Grassroots information for advertisers on the web

The Compass24 project, and resulting website, is the brain child of Ads24 Community Newspaper Sales, the advertising arm of Media24's community newspapers. Born out of a marketplace demand for a proper comparison of information regarding the buying, reading and consumption patterns of readers at a grassroots level, Ads24 rigorously covered 38 footprint areas with its extensive community research.

Esmé Smit, manager: Ads24 community sales, says, "We know, and can now show how; community newspapers play a unique role in reaching and strengthening geo-specific societies our marketplace. With Compass24 you can do cross-tab on Telmar, accessing retail specific data or use Unilever Instituted of
Strategic Marketing's SAMM's Map Bar segmentation to reach this captive audience in a much more targeted and insightful way. To make this 100% accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime we created the website, www.compass24.co.za to give you a bird's eye view on top-line data results according to the footprint areas of 38 of our newspapers."

The site combines the latest information available on the myriad of different communities, each with its own dynamics and prospects, activities and values.

Useful and consumer friendly, this tool is accessible to everyone, and was designed to improve the quality of print planning and market insight. The data in Compass24 is available on the website either to view or to download in excel files. And all the data can be 'cut and pasted' into customised presentations by the user.

Compass24 is specifically structured to enable the retail and advertising industry to reach community markets in a focused, responsive and profitable way.

Jos Kuper of Kuper Research developed the research methodology. She says, "Compass24 is almost like supplying a social 'glue' between the readers and the marketers that facilitates a mutually beneficial interaction and insight between the market we offer and the audiences you want to reach."

The new website makes use of two substantial value added components: data from AMPS (the All Media and Products Survey) and information from the South African Marketers Map (SAMM), a geographical mapping system from the Unilever Institute (part of the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa (HSRC)), to provide the geo-specific data on the countries scattered communities.

Using cutting-edge multi-basing software technology that allows visitors to cross reference the community research with AMPS entirely at the user's discretion is a defining feature of the tool. AMPS did away with community newspaper research in 2002, but with Compass24, media planners and advertisers once again have access to this valuable information.

Multi basing AMPS with Ads24's community research means that people inside the community newspaper footprints are 'applied' to or 'multi-based' with similar people in the AMPS survey through a process developed by the software bureau Telmar.

This enables Compass24 to not only reveal more about Ads24's insightful range of dedicated community newspaper information but also about consumption of magazines, radio and television as well as products and brands.

SAMM, the second value added component of the site, was developed by the Unilever Institute for Strategic Marketing of the University of Cape Town. It is a source of geo-visual information which helps marketers derive consumer profiles of specific areas and also to assess the potential of market areas through a segmentation model called MapBar.

This predicts where markets are likely to grow, stagnate or shrink in the future. When applying these predictions to the community newspaper areas, advertisers can understand where they can capitalise on growth markets.

The fieldwork period for the collection of community data was July to August 2005. Face to face interviews were conducted with respondents inside of each footprint area and 20% back checks conducted on the work of each interviewer to ensure reliability and validity. Fieldwork and processing were conducted by Markinor and the clean tapes converted by Telmar to provide electronic access.

The website was set up by Robyn Haird of Hairdnet Website Design and the data can be viewed on the website in graphic or tabular format or downloaded in excel files.