You might have seen the health debate yesterday. You may even have been tragic enough to have both Channel Seven and Channel Nine broadcasts on at the same time to compare their respective real-time audience response tracking of the debate — The Pollie Graph for Seven and The Worm for Nine. The first thing you may have noticed, apart from how truly tragic you were for doing such a thing, was how the two tracking lines behaved very, very differently. Channel Nine’s Worm had very little volatility; it was very inertial in its behaviour. When audience reactions changed from positive to negative, they did so in a relatively gradual manner.
Channel Seven’s Pollie Graph on the other hand reacted to every sentence Abbott and Rudd uttered. It was more volatile and far much more responsive to the moment.
The differences in behaviour between the two tracking systems can be explained by the differences in both the technology and the samples used by each channel.
Channel Nine’s worm used market research firm Ekas to source their actual participants. Ekas runs a large online panel from which self-identified undecided voters were selected to man the worm handsets – with each participant getting paid $50 to attend the shindig. The actual audience response technology however was provided by a different company, IML Australia.
Channel 7 on the other hand used Roy Morgan to not only source participants, but to provide the Roy Morgan Reactor technology to do the audience response tracking. The people selected by Morgan to participate were a cross-section of all voters (not just Undecideds that Channel Nine used) that approximately reflected the current state of voting intentions. These folks too were paid $50 to participate.
The first difference between the two audience response systems that helps explain their differing behaviour during the debate is the sample – undecided voters vs. a partisan weighted cross section of all voters.
The second difference is even larger, and goes to the technology involved, particularly the technology and design of the handsets that were used to track the responses of participants.
Morgan Reactor uses a handset with a dial on it. You just hold the handset, watch the debate and rotate the dial clockwise when your reaction is positive and anti-clockwise when it’s negative. The further you rotate the dial in either direction, the stronger the magnitude of your positive or negative response. Not only is it idiot proof, but if you imagine using such a thing for a second, you can probably picture how the actual turning of the dial becomes a natural extension to what you’re doing – you don’t really have to think about it, it just happens in the background.
IML technology utilised by Channel Nine on the other hand, is button technology. Each handset contains 9 buttons, each representing various strengths of positive or negative reaction. It is much less intuitive to use and more attention needs to be paid to the handset to ensure that the right button is being pressed at any given time.
As a consequence, the dial technology is much more responsive in terms of the immediacy of reaction (quick twist of the dial when something grabs your attention), while button technology is more inertial in registering changes as you only press the buttons after you’ve found them, and when your opinion changes.
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