“The Traditional Media Researcher Is Dead”

So says James Walker, founding partner of media consultancy Edge, winning few friends amongst delegates at the Nice MRG Conference. “The traditional media researcher is as useful as a blacksmith on the M25”.

There is the opportunity for media agencies to offer quantitative business-focused advice, but – despite the recent birth of Carat Insight, Universal Truths, ATG Mindshare and others – most do not. Media agencies are being “marginalised”. “Media is higher up the client’s list of priorities than ever”, but traditional media research built around JICs is of little interest to the average client, according to Walker. “Researchers must be fee generators”.

Unsurprisingly, this view was not roundly accepted from the floor. Lynne Robinson, Head of media at the IPA insisted that agencies – “the day to day traders” – must continue to have direct input to JICS. Sheila Byfield (Mindshare) suggested Walker’s scenario would leave agencies as no more than traders (he believed this was “inevitable”), but that JICs were vital to the modelling that consultants do as well as to researchers. Researchers do generate fees already, she said, and they do regularly get involved with consumer attitudes. Walker was perhaps not aware of what today’s media researcher really does, she added.

Unlike his former boss, Martin Sorrell, Walker does not believe that agencies are in competition with management consultants (3% of the income revenues for the top six comes from marketing assignments). He believed it is the growing breed of independent media consultants – like his own and that of ex-BT media controller Dominic Owens – which are the real threat to agency media research departments. “Agencies must re-invent media planning (not research) as a consultancy revenue stream.”