There's a spat brewing between News Corp's Adelaide Advertiser and Free TV after the TV body slammed the paper for making “misleading” claims in an ad that compares its readership with MasterChef viewers.
The paper ran an ad in editions of the Advertiser and Sunday Mail comparing its average weekly readership, with the average viewing audience of Monday night’s episode of MasterChef, as part of a campaign to attract advertisers and promote the paper.
Free TV says the paper's claims are flawed on a number of levels.
They equate newspaper readership figures based on online surveys that rely on a person’s recall and self-reporting with TV’s minute-by-minute people-meter data, which Free TV says “reports actual television viewing in representative panels of Australian homes”.
The claims compare the 12-month average weekday reach for their entire paper with the average audience of one TV programme.
Free TV also objected to the omission that the TV viewer figures offer an average across every minute, which means actual viewer numbers are “significantly higher”.
Free TV chairman, Harold Mitchell, said commercial television broadcasters were “bemused” by the publisher’s “flimsy analysis”.
“A rookie mistake like this would see a first-year media buyer shown the door. While all media measurement systems aim to provide the best audience estimates they can, no other Australian media can match the robust, transparent and accountable reporting of OzTAM and Regional TAM ratings.”
News Corp has declined to comment on the issue.
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