National Press Circulations July 2011
By
In July the national press was hit by a phone hacking scandal, which saw the closure of Britiains largest circulating newspaper the News of the World (NOFTW).
Aside from the closure of the NOFTW there were some healthy gains in the daily market, especially within the quality sector. The Independent spin-off i enjoyed a 6.1% Period on period rise, which takes its total circulation above the Independent for the first time.
In the Sunday market, percentage increases for the month were through the roof as the popular and mid-market titles battled it out to pick up readers from the NOFTW fallout – the data suggests readers turned to the quality titles for insight on the scandal.
UK Online Measurement Data Report: June 2011
By Tom Derrig
The total UK online universe declined in June – down 730,000 users month on month to 39.5 million. Although total users had been rising steadily in the last few months, June’s figure shows the first drop in general online take up since February of this year.
Despite the recent monthly fluxuations the online audience has risen by half a million users over the year. 20% of those who went online have a household income of £50,000 or higher while 15% earned under £15,000. Over 10% of those involved in the survey were unemployed in June.
18% of people online in the UK are based in London (seven million) down 4% YoY. The second largest area for internet usage is the Midlands, with 12% (five million).
While users aged 50 and older make up the largest age group (32%) they have only grown by 7% in the last year. By comparison, the younger audience of 18-24 year olds have seen rapid growth YoY, with a rise of 23%. Users aged 25-34 saw a 7% drop.
Brands
Summertime proved a distraction for the online population – all of the top ten brands witnessed a significant drop in users in June, fuelling the overall loss of users. Worst affected was the BBC, down over one million users since May with a total unique audience for June standing at 19.8 million, pushing it down to fifth place. The BBC site also saw a drop in active reach, down to 50%. Google also saw its reach fall by 2%, down to 83% for June. However, the amount of time spent and pages per person actually increased.
Google remained the UK’s most popular online brand with a unique audience of 33 million users. Wikipedia was also badly affected, losing 809,000 users, but remained the tenth most popular online brand in the UK. Yahoo! also lost around the same amount of users but managed to push past BBC to take fourth place.
Newspapers
The top ten newspaper websites didn’t fare much better than the top brands, with only three newspaper sites gaining users in June. MailOnline lost 11,000 users since May although it still managed to cling on to the top spot. The amount of people viewing The Daily Mail site fell, pages and time spent per person increased.
Guardian.co.uk saw the biggest actual loss over the month, down 879,000 users (17%) with an active reach of 11%. While the News of the World phone hacking scandal continued to gain momentum in June, the top News International websites had mixed fortunes. The Sun picked up 8.6% more users, a rise of 222,000, moving up two places as a result. The Times however, was down 98,000 users for the month, a MoM loss of 7.3%
Amid the escalating controversy News of the World entered the top ten, rising by 6% MoM, with 645,000 users. Newsquest Local Media saw the second biggest actual loss of the month. The collection of hyper-local sites lost 29% of its audience, sending it down two places.
Social Sites
Despite the dominance of Facebook and Twitter in the arena of social media, users are spending much more time on less known networks. The top ten social sites ranked by pages viewed per person looks significantly different when simply tallied by the amount of users. Tagged.com only attracted 297,000 users in June but almost trebled the amount of pages viewed per person to 833 (up 185%). The average user spent over four hours on the site throughout the month, an increase of 2.5 hours MoM.
Polish social network NK.pl only managed to reach .35% of the UK online population but captivated those who did log on. NK.pl ranked 58 in its category but pages viewed per person jumped up by 100MoM to 723 in June. Facebook, the third most popular site overall, saw its pages fall by 26% in June (554 pages per person) but it did reach 66% of the online population.
Video Sites
YouTube and the BBC iPlayer saw a drop in users in June; Google-owned YouTube lost 4% of its audience MoM, with a total of 18.8 million users for June. Rebecca Black helped the video streaming giant peak in March 2011 with 19.6 million users. BBC’s iPlayer remained in second place despite shedding 218,000 users. Google Video lost 30% of it’s unique audience in June, the biggest percentage loss in the top ten. Both Channel 4oD and ITV Player moved up one place, gaining 93,000 and 15,000 users respectively.
TV Round-Up: May 2011
By Tom Derrig
Channel 5 has had another bumper month under owner Richard Desmond, with revenue up 14.9% compared to this time last year. Following months of poor results last year, the broadcaster is now enjoying a turn of fortune – with revenues up 16.6% YoY in February; 22.4% YoY in March; and 41.7% YoY in April.
Aside from Channel 5, network revenue was down across the board in May – a turnaround from April’s results. Channel 4 posted the biggest YoY drop, down 14.5%. ITV1 saw revenues fall 8.4% YoY, while ITV Breakfast posted a 6.5% YoY decline.
Overall, terrestrial revenue was down 7.7% in May, while total satellite was down 1.5%.
Tags: tv-round-up-may-2011
Posted in Industry, TV |
ABC National Newspaper Round-Up: June 2011
By Tom Derrig
The Daily National newspaper market saw a return to the norm after last months slight increase of 0.1%, as the Total Daily market fell 0.9% PoP. There were notable PoP increases for two publications in the Sunday Newspaper market, while the Mail on Sunday gained a YoY increase of 1.0% as it’s rivals saw YoY losses across the board.
With the continued overall decline of the Daily Newspaper market there were some fighters. Independent’s ‘i‘ newspaper once again increased PoP with a consistent gain of 6,000 copies between May and June 11. Both the Daily Mirror and Daily Star can also puff out their tabloid chests and boast PoP increases.
The News of the World can take a teary eyed look at their last full ABC audit. As today’s news sees one red top falling; her recently much criticised and since ceased Sunday tabloid saw a PoP increase of over 10,000 copies.
Tags: ABC National press June 2011, http://londonadvertisingexpert.com
Posted in Industry, Press |
Inflated iPad Ad Premiums Leave Media Buyers Wondering
By Bo Williams
Partner
http://www.minonline.com/news/14705.html The Boys at Razorfish NY are asking the right questions.
Posted in Industry |
Thereareotherworlds
By Bo Williams
Partner
Interesting ideas ideas and comments from some very clever people: http://tinyurl.com/2dvygp8
Posted in Industry |
Direct Response TV – whats going on?
EXPERT VIEW
By Andrew Napier
TV, Ethnic, Niche
Many years ago Channel 4 and BT conducted a series of studies into the effectiveness of direct response TV to establish:
- What is the most effective commercial length
- How long should the number be on screen
- How many times should the number be voiced over
- How long should a campaign run
- Which are the most effective days
- Which are the most effective times of day
- Which are the most effective channels
- What are the most effective programme genre
The answers to these questions were derived by matching spots transmitted to all calls received within 10 minutes of transmission and became the DRTV ‘rules’ which advertisers and their agencies slavishly followed – for better or worse!
Since those days things have changed!
There has been an explosion in the number of communication channels, not just in TV but across most media, and we’ve also seen the arrival of www.
So what is going on with DRTV?
Well, the first thing to establish is what do we mean by DRTV as the majority of television advertising now carries some form of call to action?
DRTV is the polar opposite to brand advertising where the sole purpose of the commercial is to generate a sale as cheaply as possible!
Of course there is often some element of brand building even within the most simplistic of DRTV commercials, particularly with new product launches, but the route from ‘Direct Response’ to ‘Brand’ can usually be identified by the creative execution and media placement of the commercial.
DRTV commercials will therefore be placed in the lowest cost airtime although these days the creative execution doesn’t have to look cheap – just weighted with the call to action!
However with in excess of 400 TV channels to choose from there is an abundant supply of ‘low cost’ airtime so the question of which works best still remains but with two important additions:
- What affect does DRTV have on other communication channels being used?
- What level of web enquiries does DRTV generate?
Does this mean there needs to be a whole set of new rules?
The first thing to say about DRTV is that there are, and never have been, any rules – industry averages yes but rules no.
Any advertiser entering into DRTV for the first time needs to start somewhere – industry averages – but they need to create there own set of rules; test, measure, learn.
So what about the new issues of web and multiplier effect?
ITV and the DMA have recently conducted a major study into how effective TV is when used in conjunction with other communication channels which shows that response levels to DM increase by 143% when TV is included, by 52% for Press and by 175% for online.
This means that any direct response campaign shouldn’t just be evaluated by media in isolation but also by the sum of the parts and the learnings incorporated in future activity.
With regards to the issue of how does DRTV drive web enquiries Thinkbox commissioned MediaCom Business Science to provide some answers!
Given that traditional thinking is based purely on response via the phone and the phone now only accounts for 15% of total responses this is a fairly fundamental question.
The key findings from the MediaCom research showed:
- 20% of online response came within 10 minutes of a spot being transmitted
- Online response was greater at weekends than weekdays
- Online response was greater during peaktime than off peak
In other words the direct opposite of phone response.
Does this mean we need to rethink how we construct direct response campaigns?
In terms of how we earlier defined DRTV (buying the lowest cost airtime) then the answer is ‘No’ as the dayparts that worked well for online response are not the lowest cost airtime and the fact that they worked well for online response would suggest that the 80% of online respondents falling outside the traditional 10 minute rule were absorbing the message and going online at a time that suited them.
Which brings us back to our central point – there are no rules in direct response TV advertising!
At brand-links we recently launched a new business in the financial services sector using a pure DR strategy and whilst we found the TV campaign overall generated a similar phone to online response split as the MediaCom research our weekend airtime generated more phone enquiries than online – directly opposite to the MediaCom findings!
Test, Measure, Learn
