On 9 November 2014 it will be 25 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the start of German reunification: Die Mauer ist gefallen. Who can forget the television images that night and in the days and weeks that followed? People came to the wall with sledgehammers, hammers and chisels, breaking down the barrier that had divided a city and its inhabitants’ lives for 28 years.
The MRG committee has taken the fall of the wall as inspiration for the theme of its conference in Berlin this year: Breaking down Barriers.
Of particular relevance to a media research conference, 1989 also marks a key date in the evolution of the internet: in Switzerland that year the British visionary Sir Tim Berners-Lee approached his boss at CERN with an idea for “a new kind of information management system.”
His aim was to “allow a place to be found for any information or reference which one felt was important, and a way of finding it afterwards. The result should be sufficiently attractive to use that the information contained would grow past a critical threshold, so that the usefulness the scheme would in turn encourage its increased use.”
He can’t possibly have known at the time that ‘increased use’ would be nearly 3 billion users 25 years later and that the internet would be used to break down so many barriers in society.
1989 was also the year that Sky began broadcasting as the first satellite TV service in the UK; multi-platform TV had arrived. Later in the same year, however, the House of Commons was televised live for the first time so it wasn’t all good.
But what did this all mean for media research and how is it impacting on us today? Is cross platform media consumption a barrier to accurate measurement? What are we doing to dispel myths and address these challenges? Are audiences becoming harder to reach and what could this mean for representivity and data collection?
Despite attempts at unification, are we still an industry of opposing sides: the traditional versus the digital; the single source versus the fused; the qual versus the quant? What walls have our industry successfully torn down and what issues are we still chipping away at?
These are some of the questions we hope to address in Berlin. The annual conference is an opportunity for our industry to come together and discuss the key issues that we are currently facing, provoke debate and share best practice. There is a packed programme with speakers representing all walks of media life; from media agencies, media owners and media research agencies, and covering most media.
The conference is 12 – 15 November and tickets can still be bought on the MRG website.
The MRG is also celebrating an anniversary of its own this year – 2014 marks 50 years since the MRG was established and we hope to carry on the celebrations in Berlin: it would be great if you could join us.
Frances Sheardown is group director at Kantar Media – custom and co-chair of the Media Research Group.
