Introduction
By Jean-Marc Lech
Il n’y a pas d’experts muets, c’était l’antienne d’Ipsos il y a peu. Et aujourd’hui, il y a urgence : les clients veulent de l’expertise, de la réflexion, des initiatives, de l’engagement, des idées.
Alors oui, les experts doivent s’engager, et mieux encore : il est urgent de se faire écouter.
Dans un orchestre de jazz, ce sont les cuivres que l’on veut entendre, et pas seulement la plainte de la contrebasse.
« There are no silent experts » was the refrain of Ipsos until recently. But today, it is even more urgent: clients want expertise, insights, initiatives, commitment and ideas.
Experts have to commit themselves and more than that, it is urgent for them to be heard. In a jazz orchestra, we want to hear the brass and not only the protest of the bass.
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Liz Landy
Liz Landy is Managing Director of the Ipsos MediaCT specialism within Ipsos MORI. She has over 20 years of media research experience, having started her career at the BBC where she held a variety of research positions before joining the Ipsos group in 1994.
The Times Goes Behind a Paywall
The Times and The Sunday Times have recently begun enforcing an online subscription regime of £1 per day and £2 per week for access to their websites. The rationale behind this, according to John Witherow - Journalist and Editor of The Sunday Times - is that it would be 'perilous' to continue to rely on online advertising revenues which are declining for The Times, and that to pursue the free model would lead to 'poorer and poorer' journalism in the long run. Apparently, it costs The Times a million pounds per year to maintain a Baghdad correspondent and clearly this cannot be sustained whilst pursuing the free model.
The counter argument - the free model is pursued by most other newspapers in the UK - questions whether significant revenues can be made from online subscribers and The Guardian claims that whilst The Times admits to falling revenues, their digital advertising revenue was up by 100% in a year. Their view, according to Alan Rusbridger, Editor of The Guardian, is that 'if you erect a paywall around your content you kind of go into a vault of darkness'.
Nobody knows that for certain and that at least the experimentation from The Times will allow the industry to try out different models and learn from them both. The additional complication is that it is not just bundled newspaper sites who will provide the competition to companies like The Times. There are a whole host of specialist free websites that have a much lower cost model, such as the News Corporation's own Book Army, which will be very pleased to hear the news that The Times has gone behind a paywall.
The impact on the research industry in the UK is a massive cut in the research budgets of newspapers and magazine publishers while they experiment and work out where their revenue is coming from. In turn, this leads to greater scrutiny of the expense and remit of the industry currencies and their suitability for measuring this changing world.
In the UK, we are working with the newspaper and magazine publishers to investigate the implications of fusing online readership data with the NRS print currency. We are also looking to further develop measures such as engagement on the NRS, which add greater insight into standard readership measures as publishers fight harder for their share of the reduced advertising pot. Whatever happens, research in the future will need to be as cost effective as possible and so we are putting a lot of time and effort into investigating online and mobile as possible alternative methodologies, whilst at the same time, trying to understand the implications these potential changes might have on the currencies in the years to come.
August 23, 2010