The Return of the Worm : Introducing The NZ Election Reactor

Scoop Independent News and Roy Morgan Research

Joint Media Release

Friday, 11 July 2014



The Return of the Worm.

Introducing the NZ Election Reactor.

Scoop Independent News has formed a partnership with leading polling company, Roy Morgan Research, to bring the original Worm back for the NZ 2014 Election.

Roy Morgan's online, mobile and live Reactor tools record the unvarnished gut reactions of voters, displaying how positively the public feel about specific things NZ politicians are saying on the television.

The Worm has previously has frequently caused a stir in the US, Australian and NZ elections. The Reactor (the original Worm) first appeared in NZ on TVNZ for the Election Debate in 2002 Then on TV3 in 2005, 2008 and during the live TV3 political debate in the NZ 2011 Election.

"The Reactor is ground-breaking as it enables crowd-sourced reactions to provide a precise picture of how specific developments, political promises and news events affect the public mood," says Scoop Publisher Alastair Thompson. "The art of political punditry is to interpret these things based on hunches and experience, The Reactor provides us pundits with data and evidence to back up our views.

"As a company with a strong lineage in digital innovation around election reporting, Scoop is delighted that in this our sixth NZ election we can innovate further and deliver a clearer understanding of just how NZ's democracy is working on the inside," Mr Thompson says.

Today, in Partnership with Roy Morgan Research, Scoop has launched an interactive multimedia feature which we plan to run from now till the election on September 20th called Political Highs & Lows Of The Week.

Presented by Scoop and powered by Roy Morgan Research's Reactor technology Political Highs & Lows Of The Week will measure the immediate emotional, reactions to the political messages which they are receiving in the broadcast media each week.

A video clip of the previous weeks Political Highs & Lows will be compiled by Scoop and we will invite Scoop Media Cartel readers to participate by giving us five minutes of their time to tell us how strongly they agree or disagree with what the politicians are saying.

Initially the NZ Election Reactor will invite New Zealanders everywhere to react Online with the Reactor. In the coming weeks we will also deploy the Mobile Reactor App to reach as wide as possible an audience.

If you’d like to take part in the inaugural 2014 NZ Election Reactor test

CLICK HERE (http://www.scoop.co.nz/NZElectionReactor/ ).

"The Reactor research method is particularly powerful for delivering insights into why voters are changing their views in the lead-up to an election," says Roy Morgan Research CEO, Michele Levine. "It shows us very clearly what resonates with the electorate and the issues that that affect voters most strongly – positively and negatively."

"The Reactor has been proven over more than 30 years to be remarkably accurate predictor of how electors feel about key issues and, ultimately, how they vote.

"In the 2013 Australian election Roy Morgan ran detailed post news event polling which showed us a significant portion of the vote could swing over a very short space of time, up to 3% in 24 hours or less, seemingly on the basis of a particular news "hit" in the campaign.

"Identifying and understanding which elements of the political campaign cacophony are reaching the emotional core of voters is a key to understanding what is moving voter preference and why.

"These days elections in English-speaking Western democracies are almost universally coming down to the wire. And who wins in the end is often the party which delivers the most effective "emotional" nugget to the electorate in the final days."

“This week, the Morgan Poll was hailed as the most accurate predictor of the results of the Indonesian Presidential Election, although the final results are yet to be confirmed as counting continues”, Ms Levine said..

After each "'Political Highs & Lows Of The Week" Reactor feature is published and tested the results will then be published with an overlay enabling the public to see how various segments of the population have responded to the clips.

For example, out of the first week’s video clip, which is being tested from today, we expect to discover whether there was a difference in the gender response to last week's David Cunliffe apology for being a man.

To help ensure that the accuracy of the results across the spectrum of New Zealand electors, Roy Morgan will be supplementing the crowd-sourced data with the responses of a selected panel of respondents taken from its 12,000 strong market leading Single Source Survey Panel.

On Monday we will be able to view segmented data by voting preference, gender, age and Helix Persona™. Roy Morgan Research's revolutionary new segmentation system.

- For more information please call Scoop's Alastair Thompson on 021 707044 or Pip Elliot, Roy Morgan Research's NZ Manager on 021 444 506



Background :

Roy Morgan Research

Roy Morgan Research is Australia’s best known and longest established market research company, with an unparalleled reputation for reliable, accurate, meaningful, revealing market research. Proudly independent, the Company now operates globally with offices in New Zealand, USA, UK, Indonesia and throughout Australia. See more here: http://www.roymorgan.com/about/about-roy-morgan-research

The Reactor

The world’s most advanced suite of research tools for measuring respondents’ continuous real-time responses.

The Reactor is the original ‘Worm’ that has famously graphed viewers’ reactions to political debates over several decades and provided critical insights into the effectiveness of thousands of ads, programs and events, worldwide. By turning a dial or dragging the Reactor slider-bar on their computer, tablet or smartphone, respondents continuously score the program (according to specified criteria) and their reactions are averaged and graphed in real time. The audience reactions can be segmented and graphs (by age, gender, country etc) can be selected and displayed over the TV show as it goes to air.

Audiences can react from home (at a time they choose) with their smartphone using the Mobile Video Reactor App or with the Online Reactor on their computer. The program plays on their device while they react with their slider-bar. This is mostly used for testing ads, concepts and short program segments. Audiences in a studio or auditorium can all react in real time with the Reactor Wireless Dials or the Mobile Reactor when the program is presented (usually on TV). This is mostly used for focus groups, adding audience involvement for events and live TV shows & conferences and for longer programs (like political debates).

The Mobile Reactor App enables anyone, anywhere to react , second-by-second, to any program. This is used more often for entertainment than pure research to add involvement and interactivity to live TV with the graphs of selectable audience segments superimposed over the program in real time. No other research technique can give you honest gut reaction like The Reactor. See more here:

http://www.roymorgan.com/products/reactor

Scoop.co.nz and Scoop Media Cartel



Scoop Media is the publisher of Scoop.co.nz , New Zealand's oldest and largest independent online news service. Scoop.co.nz reaches 300,000 unique NZ visitors monthly and publishes around 1000 news items every week including a live real-time feed of political news and reaction. The Scoop Media Cartel is a group of leading NZ current affairs blogs which Scoop works together with to sell marketing services. Other sites in the Scoop Media Cartel include Russell PublicAddress.net , Pundit.co.nz and TheStandard.org.nz .

Helix Personas



Helix Personas is a unique and powerful consumer segmentation and data integration tool that combines sophisticated psychographic and behavioural data to classify the Australian population into 56 Personas and 7 Communities using a combination of Roy Morgan Single Source data and third party data sources. See more here : http://www.helixpersonas.com.au/about



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