Media Research Awards 2018: Channel 4 wins Grand Prix

Click here for the full gallery of images

Innovators working in the media research community were celebrating on Wednesday (28 February) at the 2018 Media Research Awards, hosted by Mediatel in partnership Future Thinking.

The winners were led by an extraordinarily strong Channel 4, which took the Grand Prix prize along with Gold in the Best Custom Media Research Project – Media Owner and Excellence in Measuring Effectiveness of a Media Campaign for its ‘Contextual Moments’ project.

“A huge congratulations to a deserving Channel 4,” said chair of the judges and director of Research the Media, Richard Marks. “The broadcaster’s Contextual Moments initiative had a very focused research objective: to isolate the impact of context advertising, the benefit of optimum ‘fit’ with programme content and themes. The research programme was elegantly constructed and clearly communicated.”

Judge Richard Shotton, deputy head of evidence at MGOMD, added that Channel 4 had delivered “exceptional work”.

“The Contextual Moments campaign was built on a brilliant psychological insight, it then proved it through a smart experiment and then, most importantly, it has turned that insight into a significant commercial opportunity,” he said.

“In four years of judging these awards this was one of the best entries I have read.”

The Media Research Awards were launched in 2014 and were set up to reward those individuals, teams and businesses driving innovation in an industry where measurement and insight are at the very heart of business planning and success.

Each year the awards have grown, and to better recognise the scale of the Best Custom Media Research Project category, 2018 saw the prize split into three separate awards recognising trade bodies, media owners and agencies.

In the Trade Body category, the 2017 Grand Prix winner, Newsworks, won for its Sample of One project.

“Newsworks has built on last year’s impressive body of work,” said judge Lynne Robinson, director of Research, IPA. “They achieved this by conducting a complementary range of high quality research which addressed effectiveness, how consumers connect with media and tackling head on the problems of industry preconceptions and untruths which has been of benefit to the industry as a whole.”

Newsworks also won the Excellence in Research Presentation category for its project Getting closer to the Great British public, as well as Media Owner/Trade Body of the Year, marking another strong year for the news publishers’ marketing body.

In the Best Custom Media Research Project – Agency category, J Walter Thompson and Mindshare won the prize for their Speak Easy project – a timely investigation into what consumers make of smart speakers.

“There are plenty of superficial assessments of new media forms around, which is why it’s so refreshing to be able to access real insights into how people are actually using such an important innovation,” said judge Brian Jacobs, founder Brian Jacobs & Associates. “A big congratulations on a well-deserved win.”

In the Best International Media Research Project category, the BBC World Service was crowned the winner for its Attribution study.

“As complexity builds in the media landscape the ability to give credit where it is due can be challenging, but more important than ever,” said Kristin Bayliss, global account measurement lead at Facebook.

“The BBC World Service entry pushes further towards an understanding of how credit is attributed to the BBC brand as a provider and creator in a world of social media sharing, with results already reflected in changes to BBC branding that speak to the value of insights generated.”

Elsewhere, the Best Media Research Tracking Project award was handed to independent agency the7stars for its Untangling the fairylights: festive tracking study.

“Whilst some tracking projects can suffer from seeking to cover too much, the study by the7stars was something much more focused and tactical,” said judge Jonny Protheroe, head of UK market insights, Google.

“They tackled the challenge of getting closer to Christmas shopping behaviours in an innovative way, using geo-fenced surveys to capture what was happening right in the moment.”

Wavemaker (formally MEC and Maxus) took the prize for Best Social Media Project for its work on FB intelligence (WM FBi).

“The social media category is by its very nature always evolving and can be more experimental than some of the other categories,” said judge Denise Turner, insight director, Newsworks.

“Wavemaker’s winning entry found a new way to distil massive amounts of Facebook data to deliver insights about one of the planet’s biggest media platforms. Their focus on the big picture delivered an impressive set of findings.”

In the Best Use of Data Sets category Hello London – the partnership between Exterion Media and TfL – won for Abi & Ali: TfL Audiences.

Commenting on the win, judge Catherine Blizzard, director of marketing and audiences, BBC World Service, said: “The winning entry demonstrates how the industry can capitalise on the power of combined data sets, advanced analytics tools and impactful visualisation to better understand audience behaviours and drive planning efficiency and advertising effectiveness.”

Beating Manning Gottlieb OMD and Wavemaker, the7stars won Media Agency of the Year.

“This is one of the hardest categories to judge, as media agencies deploy insight in a wide variety of ways,” said judge David Brennan, co-founder, BE Insight.

“the7stars managed to beat a very strong field by demonstrating an approach that was both creative and demonstrably effective, whilst also being very clearly targeted at the specific needs of their client base.”

Finally, Research Agency Team of the Year was awarded to Ipsos Connect – which beat strong competition from house51 and Kantar Millward Brown.

The judges felt that Ipsos has had a particularly strong year, contributing to a significant number of the projects entered across the various categories with a particular emphasis on projects related to virtual reality.

Commenting on the overall standard of 2018’s competitors, Derek Jones, CEO of Mediatel, said: “For the fourth annual awards the quality remained incredibly high, really demonstrating that the UK delivers world-class projects.

“We are extremely proud to run the only awards of this type in the UK and do so in the firm belief that it helps drive innovation. A huge congratulations to the winners.”