According to BBM, Farmers are now Lumberjacks

Effective with the Fall 2008 study, BBM announced a change to their occupation category. What was previous "Farm / Farm Worker" has now been revised to "Working in Primary Industry", which means that crop and livestock producers have been grouped with workers in the forestry, mining and fishing industries.

Their primary reason for this is that agriculture only accounts for 2.1% of jobs in Canada, and this sample size in most cases is too unreliable to obtain useful information. grouping the category to include other primary industries increases the percentage to 3.8% of all Canadians(source StatsCan 2006). From a research methodology standpoint, I understand why it was done. The problem is, what is sound methodology does not always make sound business sense.

Here’s the issue: Primary industries are not a homogenous group. A farmer is different from a fisherman and a forestry worker is something completely different. If they need to be grouped to satisfy someone’s need to be statistically reliable, I have no problem with that. But the data should also be available to be broken out for someone who specifically wants it.

Agriculture, this little 2.1% segment of the occupational market, is a 50 million dollar advertising category. there is even an advertising association (CAMA) devoted specifically to marketing to this one segment, with active chapters in a number of provinces. We make our marketing decisions (hopefully) based upon accurate and usable data. If the sample size is too small, let's look at ways to increase it to be more representative of the importance of the advertising category. But the solution is not to group apples and pears together and call them apples…because the reality is now the data is a Japanese yah pear.

Subsequent to this, the RTC recommended that the Primary Industry category be broken down further into Agriculture vs. Other Primary Industry. This change will be implemented in the radio diary, but not likely until Fall 2010. At this point, there are no plans to make this change in the TV diary or PPM questionnaire.

While I am thankful that BBM has made a positive move (even they admit this has been a hot button issue), the lack of measurement in metered markets and TV diaries is still acute. In 2008, I myself spent 2 million dollars in TV advertising to farmers, and now, without any current farmer-specific research to prove who's watching what program, it will be extremely difficult to justify to clients.