MRG Conference: Keynote Speaker Tells Media Researchers “End User Reality Is Your Reality”
A challenge was thrown down in the opening session of the 2000 MRG Conference in Munich yesterday. Peter Bowman, research manager at UKTV, introduced the first group of speakers with the question, “Stand up and be counted, can we ever get it right?”, and thereby challenged the afternoon’s speakers to address the issues currently facing media research bodies.
First to take the stand was keynote speaker Mark Palmer, head of communication strategy at OMD UK. He chose to discuss the immediate concerns of media research using a Who Wants To Be A Millionaire – style quiz. Palmer cited the Budweiser “Wassup?” commercial as an example of ‘getting it right’. The ad had no basis in theory or research but worked because it was ‘of the moment’, he said.
“End user reality is your reality.” stated Palmer, meaning that all media research needs to be consumer focussed and work across the various different media. He went on to predict that, in the future, media research will be evaluated more in terms of sales, and that over-supply of research coupled with budget constraints will lead to a need for culling at a bottom line sales basis.
Palmer spoke out against the involvement of committees in the decision making process. Delays mean that by the time a decision or plan of action is reached it is already out of date, he argued. Time spent trying to get research absolutely right is time wasted.
The Big Brother phenomenon is the reality of our own future, concluded Palmer. His argument was that an enormous number of people participated in this cross-media experience- voting through the use of telephones equals revenue, therefore it becomes a commercial activity. Telephones, he claimed, should not be considered as separate from other media types as they are at the moment. He cited Vodafone as the biggest media owner in Europe, ten times bigger than CNN, and ended by saying that new and developing technologies were, of course, one of the greatest drivers in changes to research methods.
Palmer was followed by Dave Brennan, currently of Flextech, but about to set up his own consultancy. Brennan posed the controversial question, “BARB: Who Needs It?”
He went on to argue that although currently everyone does, as the TV landscape changes radically, BARB’s remit will become too narrow for the vast number of changes which will come about within the 2002/2007 contract, despite the changes it has made.
Multi-channel viewing will become the norm and as a results the economics will change, said Brennan. The majority of us will be digital viewers and there will be a major convergence of technologies.
It has been predicted that the percentage revenue from spot advertising could be as little as one quarter of TV revenue by 2007. 30% of ad revenue is expected to come from interactive TV, 20% from embedded advertising and 5% from targeted advertising. “BARB could become the prime currency for just 60% of the 24% of TV revenue by the end of the current contract.”
Brennan argued that if BARB is to be more than a spot advertising currency it needs to widen its remit to include all uses of TV set and screen-based media and use measurement and evaluation. It needs to acknowledge the importance of platforms, he continued, have a role as an industry auditor of set-top box data and become the ‘Gold Standard’ of data and database management. To maintain its viability in the future it needs a less proscriptive approach and become a more proactive and commercial operating structure, he concluded.
Report by Lucy Condon in Munich