10 Nov 2004 | The Media Leader Staff

Clear Channel’s Gritten Attacks Research Bias

Adele Gritten of Clear Channel challenged delegates at this year’s Media Research Group conference to take some bias out of research through experiencing the experiment that they had undertaken with Millward Brown.

Showing an interview with Unilever’s strategy director, Gary Jones, the presentation described how, although Timotei had not been on television for 15 years, 85% of people still believed they had seen it advertised.

The research methodology bias, which Gritten believes often results in this over-attribution to television, was challenged through the use of Computer Assisted Self-Interviewing (CASI), a method which allows for a wide range of media to be played, has short result times and encourages longer response times.

Adrian Sangar of Millward Brown went on to describe the study in more depth. He argued that innovation is required to engage modern respondents and that, through CASI, the experience for them is much more positive than with prompted paper interviews.

A comfortable, representative, central location is chosen and respondents are recruited, not interviewed. Without interviewer prompts, respondents reported seeing more adverts more readily and correctly attributed them to the correct medium more often.

The Clear Channel pilot showed a 10-20% increase in the amount of advertising respondents said they had seen recently and, in the case of outdoor, there was a 20% increase in attribution.

Gritten went on to argue that paper assisted prompted interviews just would not have picked up the major success of Apple’s recent outdoor campaign for its iPod, for example. By experiencing this experiment she concluded, clients can now optimise their mixed media schedules through strategic tracking.

MRG: www.mrg.org.uk

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Clear Channel’s Gritten Attacks Research Bias

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