MEDIA GROUPS DEVELOPING JOINT SURVEY
By Adnews Staff
Three of Canada's major media organizations are working together to develop an audience measurement system that will have them all singing from the same book and saving money as well. The Television Bureau of Canada, Radio Marketing Bureau and Newspaper Marketing Bureau have formed a joint industry group to design a study that will provide data for the three media together, and for each medium individually. The enterprise will be headed by John Chaplin, former president of the Print Measurement Bureau and now head of his own Toronto consulting firm, Inter*Act Research Communications Company. He will work on contract with a technical committee chaired by Owen Charlebois, president of the BBM Bureau of Measurement. A test market study is planned for the fall. The three media groups have formed a corporation to handle the research, called Strategic Target Audience Research (STAR) Inc. Charlebois says in a release, "Utimately the STAR project is going to become an invaluable marketing tool. It will provide qualitative data - not previously available - by category, by market, by region and nationally." STAR is expected to eliminate duplication of effort that results when each medium does its own study. This would result in cost savings that could be passed on to the ad industry as a whole.