Seminar Gains Insight Into Research Technologies

Lynne Robinson, research director at the IPA, was the first of the panellists to try to answer, saying: “You have to be careful as you leap forward into new measurement techniques that you don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, so I think on most of these things we are looking for evolution, but, as things fragment and they reach a critical mass as well, it becomes increasingly difficult to measure new things.

“PVRs were a wonderful example of this. PVRs have been around for about 10 years and actually they didn’t really matter for the first eight of those but actually once Sky+ got the product and it worked at the right price the whole thing started to move. They have to be measured and its a very difficult thing to measure them.

“Also, we need to not feel that we need to measure everything the same. There was a very interesting lesson when Channel 4 decided they would broadcast over the net. It was great innovation but they didn’t’ check anything before they did it and they didn’t have the rights to broadcast material over the internet, which is why you got a lot of things blacked out, particularly when you were dealing with American material. They sort of got over the programme rights, but then it came to the commercials and certainly Equity wanted payment for this and so did the Music Publisher’s Association and the way we’ve been able to address that in the end is to get JICWEBS (The Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards in the UK and Ireland) in to do an audit of IPTV.

“The benefit of having JICWEBS come in is that they can audit it, we can see how big it really is and we can see how fast it’s moving. I think we’ll see JICWEBS come into quite a lot of other measurements such as podcasting etc, to provide a short term census measurement before they’re big enough to go onto the traditional surveys.”

Richard Silman, non-executive chairman of Ipsos, said: “One of the imperatives is to make sure that the research technology is fit for purpose before it’s introduced because of the impact it will have on the underlying currency data. For me there will be a double time lag. Firstly the cost of investment in that technology for research purposes is extremely high. Secondly, in terms of making sure that that is fit for purpose before introducing it will necessarily create a time lag.”

As far as Ray Snoddy, media commentator, was concerned two of the most interesting technological advances in media research are neuroscience and the use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID).

Snoddy said: “Scientists are putting things on peoples heads and measuring what happens when you view an ad. And there is a little blip that you cannot fake if you recognise and have some sort of pleasurable connection with the brand. It’s been used by the FBI and it’s got some people out of death row because you can’t fake the memory trace in your brain.”

He also pointed out the use of RFID in the Apollo project and said that this “could be the answer to all of your problems.”

He said: “Produced in the States, these are wafer thin radio circuits that can actually monitor actual consumer behaviour. I happened to ask the chief technology officer of Arbitron if there was any relevance to newspapers and he said ‘yes, these things are so cheap and so thin they can be attached to the pages of a newspaper within the next three years and can actually measure reading time’.”

Also present on the panel was David Brennan, research and strategy director at Thinkbox, who said: “I agree with Ray. People can’t fake this stuff. I’m concerned that the most effective type of neuroscience monitoring actually requires this massive helmet and people sitting in a very unrepresentative way of viewing material or being exposed to media and I think also at the moment, from what I know, it’s kind of an imperfect science.

“But what it has done is already demonstrated things that conventional research can’t. Within the area of television for example, what neuroscience has done is shown that actually it’s the emotional areas of the brain that engage first and they actually then send the signal which the cognitive areas of the brain respond to. And so it’s taught us, which no amount of research could have shown us, that emotions actually lead the way.”