If you spent a lot more time online during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and early this year, you weren’t alone.
At the recent NRF 2021 event, held entirely online this year for the first time ever, retail guru Miya Knights confirmed that consumers, in general, were spending 20% more time online than they were in previous years, and ZDNet reports that active social media users grew by a whopping 304 million year-on-year.
People - stuck at home due to ongoing lockdowns and social distancing requirements - are also watching more TV than ever, according to research in the UK from Ofcom. In the US, television viewing numbers increased for the first time in ten years.
Whichever way you slice the numbers, it’s clear that they present both a challenge and an opportunity. However, the biggest challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic is the unknown. The media landscape has never been affected this way before, change has never happened at this scale, the industry has never been so disrupted. As a result, finding the relevant insights and analytics to help guide decision-making can be tricky.
Media consumption studies are particularly important to advertisers, who want to understand how their brands will be affected, short and long term as well as media agencies who need to investigate how this pandemic has impacted and changed media consumption patterns. This has led to a vast amount of independent, proprietary surveys from advertisers to sales houses/media owners, research agencies and media agencies.
Since they are independent, they’re not part of the typical syndicated surveys that exist for audience and media measurement in most countries. Herein lies the challenge. How do you maximize your investment in research when it’s not linked to a syndicated survey?
Multibasing and integrating specific COVID-19 studies with syndicated surveys will allow media planners to closely investigate how media consumption has changed across various audience segments, giving them the agility to ensure their media investment reaches the right people, at the right time, in the right place.
By combining surveys, media planners will be able to maximize their investment in research. Small proprietary surveys dealing with particular issues, such as the effects of COVID-19 on consumers, can be linked with syndicated surveys that may contain brand information, allowing insights into whether the pandemic has influenced media consumption differently across different consumer, financial categories, or brands.
Done right, media plans can be created leveraging the information from both surveys, providing a clearer route to better ROI.
TelmarHelixa has some of the best data integration specialists in the world and can assist in designing well-structured hub surveys that have the correct questions embedded in them in order to effectively MultibaseTM with a syndicated survey.