Audience measurement research

Marketers and media companies, as well as the agencies that serve them, need access to accurate, up-to-date information on the behaviour and attitudes of viewers, readers, listeners and users of media.

Ipsos measures media audiences in more than sixty countries. These include quantifying and profiling audiences to television, radio, internet, print and out-of-home media.

Ipsos carries out surveys of television and radio audiences in Europe, Latin America and the Middle East and North Africa regions. We are also actively developing personal metering solutions for these media.

We measure newspaper and magazine readership in every continent and are pioneering the large-scale deployment of GPS-enabled meters to measure exposure to out-of-home media in several markets. We are also developing solutions for the measurement of internet audiences and on the overlap between new and old media.

Print

Ipsos measures the audiences to print media in 62 countries using a variety of survey-based methods:

• Face-to-face interviewing with visual prompts, for example, is used throughout Latin America, parts of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.
• In some regions of central Europe, phone interviewing dominates.
• Mail surveys are used for the Ipsos Business Elite studies, as well as for the Ipsos Mendelsohn Affluent Survey in the US.

Ipsos is joint founder and sponsor of the Worldwide Readership Symposium, the world’s leading forum for discussing the latest print measurement methodologies.

Radio

Like print, radio is measured using a variety of methods depending on market needs and budgets.

Ipsos measures radio listening in 28 countries, mostly as part of multi-media surveys carried out face-to-face or by telephone.

We also run radio research contracts in several countries using seven-day diaries to track listening throughout the week, notably the UK's RAJAR contract.

Television

Apart from measuring TV audiences in its multi-media studies, Ipsos runs 'Establishment' surveys in several markets. An example of this is the BARB Establishment Survey in the UK, possibly the world's most sophisticated study of its kind, interviewing more than 50,000
people every year in their homes.

Outdoor

Out Of Home is a complex medium to measure. Every site (which can include roadside  billboards, station platform posters, taxi sides and more) must be accurately mapped.
Estimates of the characteristics and size of the pedestrian and vehicle traffic passing by a site must be made. Ideally, account should also be taken of the likelihood each site has of being seen.
Ipsos has partnered with MGE Data to track the journeys of 10,000 people in the UK using GPS-enabled meters. This represents the most advanced large-scale attempt to estimate Out-Of-Home audiences to date.
We are pioneering the large-scale deployment of GPS-enabled meters to measure exposure to out-of-home media in several markets.

We offer  the main elements of the outdoor audience measurement process:

• Site audits and checks
• Traffic counts
• Visibility adjustment (audience modelling)
• Planning and optimization software

Internet

Ipsos measures internet usage in several Middle Eastern and European countries. In many countries, the number and kinds of people using the internet are tracked using panels. This has the disadvantage that most sites are too small to register. An alternative – measuring page and site traffic – suffers from the drawback that it cannot identify who is viewing the page.

Ipsos is working with a partner to combine these two approaches. This represents the way ahead for internet audience measurement. Ipsos delivers integrated measurement in Hungary and Turkey.