Mediacorp is missing the point

So, i watch the occasional free to air television when i have some down time. I tuned to ch 5 last night to watch some meaningless tube and i saw some Mediacorp house ads. They were using the latest AC Nielsen results to brag about how much better they've been doing compared to their traditional rivals SPH. Let me state on record how absurd AC Nielsen, Synovate and the rest of these media index / research companies are. Most of their qualitative research comes from a "sample size" that somehow represents the rest of the entire population. Gee, i didn't know some sample dude out there representing me out right now, is thinking about how useless sample dudes are.

Take a radio survey for example, unless AC Nielsen is listening to every single person in a specified age group 24 hours 7 days a week over a period of time. How the hell do they suddenly stand up say "we have the answer to which radio station won in this age group and if you would like to know, here is the price".

Unless we are all living in some AC Nielsen bubble ala the Truman show, i don't think my radio activity is being monitored by some AC Nielsen monkey. So if you are in some a position of marketing influence, the next time AC Nielsen comes to present some "findings" to you, do yourself a favour and ask them this right at the end of the presentation : "I've listened to you and your colleague today and i have concluded you are both idiots. Now, assuming you are the sample size representation of your company, i have also concluded your entire company is full of idiots"

Anyway i digress terribly, back to Mediacorp. So, they have taken an aggressive stand against an old war horse to shout to the rest of the advertising dollar that they are somehow the better media of choice. Am i the only one who thinks Mediacorp is thinking like a MediaC**k? Helloo.. the real media you need to confront is the online media. We (collectively the upwardly mobile geeks) are spending more time watching shows via IPTV, we listen to music from live streaming and music portals, we read the news with live updates via digital readers or streamed video. We "discover" new topics by wikipediaing everything. So Mediacorp and SPH really need to redefine their market dynamics and realise they are both in the same position. I wont even consider Stomp or Razor TV or Mobtv initiatives that prove Mediacorp and SPH are embracing digital content delivery because the competitor is NOT the medium. Their increasing worry is globalization of the consumer and ease of access. Now that we have global options, we can choose not to endure lousy content no matter what the medium.

I would love to support what Ive said about increasing eyeballs glued to the monitors instead of the tv screens with some local media audience measurement stats but that would mean talking to Nielsen online to get the numbers and we all know who works for AC Nielsen. Idiots.