY UNIQUE USERS/BROWSERS: This is the de-duplicated net number of Unique Users for the month. Unless otherwise stated, the Unique User data refers to Global Unique Users

PAGE IMPRESSION: Is defined as “A file or a combination of files sent to a USER as a result of that USER’S request being received by the server”. Note: The USER must be a valid USER. Non-requested files (e.g. some images, surplus html files served to build frame-sets, pushed pages, etc) are excluded. One request by a valid USER should result in one PAGE IMPRESSION being served. Where service providers, search engines or other organizations cache site content, PAGE IMPRESSIONS served from such caches may not be recorded by the originating site.

INVALID TRAFFIC: Is defined as “Traffic generated by web site development activity, whether by the site or by its agents and automated search engines, indexers, robots, spiders etc.”.

SYNDICATED CONTENT: Is defined as “Content served by a third party into the certified site’s PAGE IMPRESSIONS, or content served by the certified site into a third party’s PAGE IMPRESSIONS”. Such content may be claimed as valid traffic by both parties. Syndicated content may or may not be included in the traffic certified.

END

Statistical profiles from the CSO based on the 2006 Census

Source: CSO, The Oireachtas and The Irish Times

Small Area Population Statistics (SAPS) for Ireland contain 68 tables and are organised into the following 15 themes:

Detailed statistical profiles have been compiled based on the last census conducted on April 26th, 2006.

Headline results show for example, when broken down by Dail Constituency:

• Dublin North West has the highest proportion of single-parent families Meath East has the highest proportion of two- parent families (87.1 per cent of all families).
• Dublin South East has the highest proportion of single persons (60.3 per cent)
• Meath East has the highest proportion of married persons (56 per cent).
• Louth and Wicklow have the highest proportions of separated or divorced persons.
• Limerick West has the highest proportion of individuals who describe themselves as Irish (93.7 per cent).
• Dublin Central has the lowest proportion of individuals who describe themselves as Irish (72.6 per cent)
• The average proportion of those who describe themselves as Irish across the State is 88.8 per cent.
• Donegal North East has the highest proportion of families who have five children or more (5.5 per cent)
• Dublin North and Dublin North Central have the lowest (1.9 per cent). The average across the State is 3.4 per cent.
• Dublin North West has the highest proportion of households living in local authority housing (22.2 per cent). State average is 8.8 per cent.
• Meath East has the lowest (3.9 per cent). Donegal South West has the highest proportion of males who ceased education before they turned 15 years of age (27 per cent)
• Dublin South East has the highest proportion of males who ceased education at the age of 21 and over (58 per cent). State average is 23 per cent.
• Dublin West experienced the largest increase in population growth in the period 2002-2006 (26.9 per cent). State average growth is 8.2 per cent.
• Dublin North Central has the highest proportion of individuals aged more than 65 years (16.5 per cent). Meath East and Kildare South have the highest proportions of individuals aged 14 and under (23.6 per cent).
• Dublin South East has the lowest proportion of Catholics (67.6 per cent) and Limerick West the highest (93.8 per cent). State average is 86.8 per cent.
• Dublin West has the highest proportion of new housing stock (houses that were built from 2001 onwards) 31.5 per cent. State average is 17.9 per cent.
• Dublin South East has the highest proportion of old housing stock (houses that were built before 1919), 35.6 per cent. State average is 11.1 per cent.
• Galway West has the highest proportion of Irish-speakers (51.9 per cent), Dublin Central the lowest (28.7 per cent). State average is 40.8 per cent.

For more see: http://www.cso.ie/census/documents/SAPS_2006_GUIDE.pdf

According to the latest Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) figures, newspaper circulation figures for the second half of 2008 fell for most of the country’s daily and Sunday newspapers compared with the same period in 2007.

More detailed information covering all ABC audited titles on the island of Ireland including magazines, is available from Eason Advertising. However, here are the uncomfortable headlines about newspaper circulations in summary. Note that this does not include UK newspapers with Irish editions circulating in Ireland eg The Sunday Times. These figures out in due course. Also these figures concern circulations only, not readerships.

Just one “winner” on the same period a year earlier:

• Sunday Business Post – up just over 2% to 54,993.

Little or no change on the same period a year earlier:

• The Sunday World was little changed at 285,214

The losers on the same period a year earlier:

• Irish Independent (largest circulating daily) – 54,610, down 4%
• The Irish Times – 115,462 – down 3%
• The Irish Examiner – 52,544 – down 6%
• The Evening Herald 74,927 down almost 9%
• Evening Echo 24,522 down 5.3%
• The Sunday Independent – 270,362, down 4.3%
• The Sunday Tribune – 66,672- down 4.8%

The ABC report also provided figures for a number of websites. See table below.

We’ve ranked them by what we consider to be one of the best criteria: unique users. Note some of the periods are not recent. Note also that this list is restricted to sites who chose to subscribe to the rigorous  ABC method of independent audit.

Radio in Ireland is more popular than ever – total radio listenership in Ireland has now broken the 3m barrier according to figures recently release from the JNLR/TNS mrbi  survey covering Jan – Dec ‘08 .

85% or 3,008 million (+22,000) Adults aged 15+ living in Ireland tune in to radio programmes every weekday. People are listening in for over 4 hours every weekday.

The Top 20 Radio Programmes listened to are shown below. Nineteen of the twenty are RTE Radio!

Nineteen of the Top 20 programmes watched by Adults last year were on RTÉ Television and 17 of them were home-produced by RTÉ: