In-store TV audience figures 'inflated'

A leading member of the fledgling in-store television industry has warned that audience figures are being inflated, giving the business a "wild west reputation".

Britain's biggest supermarket, Tesco, promised advertisers audiences the "size of Coronation Street" when it launched in March 2003, but it has struggled to convince advertisers of audience sizes since. Now David Williams, the chief executive of Avanti Screenmedia, which supplies televisions in shopping malls, bars and gyms around Britain, has warned that figures are being inflated.

"Crucially, we sell researched impacts [the number of times an advert is seen] not gross customers per week, and we hope that the rest of the industry will soon follow," he said. "The most important thing that the industry can do is to report audience in terms of commercial impacts not in terms of gross footfall.

"Until they do that, our little emerging industry is going to suffer from a wild west reputation."

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