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Rank TV is recognised as the leader in televised advertising communications to South Africa's 20 million economically active taxi, bus and rail commuters, reaching an unduplicated 2 500 000 daily audience. Despite this, ComutaNet regularly commissions independent research to ensure Rank TV's leadership position as an advertising channel is maintained.

Says Gavin Ritchie, Sales and Marketing Executive, "As a media owner, we seek to avoid complacency and to offer clients advertising solutions that satisfy their needs on an ongoing basis. We deploy several methods to ensure our offerings remain of the highest standard - research being a critical tool to highlight opportunities to improve".

ComutaNet briefed Freshly Ground Insights (FGI) to develop a research methodology to measure Rank TV's efficacy countrywide. To prepare a benchmark rating, FGI designed a pre-test phase undertaken by FGI field agents. Face-to-face interviews were conducted with a randomly selected sample of commuters traversing all 15 taxi ranks with Rank TV installations around South Africa.

FGI conducted approximately 70 interviews between 05:00 and 19:00 at each rank until they had drawn a sample of 1,000 respondents. Each was asked a single multiple-choice type question, "Which one of these countries was the first ever to win the Soccer World Cup tournament?"

Answers were recorded and synchronised in real-time via GPRS to the FGI Head Office and captured electronically on a database.

Thereafter TVX prepared a 5" clip giving the correct answer to the question which was flighted on every Rank TV rank across all time channels, over a 7 day, Monday - Sunday, period. To protect the next round of data, the clip was not flighted elsewhere and, to FGI and ComutaNet's knowledge, no other communication regarding this Question and Answer aired in any channel by any advertiser during the fieldwork period.

After the answer had been televised for 7 days, FGI field agents repeated the fieldwork methodology, mirroring the pre-test fieldwork. They asked the same question at the same ranks and on the same days and times. They conducted the same numbers of interviews per rank, and same random sampling. Again, these results were uploaded electronically to the FGI database in real-time to be compared to the pre-test results.

In the pre-test phase, only 5.78% of the respondents correctly answered ‘Uruguay’ to the question whereas in the post-test phase no less than 16.13% of the respondents gave the correct answer. An improvement of 180% in the second series of research questions provides an objective, positive measure of Rank TV as an efficient advertising channel.