Some might say that press is being taken over by digital in this day and age however, it is still very much a prominent part of our lives as both media experts and consumers.

The JNRS committee has been working hard this year to ensure that all planners and clients are getting the best out of the survey in order to deliver the best press plans for their client’s needs.

I joined the JNRS committee about a year ago and really hit the ground running. There were a number of issues I had wanted to bring to the table but when I went to my first committee meeting, I found that most of them had actually already been discussed before my arrival. This was a great start for me as I knew everyone else was on the same page.

Over the past year we have tackled a number of items on our agenda and have already made progress in a number of areas;

Move to Choices software

We have spoken to a number of media planners about the way they actually plan press campaigns and measure them against their target audiences. The majority of people that we spoke to actually said that they preferred to use TGI to do this rather than the Telmar tool that reports on JNRS figures. There were two main reasons for this, the first being that they were already conducting a lot of their audience research in TGI so it was an easy option to go straight into the press planning tool with the same audience profile to measure press coverage. The second and most common reason however was that the TGI software was a lot easier to manoeuvre and made the task at hand a lot faster and easier. The general consensus was that the Telmar tool was clunky and more complex to use. For this reason, we approached Choices about applying the JNRS survey to their software so that agencies can purchase this as an add-on to their subscription and run JNRS figures within the Choices software, making it easier to run and keeping the survey within the same software as TGI. This does not mean that TGI press data runs off JNRS figures but that the JNRS survey can be viewed within the same software if purchased.

1. Joint measurement committee
2. JNRS has been represented within all meetings on Joint media measurement and is very involved in the process. There was a meeting earlier in the year where all measurement methodology within the Irish media market was presented and JNRS were very heavily involved in this.
3. Research
4. A number of you will have completed a survey a few months back on what you think of theJNRS and how you use it. This was to determine how the JNRS is servicing the needs of its users. This was conducted through 16 in-depth interviews across the industry including media agencies, press publications, JNRS committee and the JNRS contractor. We were delighted to see some positive commentary within the survey results but it also allowed us to highlight the weaknesses that the industry sees within the JNRS and we are now working on addressing these.
5. Review of how the survey is measured and reported

This is something that we are currently undertaking based on the outtakes of the survey. We will circulate an update on this once we have more news.

We have made a lot of progress in the last year and have been working to ensure JNRS is providing the best possible service to meet the needs of the advertising industry in Ireland.

Jessica King is Account Director, Mindshare. IAPI appointed her to the board of the Joint National Readership Survey (JNRS).