MUMBAI: This is a piece of news that should make advertisers in newspapers pay attention. Pull outs that is sections of newspapers like Times Of India's (TOI) Bombay Times, Education Times, Mid-day's Go, Play, Economic Times' Brand Equity are most likely to be read by those in the 25-34 age group SEC A,B.
The only exceptions are the education and property sections where SECs C and D start to make their presence felt.
These were just a few of the findings contained in the new research study Sparr conducted by Media Research Users Council (MRUC). Sparr stands for Sections, Pullouts and Attitudinal Readership Research. The aim was to provide an understanding of the nuances of reader's habits towards newspaper pullouts and sections.
The survey was conducted from July - August 2003 for Mumbai with a sample size of 1920. 100 per cent back checks were done in all 11 dailies and 50 pullouts were surveyed. MRUC will also be releasing a study on FM Radio in the first quarter of next year.
MRUC's Roda Mehta delivered a presentation saying that daily pullouts behaved differently from weekly pullouts. An interesting find is that women are biased towards Marathi pullouts. Not surprisingly for the TOI among SEC A its edit and international pages score the highest. Celebrities may be desperate to appear in page three of Bombay Times. However the survey revealed that while a third of TOI's readers read the section six times a week over half read it
less than three times each week.
Another issue relates to the average issue readership versus the claimed readership. For TOI the AIR is 55 per cent of the claimed readership. However when you check the pullouts the figure shoots up. For the Educational Times the figure is 87 per cent. For Ascent it is an impressive 91 per cent. For Gujarati publications the AIR is as high as the claimed readership. For Loksatta all pullouts rank high in popularity among the SEC A group 25+.
The overall business readership for the newspapers surveyed ranges from 15-42 per cent. It is at its highest for the TOI. The sports readership ranges from 43-65 per cent. The edit section is between 24- 46 per cent of the readers.