Nielsen Data to be Married with Australia's emma

Australian industry body The Readership Works is to work with Nielsen to merge the latter's Online Ratings data with its forthcoming cross platform audience insights survey 'emma'.

emma is the association's new newspaper and magazine readership survey, is funded by the newspaper industry and is a direct competitor to the existing metric run by audience measurement firm Roy Morgan.

Nielsen's IAB Australia-endorsed online audience ratings data will be delivered to Ipsos MediaCT, which is running emma, and the two independently audited data sets will be combined, giving emma subscribers 'greater accuracy... by showing how audiences engage with newspapers and magazines across content delivery platforms', according to Readership Works GM Mal Dale.

Simon Wake, Ipsos MediaCT MD, comments 'The emma and Nielsen data fusion represents global best practice at work. We are employing widely accepted techniques from other markets where Ipsos conducts national audience surveys such as in the UK for the National Readership Survey.' Sophie Madden, CEO of the Media Federation of Australia, congratulated The Readership Works for its 'continued collaborative approach' and added: 'In this increasingly complex media landscape, we welcome all initiatives to provide accurate multi-platform data for more efficient media planning.'

The name emma, which was only announced last week, stands for Enhanced Media Metrics Australia.

Web site: www.thenewspaperworks.com.au .