MRG Conference: Nothing Wrong in Nottingham?

David McEvoy, JCDecaux’s marketing director, delivered the final paper at the MRG Conference in Budapest on Friday afternoon with a Pathé news reel from Britain in 1952.

Fifty years ago Mills and Rockley (later to become Mills & Allen), which was taken over by JCDecaux, conducted a travel survey to assess the coverage and frequency outdoor advertising. They found that the sector accounted for 10% of the market with 83% of advertising coming via press. A huge number were surveyed and response rates were very high.

JCDecaux set Rachel Hoy, Research Manager at Qu’stor Research, the challenge of repeating the town level study in Nottingham for the MRG Conference, with considerably less time and a far less compliant population.

Hoy conducted a two day travel survey and found that as the majority of journeys are for work. “Opportunities to see” had dropped off from the 1952 survey, but this was thought to be a result of removing drivers from the survey and factoring in the direction of travel.

In 1952 the travel survey tried to find out how many times you needed to pass a poster before remembering seeing and the POSTAR data used today by the outdoor industry is still the only survey that goes down to contact level.

McEvoy argued this study should be at media research’s top table because it was timely, cost-efficient, insightful and replicable.

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