Zed Media’s Kevin Murphy: Not enough analysis

The challenge of tackling the wealth of data available to researchers was addressed by the second panel at MediaTel Group’s ‘Future of Media Research’ seminar yesterday.

Kevin Murphy, joint managing director of Zed Media, outlined how the process of collating data often stands in the way of being able to deliver more granularity – “it should be 20% preparation and 80% analysis…at present these roles are reversed”.

John Svendsen, director at Aegis’s ævolve, broadly agreed with Murphy – “the promise of the data is at present greater than what it is actually delivering”.

Svendsen went onto compare the current situation to “dinosaurs footprints”, in that you know something is there but are not quite sure how or why.

Both Murphy and Svendsen, representing the agency community, emphasised the important role that econometrics now plays in providing their clients with rich, short-term information about the immediate effect advertising activity has on sales response and how that sits with other elements of evaluation work.