WAM CONFERENCE
Punch-ups in Cannes

19/June/2002

As already reported, there was outspoken criticism by Nielsen Media Research of the user satisfaction survey of television peoplemeters commissioned by the conference organisers, ESOMAR (European Society for Opinion and Marketing Research) and America's Advertising Research Foundation.

Peter Menneer, former head of research at the BBC, who had conducted the survey, announced that top marks had gone to Dr Alberto Colusssi's AGB Group, while Nielsen had been awarded a minus score.

Menneer was involved in another dispute that came to light on the Friday (radio day) of the conference. At the end of a session during which reports were presented about the PPM and Radiocontrol audiometers produced respectively by Arbitron (in the US) and Telecontrol (in Switzerland) he asked whether the latter organisation would kindly resume co-operation with the Audiometer Evaluation Group, of which he is convenor.

Answer came there none, so the representative of this publication repeated the question in somewhat blunter fashion. Why had the Swiss withdrawn co-operation from Menneer's international committee?

"We thought we were treated unfairly," was this time the surprisingly blunt reply. No further explanation followed, but it is understood that there has been personal friction between Menneer and Matthias Steinmann, the former boss of Telecontrol, who has sold it to GfK but remains in charge of the international marketing of Radiocontrol.

Another occasion on which normal politeness broke down was the breakfast meeting hosted by AGB Group. Antonella (Toni) Petra, AGB's General Manager in Australia, gave guests an upbeat talk, attributing the group's success - including its winning of contracts in Australia and the UK - to its focusing exclusively on TV audience measurement.

She also disparaged the idea of a parallel run in which data from a new contractor's system are compared with those from one managed by the previous contractor. "How can data be parallel when we're supposed to be providing an improved system?" she demanded.

While acknowledging that there had been some "resistance to change", she did not go into details about teething troubles in either Australia and the UK. However, her serenity was too much for Hugh Johnson, of the UK's Channel 4, who accused AGB of having created a "dreadful mess" and asked when its UK panel would finally be brought up to strength.

She was also assailed by Tom Harper of Media Audits, Ireland, who said media-buyers needed a parallel run that calibrated the difference between old and new panels, so that buyers could know what changes in ratings to expect.

AGB's Chairman, Dr Alberto Collussi, joined in the fun, citing as reasons for delay in the UK the difficulty of recruiting PC-literate engineers and the large number of video cassette recorders in British homes.

This provoked some unflattering remarks from Mike Gorton, head of TAM services at the rival Taylor Nelson Sofres, which Colussi's firm displaced as the main TAM contractor in the UK.

WAM 2002 was attended by a total of 450 people, though attendance was considerably higher for the first two days, devoted to TV, than for the rest of the week, when online, print and radio each got a full day.

Next year it is planned to repeat the exercise with Los Angeles as the venue. It will be interesting to see whether WAM 2003 generates as much ill feeling as the Cannes event.

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