More detail, more data, and importantly, more readership… that’s the initial response to Australia's EMMA survey, released today.

The industry-backed Enhanced Media Metrics Australia survey has delighted publishers and seems well on the way to pleasing agencies and media buyers.

Today’s trade response has been scarce, with the most extensive – and most favourable – comment coming from Mat Baxter of UM, owned by Mediabrands, whose executive chairman Henry Tajer worked on the project. UM numbers News Corp Australia among its clients. He told advertising newsletter B&T that EMMA had “superior methodology” and described it as a “more in-depth analysis” of media consumption.

EMMA had its launch on Friday, with July-June statistics released today.

Interestingly but unsurprisingly, according to Baxter, the metric delivers figures which are generally higher than those from the Roy Morgan survey. The Australian comes out 41 per cent higher, Fairfax metro dailies the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age 38 per cent and 37 per cent higher, and News’ Sydney tabloid Daily Telegraph 30 per cent higher.

The difference is even more remarkable for commuter giveaway mX Sydney (at 272,000, 94 per cent higher than the Roy Morgan figure) and Fairfax newspaper insert The Melbourne Magazine, said to have an audience 84 per cent higher than that quoted by the Morgan survey.

Baxter attributes this to better recall, but whatever the cause, it’s a satisfting outcome for publishers reeling from falling print circulations.

The Readership Works has announced that there will be monthly data releases from EMMA starting in November 2013, delivering a 12 month rolling database including crossplatform audience figures, readership of all titles, comprehensive consumer profiles and product data, and will include the fused Nielsen Online Ratings data. Interim monthly reports will be published in September and October in advance of the database releases.

The readership metrics include “fused data” from Nielsen online ratings, mean Nielsen will provide contractor Ipsos MediaCT with its IAB-endorsed online audience ratings data. Some 54,000 people a year are being interviewed, seven days a week.

Competition in the metrics market is likely to be healthy, although the consensus appears to be that agency users will typically buy only one. There will be a shakedown period: Not only for EMMA, but also for the Roy Morgan figures, to which some significant changes are being made, but the principal outcome appears to be more information – and hopefully more knowledge – about products.

One by-product of the initiative has been the availability of section data and (surprise, surprise) sports features are not the most widely read. EMMA figures confirm what magazine publishers already knew… that it’s all about food, travel, entertainment and wellbeing.

While current affairs analysis also rates highly with national daily The Australian, it could also be time for Fairfax to dust off the old line about the newspaper being “a wrapper to put the sections into”. What readers want is, after all, also what advertisers want.

Peter Coleman