Comment Central

Mike Ironside, NRS

Unlikely as it sounds, if the pollsters have got it wrong and the swing against Labour isn't as great as they think, we could find ourselves with a hung Parliament this time next year. The thought of the main rival parties trying to work together to drag the country out of recession is enough to make most people shudder with scepticism.

But there are advantages to coalition. Working together with rivals can actually create common ground and help find solutions to issues affecting the many, not the few. There is nothing wrong with coming at something from two different angles to find a unified way forward.

The National Readership Survey business model is all about collaboration. Without the backing and joint funding of the PPA, NPA and IPA, as well as involvement from ISBA, our organisation wouldn't exist. But it soon became obvious not long after I became NRS chief executive 10 months ago that the time was right for us to work closer together with our closest so-called (but misperceived) ‘rival' in the publishing measurement space, ABC.

NRS has suffered from perceptions of being at odds with ABC, partly because we haven't until now started making the most of the robust and extensive data provided by the survey, and partly due to ABC's long-term marketing and PR strategy which has helped it appear to be the industry measurement leader.

Of course, we have made great strides towards refreshing NRS as a business. We have launched a new website with greater access than ever to the data; we're doing away with the heavy print volumes in favour of digitised data; and we're taking steps towards an exciting multi-platform future. We've also set up a User Advisory Panel to allow those who employ NRS data in their planning and buying - be that at a media owner or agency - to have a say in what works and what doesn't. The key thing with the panel is that members aren't all advocates of the survey as it stands!

But a central plank of the work we're doing is building a much stronger and closer relationship with ABC. It makes sense for the two organisations, as pillars of the publishing community, to collaborate. It's about educating the industry with regard to the use an abuse of circulation and readership data, and to this end we've included eight-year trend data from both organisations for scores of publications in the non-subscriber section of our new website, http://www.nrs.co.uk/, for the first time. It will also be accessible via http://www.abc.org.uk/ to provide better insight than ever into the data for the benefit of all users.

There will doubtless still be areas where NRS and ABC don't see eye to eye; we are both separate businesses, after all. But forging a closer relationship will be a great benefit to the whole media industry. We will be much more capable of driving our corner of the media forward if we admit our similarities, and work in tandem rather than continuing to plough separate furrows.