MRG 2013: One day conference in review
This week saw the Media Research Group’s annual conference take place, pulling together the best research the industry has seen over the past twelve months into one packed day.
Based at Bafta in London, the day promised much with high profile speakers covering many areas of today’s complicated media landscape.
Sue Unerman kicked off proceedings with an informative keynote speech, highlighting how the best media research always gets you to the truth.
Some of the stand out papers from a connected perspective included MEC’s David Fletcher and Louise Osilaya look at product placement. They showcased some recent research they had conducted with STV and Mirriad on how effective personalised product placement can be.
The clever technology allowed a seamless insertion of a product or advertising billboard into the background of a catch-up episode of Coronation Street on STV Player. The content could even be targeted to the demographic profile of the viewer.
Belinda Beeftink, deputy research director at the IPA, introduced some of the passive data that is being collected from mobiles as part of the TouchPoints 5 research. In recent years, the IPA has been using PDAs to collect respondent level field information, but these have quickly become outmoded and expensive, and there needed to be an improvement on respondent experience.
The new e.diary app the IPA has created allows respondents to tell them where they are, what they are doing and who they are with, and they expect 40% of TouchPoints will be completed using a smartphone.
Other papers included:
- Ipsos MediaCT’s Andrew Green and John Carroll explained a new readership survey in Australia, which is in competition with an existing one
- Ian Gibbs from The Guardian introduced a strategy to encourage agencies to come to them with budget and target demographics, allowing the Guardian to find this audience across its different platforms, using a tool they’ve developed with Telmar
- Richard Marks from Research The Media looked at the future of the media research agency
- BDRC Continental’s James Myring talked about research they conducted which showed the premium people are prepared to pay for brands
- Sky Media’s Rebecca Rangeley presented research into how football fans consume football across platforms
- Kantar Media discussed the importance of social buzz
- ComScore and UKOM looked at multiplatform measurement
- BBC’s Simon Kendrick addressed the importance of meeting audience needs in a multi-screen world
- Thinkbox’s Jeremy Nye argued that despite what people think, they mostly still watch TV live and will overestimate how much VOD and recorded content they watch, taking evidence from Thinkbox’s Screenlife research
- YouTube’s Sarah Everitt and MTM’s Sara Sheridan explained that Google now recognises the importance of qualitative research as well as using data, highlighting some home focus groups MTM ran on different categories of YouTube users to see how they used it
In addition, there was a lively debate on social media research, chaired by Stef Hrycyszyn, featuring Richard Asquith, Kantar Media, Simon Kendrick, the BBC, Scott Thompson, Starcom MediaVest, Bryn Bazzard, Quocom and Ross Williams, Ipsos.
The main theme appearing in several papers was the continual importance of cross media measurement and comparable data, allowing the industry to become more joined up in its approach to research, as data-sets get bigger and more complicated.
The final announcement of the day was that next year’s international conference will be based in Berlin in November 2014.