This is a special issue of IJMR covering media research and the papers span the main media.
Most reviews of media and media research have always suggested that they have reached a unique time of great change. Inevitably this seems to be the case today. Interestingly, research systems in nearly all the media are currently experiencing some common problems, not necessarily amenable to common solutions.
* Within each medium, the titles or programmes are rapidly increasing in number and diversity. This diversity includes both size and degree of specialisation of the target audiences. In particular, the electronic media digital transmissions can, at a stroke, multiply the number of channels and services available.
Whilst the mass media continue with their measurement requirements of maximum details of exposure and many demographics, the resulting research vehicles struggle to accommodate the huge range of the small media which are eroding the mass media, albeit relatively slowly.
* New delivery mechanisms are emerging, particularly for the electronic media, broadcasting by satellite, cable, via the internet and telephone lines. This is contributing to the trend across all media for the boundaries between the media to overlap and become blurred. Cable and satellite television packages include radio channels. Television channels will be available via the internet. Interactive television services will take the viewer out of the broadcast stream, perhaps on to the internet.
Television broadcasts will increasingly be available outside real time via high capacity disk recording. This will make television a little more like publishing. Newspapers and magazines have websites which become an extension of themselves. Some titles, e.g. in the medical press, exist both in print and on the net with parallel but not identical content. Outdoor displays are sometimes animated and electronically sophisticated.
These are the changes creating the pressures upon and challenges to traditional media research. Not all these topics are addressed in this issue: it would require many issues. The developments for print, radio and poster research are broadly reviewed. By contrast, the two television papers concern the control and management of peoplemeter panels, still likely to remain at the core of television audience measurement systems and increasingly difficult to get right. An important paper discusses the rising new medium, the internet.
Media research is still primarily funded to measure the traditional media, but it is also trying to expand these systems to include as many new developments as possible. This is putting those systems under strain. A next step is to create several research vehicles to measure different subcategories of a medium and then combine the results by data fusion. This still results in a database for a single medium, yet media planners increasingly want to plan across media. We include a paper from Germany which is concerned with creating a planning system using research from different data sources.
Some developments in media research reflect the tendency of media to overlap. Personal meters have been tested in the UK and Switzerland which could measure both radio and television. Extensions of these methods have also been hypothesised for posters and even the press. What is not clear so far is how the currency from this kind of technique, which is in fact measuring proximity to a source, will compare with currencies based on research using the direct recording of behaviour and recall. However, technological progress will increase the power of personal meter techniques.
The diversity of media forms makes advertisers more concerned about the nature and value of the exposure experience. We therefore have a paper about media research which goes beyond the 'opportunity-to-see'.
The focus of the papers is still upon the developments within the established research systems together with users wishing to extend current practice. What we do not have, and what would make another issue, are reviews of the special problems of newer and smaller media and possible solutions. Such solutions would probably involve combining different data sources. We do not have a paper on fusion. There are plenty of methodological papers elsewhere showing that it can be done. What is needed are some ideas for a strategy for using fusion to create broader databases across the diverse media. The paper from Germany is the nearest to that.
Media research remains the area of market research where there is probably the greatest effort and expenditure devoted to methodological development. This is because the data produced translate directly into a currency which needs to be protected. There should therefore be plenty of new work to report in a future media research issue of the IJMR.
Tony Twyman is an independent consultant on media research. He is Technical Director of BARB, Technical Consultant to JICMARS (Medical Readership) and Technical Adviser to the Commercial Radio Companies Associaion on the RAJAR contract. He has consulted on media research projects across the world.
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