PAMCo: The Components Behind A World-Leading Audience Measurement Solution

Ipsos are PAMCo’s research partner in the development of the new audience measurement currency. We have played a key role in introducing a world-leading quality digital panel recruited via face-to-face interviewing. The panel facilitates the calculation of full platform reach for publisher brands. The accurate measurement of the overlap between print, desktop, phone and tablet is a critical component of our approach.

Underpinning our methodology is a gold standard research approach involving a random probability sample and in-home interviewing using our 250-strong trained team of field interviewers working across GB. Annually, we collect 35,000 interviews using advanced touch-screen technology and a visually appealing questionnaire design. Here we collect the important information on demographics, the print readership of newspapers and magazines, the ownership and use of digital devices.

PAMCo’s innovative methodology combines data from three sources to provide an overall picture of publisher audiences across print
and digital platforms. As part of the interviewing task, we then recruit a subset of 5,000 each year to become part of our PAMCo digital panel and install a cookie-based app onto all eligible digital devices they use. The panel allows us to identify websites and apps that participants visit over a 4-week period. It provides unique and accurate single source data on the duplication between print and digital reading for the same brand as well as a measure of the frequency of visits.

The survey and panel data are matched via a complex data fusion algorithm to comScore multi-platform estimates. ComScore are the UKOM official contracted supplier of digital audience statistics in the UK. ComScore also base their universe estimates on information collected in the same PAMCo in-home survey.

The survey provides reliable estimates of total readership across print, desktop, phone and tablet for profiling and reach and frequency planning. It covers over 150 publisher brands, including their print and digital sections and supplements (subject to sample size), as well as over 300 non-publisher sites.

We are very proud to be PAMCo’s research partner in this ground-breaking new methodology and to be playing our part in helping publishers to commercialise their audiences in this evolving market.