The company behind Jamaica’s long-running All Media Survey is rebuilding the study around artificial intelligence (AI) and a longer measurement window, betting that advertisers need a sharper picture of audiences who no longer stay put on one platform.
Market Research Services Ltd, known as MRSL, launched The All-New All Media Survey at S Hotel Kingston on Thursday.
The revamped study will measure social-media influencers and content creators alongside radio, television, newspapers, and Internet usage, and will move beyond standard demographic profiles to deeper market segmentation.
“The media landscape has changed dramatically from the time we started, and we have constantly had to adapt the way we collect media data,” Chief Executive Kishka-Kaye Anderson told business executives and journalists at the event.
Longer window
The biggest methodological change is the data-collection period, which expands to six months from a six-week snapshot. Anderson said the longer window is meant to capture how consumers move between platforms.
“Consumers are moving across screens, different screens at different times of the day, so we wanted to capture data over a wider window,” she said.
New segments
Advertisers and agencies will be able to examine specific groups, including banked and unbanked Jamaicans, prospective vehicle and home buyers, business owners, and farm owners. Anderson said that would show advertisers not just who is consuming media but where particular groups can be reached.
She described the survey’s role as independent coverage of which platforms people use and who uses them. “It helps advertisers and advertising agencies determine how and where to spend their advertising dollar,” she said.
AI partner
MRSL has partnered with DatanXzen, a US-based technology company with a strong technical presence in India. Dr Kiran Kumar Koka, group chief executive of ASOFT Group of Companies, said the technology uses AI and data engineering to automate the preparation and analysis of research data.
It is designed to catch duplicate records, mismatches and missing information, work that previously required extensive manual processing, he said.
Dr Koka said the Data NexGen platform uses AI orchestration and a plug-and-play approach to sharply cut the time needed to engineer and process complex datasets. He sought to head off concerns about job losses. “It is not about replacing human intelligence. It is to give added advantage to human intelligence,” he said.
Anderson said the collaboration is also new ground for DatanXzen because the technology had to be adapted to the complexity of the All Media Survey. The results will move from a series of PDF and Excel reports to an integrated online analytics platform. Clients will be able to explore findings, apply filters, and answer media-planning questions without searching multiple volumes or waiting for additional tables.
Timeline
Data collection will run for six months. MRSL plans to give subscribers to its MRSL Classic and The All Media Insight Suite reports an interim look at trends after the first three months, covering radio, television, newspaper, Internet, and social media.
The release didn’t say when the full results will be available, what the new subscriptions will cost, or how influencers will be measured and ranked.
business@gleanerjm.com
