Who will grasp the future?

James Whitmore, MD at Postar, sees mobile measurement techniques as an industry changing research tool, someone just needs to accept the challenge…

Investment in audience research is aggressively questioned and forever threatened. It doesn’t help that the increasing complexity of the world means that we require more and more sub surveys to tidy up the complicated or emerging bits. The certainty of conducting a single field study to deliver all the answers is long gone.

As things stand, the only budget is a bigger one.

Yet are we thinking this through? Yes, I need more studies to measure my medium but could these studies not serve more than one master?

For example, to date some 17,000 people have carried Postar’s GPS meter, each for nine days. It is a passive measure that records a second-by-second GPS and GPRS fix as well as motion-sensing data. Ipsos and MGE Data, our research partners, have collected some three billion GPS records alone.

Now, what if the same device was adapted so that it could pick up an element of out-of-home radio or TV exposure? It is hard to see how it might devalue our effort. It places no extra burden on the respondent.

Would it work for the other media? I have no idea. One would have to find out. Certainly we know that people are correctly carrying the device when they leave home because we get data that says so. Such information might be useful to augment or validate the exposure data for other media. For us, it is a chance to either spread the cost or to enlarge the study.

Of course an electronic meter such as Postar’s will only ever be a transitional technology. It seems obvious that this stuff can and will end up in a mobile phone of some sort. That would have many advantages, not least that it removes the artificiality of carrying a separate device.

As people tend to be wedded, perhaps welded, to their mobiles, it is not too much to hope that phones could pick up indoor data too. At its simplest level you should be able to glean information for outdoor, TV and radio. It is possible to imagine how other media might be tracked as well.

What you achieve is a pool of data, into which you might dip to find the respondent information that meets your proclivity. Interestingly, the role of the JIC might change to be less about collecting media exposure data and perhaps more about likelihood to see or cognition.

A lot of this gets bound up in debate about a “super JIC”. I am not sure that’s the point. It can take us years just to agree to no action. There are simply too many people with a hand on the spoon stirring the pot.

We must be saved from ourselves. Perhaps, a research company will package up such a scheme and simply sell the idea to interested parties? If I were an enterprising mobile phone operator I would be looking at this now.

The question for me is not whether this will happen but who will lead it.

The future may not be any sort of JIC at all; it might be Orange.

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