Worm (marketing)
market research analysis tool
The "Worm" is a market research analysis tool developed by statistics company Roy Morgan, who called it "The Reactor", with the purpose of gauging an audience's reaction to some visual stimuli over some time period. The name "worm" describes its visual appearance – as a line graph snaking up or down, usually depicted on TV during live political debates.
Background
Each member of the audience firstly fills out a questionnaire, used to describe the composition of the audience. Then, each member is given a control device (such as a dial or keypad) with which they select their feelings towards the vision or stimuli (for example, whether they regard the comments currently being made by a speaker favourably or unfavourably). This dial is checked centrally three times per second, and as the audience reacts differently over time, the collective feelings of the audience are gathered.
Australian Federal Elections
The "worm" has been used in the televised political debates in Australian federal elections, including those between then Australian prime minister John Howard and then-leader of the opposition Kevin Rudd in 2007 and between prime minister Julia Gillard and opposition leader Tony Abbott in 2010.
Internationally
In the first UK general election debate on 15 April 2010 between Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Conservative leader David Cameron and Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, "the worm" was used in certain segments. A study published in March 2011 suggests that the worm may influence voters.
In New Zealand, the worm has been controversially credited with increasing the support for United Future leader Peter Dunne in the 2002 election.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q8036842. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2007, 2010, 2011 and 2002.
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This entry incorporates text from “Worm (marketing)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.