A new method to measure media casualness for magazines and newspapers

Much has been written about scheduling ad campaigns and calculation of reach and frequency distributions for magazines, newspapers, TV programs and other media. The emphasis of most previous papers has been largely on creating a methodology which produces internally consistent results (e.g. no ‘negative reach’, group additivity – distributions for two complementary population groups (e.g. men and women) should be reconciled with the distribution for the total population). However, what has been largely ignored is a solid and accurate method of measuring media casualness or turnover. Media casualness is a powerful mathematical tool which can be used to model reach and frequency distributions for media schedules covering print, TV, radio, internet and other media. It is a measure of audience turnover with particular advantages over simpler measures and is defined and explained in Section 3. Casualness was invented by Christopher Fry (See References [1], [2]) in the early seventies. Since then, it was adapted and further developed by George Rennie for The Roy Morgan Research Centre (See References [3],[4]). In this paper we discuss mainly the measurement issues and present a new and, we believe, a superior method to measure casualness for magazines and weekly newspapers. Most of our results and examples will be for print media but all conclusions are applicable to TV, radio, internet and other media.

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