In 2011, local English daily the Sun filled a suit against The Nielsen Company (Malaysia) claiming that the market research company published false and misleading readership estimates of the newspaper.
The long drawn out court case came to a close yesterday when High Court’s Justice Lee Swee Seng handed out his judgement that the Sun Media, publisher of theSun, had failed to show that it suffered losses as a result from the Nielsen Media Index (NMI) survey.
According to the report in The Star Online, having dismissed the suit Justice Lee requested the company to pay RM600,000 in costs to Nielsen Malaysia.
The Sun’s report on the case today highlighted the evidence presented by Sun Media’s experts which highlighted the execution flaws of the NMI which included Nielsen’s Primary Sampling Unit (PSU) maps, depicting the geographic area of 220 households, had not been updated for 25-30 years in many cases.
In response to the evidence, Justice Lee was quoted in The Sun to have said, “steps have been taken to ensure that the methodology employed meets the acceptable standards of statistical research method in a survey of this nature where one is concerned with the issue of reliability and validity”.
The Sun’s report also stated Justice Lee commenting that he did not find merit in using audited circulation and did not find the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) Malaysia’s method of auditing circulation for free newspapers to be reliable.
Though the decision has been made the chapter on this issue might still continue as the Sun report states that the company has been advised to appeal the decision.
In a statement to MARKETING on the issue Richard Hall, Country Manager of Nielsen Malaysia said,
“The result reaffirms the world-class standards of our products and execution and we can now underline that Nielsen has always been committed to the highest quality audience measurement standards and methodologies. We steadfastly adhere to best practices both here in Malaysia and around the world.
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