Portable People Meters (PPM)are being piloted now in Malaysia, says media research house Nielsen.
A PPM is worn like a pager and will detect hidden audio tones in a radio station’s signal, logging each time it hears a station.
The company says the PPM trial is underway, along with test runs of electronic diaries (e-diary) and mobile diaries (m-diary), which is likely to complement the existing paper diary used for Malaysia’s bi-annual radio audience research.
The company says the trials will finish by the end of this year and be subjected to vigorous analysis before being released to clients.
Earlier this year, Nielsen faced criticism from Malaysia’s Star Radio Group (SRG) over what it said were delays in rolling out new technological research methods including PPMs and e-diaries.
The company, which runs Suria FM, 988, Red FM and Capital FM, hired GfK to conduct its own research, hoping to encourage the rest of the industry away from Nielsen.
At the time Kudsia Kahar, Chief Operating Officer of SRG said: “We were not prepared to wait another two years to understand the current audience trends – by that time the brands could be so off the mark it would be too hard to play catch up.”
In a press release announcing the PPM trials in Malaysia, Benjamin Ting, Executive Director of Media Industry Group for Nielsen Malaysia explained the reason for the company’s slower roll-out of the new technology.
“Nielsen takes pride as the industry currency for radio and will never disclose any data for use by our clients unless it has undergone strenuous checks and verification. Usually, new methodologies of data collection will first have to go through at least two trial periods to ensure stability and accuracy before we would even consider adopting the methodology,” he said.
PPM technology is already in use in the top 50 US radio markets.
But Ting acknowledged that paper diaries continue to be used in the majority of markets around the world as they “strike a good balance between cost and efficiencies of executing a survey”.