There is a lot of talk in town about the industry-funded South African Advertising Research Foundation (SAARF). Some write articles saying it is socialistic and stifles competition; others speculate about the extra R2.9-million funded by Print Media South Africa earlier this year. Some have views on its black economic empowerment partner; others believe it should restructure its funding mechanisms.
And then there is branded AMPS (All Media and Products Survey) which offers audience figures and information on brands, products and lifestyle. There are many points of view on branded AMPS and it probably is such a contentious issue for one reason: it launched around the same time that the international research company Target Group Index (TGI) entered the South African market. TGI, co-founded by two former SAARF board members, offers its service at a cost; branded AMPS is funded by the industry and therefore free in the public domain.
Do the two entities compete? On the record, everyone says they should not be competing. But in reality, the answer is probably “yes”.
“Both TGI and SAARF need to recognize that they are suppliers of data to the industry and their primary responsibility is to deliver value to users. There can be no other agenda other than improved advertising decision making,” says media consultant Gordon Muller.
At a recent debate of the Advertising Media Association of South Africa (AMASA), Muller said the AMPS readership figures were of the utmost importance to the industry.
“The day that AMPS go to the wall, will be the day before there is an emergency meeting to try and get it back in place,” he said, but added: “I don’t believe AMPS was ever conceived as a one size fits all. It cannot perform the entire gambit of strategic thinking.”
Paul Haupt, CEO of SAARF, says branded AMPS, which measures the usage of 1,800 brands in 160 product categories in both rural and urban areas, was the logical next step to take.
“This thing that SAARF is trying to be everything for everyone is absolute nonsense. We have been very, very focused on the currency but the currency has been evolving and we need to adapt with time.
“Branded information is as old as SAARF is. The people who have been against branded AMPS all had some kind of commercial agenda,” he adds.
TGI co-founder Tim Bester says: “There has been an impression that my partner, Barbara Cooke, and I are out to get SAARF. Somehow there is this impression that we are a threat to SAARF.”
He recently delivered a 16-page paper on SAARF, urging for co-operation between the two bodies.
TGI provides its service to some 52 clients, many on three-year contracts which came into effect in mid-2002. When it decided to launch in South Africa five years ago, it would have been the only research company providing branded surveys on lifestyle and attitude.
“The first people we went to see were SAARF. We said we did not want to compete with SAARF and we offered to buy the print measurement,” says Bester.
However, SAARF turned the offer down and launched branded AMPS in 2002. In the first year it sold the product to about 20 companies – “but with hindsight it was a mistake to try to sell it”, says Haupt – but last year television owners agreed to fund branded AMPS, allowing SAARF to make it available at no cost, as opposed to the TGI product.
“In doing this, they entered into the commercial research market place and offered branded data to selected companies at a price, subsidised by the levy. In doing this, SAARF became an unfair competitor to all research companies, by competing for the ‘research rand’,” says Bester.
Haupt acknowledges this, saying: “It wasn’t done to prevent them from coming here. We did it because we think it was the right thing to do for South Africa. But make no mistake, the TGI survey is a competitive survey to AMPS.
“We are not really interested in what they do there. It is a free country and people co-exist,” he adds.
The main differences between the two: Saarf is industry-funded; TGI is a commercial business. SAARF’s sample size is 12,400 while TGI’s is 15,000. TGI data is more frequently available and more in-depth, its surveys are done only in urban areas while SAARF’s more simple questionnaire is answered in both urban and rural areas.
Media Compete was one of the first media agencies to sign up for TGI in 2002. “Up until recently you were forced to pay for TGI but now branded AMPS has become something. There are pros and cons to AMPS but everybody knows it and everybody trusts it,” says Terry Murphy, head of research and consumer insights at Media Compete.
Murphy, however, says they would probably continue making use of TGI data which costs the company “hundreds of thousands of rands” every year.
“It’s a nice-to-have. TGI offers more in-depth analysis. All in all, it’s far more detailed and it gives a lot of insight into lifestyle and attitude,” she says. “But the industry is spending money on two branded national surveys and yet they are differing only slightly.”
Independent media strategist Brenda Wortley says she rarely uses TGI for several reasons. “I’m not really a TGI user, just because I work on my own and I don’t have it on my computer and it costs a lot of money. As a media planner, one always goes back to Saarf data. I think TGI has a better product and brand data but it is complex to work with and requires a skilled user.”
Haupt himself describes SAARF’s product as “the basic stuff”. “We focus on the basics. There are lots of things that SAARF can get involved in but I’ve been saying ‘no’. We want to stick to our real business.”
Mike Broom, managing director of Infosense, believes there is space for both in the market.
“SAARF is a lot more transparent because it is public money. Their issues are open for debate. If things go wrong in the field, they have to say something, while TGI is a commercial operation and they are under no obligation to do it,” notes Broom.
He also says that SAARF is representative of the whole of South Africa because it includes rural areas and the questionnaires are designed for Africa’s high illiteracy levels.
“That is very important in strategic planning,” says Broom.
SAARF’s future? Haupt would like to see the data become more freely and easily available on a website, as opposed to expensive software. He wants to see the sample size increase to more than 20,000.
His ambitions echo Muller’s statements at the AMASA meeting: “We need to open up AMPS as a gold standard currency again.”
In the meantime, TGI will continue selling its highly regarded product to those who can afford it while others will continue to rely solely on the valuable universal currency of AMPS in their media planning and target marketing. Only time will tell who will outlive the other.