‘Media researchers need to be more like helicopter pilots’
Adam Joseph, Camelot
Helicopter pilots. Media research needs to start recruiting lots of helicopter pilots. Well, metaphorical ones, at least.
Making sense of the enormous – and growing – puzzle of data that media researchers now regularly face has become such a difficult task that the only way to view it is not so much by ‘taking a step back’, but flying high above it.
“There’s so much data now it’s like a jigsaw puzzle the size of this conference room…and it’s so easy to get lost in different corners,” Camelot’s consumer insight manager, Adam Joseph said at the Future of Media Research conference this week, where the skills of the media research community were discussed.
“You need somebody to fly up and see the bigger picture to know where the edges and the corners are, to see where different things are happening.”
Joseph – whose research career spans almost two decades, including stints at the Evening Standard and EDF Energy – said the way media researchers work with both data and data scientists is now a major challenge – and appealed for tighter collaboration.
This is where media agencies could play an important role in bringing the two closer together; however, OMD’s head of insight, Sarah Gale, said finding a common language is tricky.
“It’s about taking everything back to basics,” Gale said. “What I am learning is that certain insight people have the same brains as data scientists, so if you can build bridges between insight and data science, you can talk the same language.
“But it’s a learning process and we shouldn’t assume it’s going to be smooth sailing.”
But even if a common language is established, in this data-rich age, where consumer behaviours are constantly changing and media consumption always fragmenting, will media researchers ever be able to fly high enough to see the full picture?
Paul Goode, Chris Havemann, Adam Joseph, Sarah Gale and Denise Turner (chair)
Gale, who first joined the research and insight sector 20 years ago, said media researchers will need to become much more critical in the way they analyse data from now on.
“We’re lucky that we have lots of data but we’re going to have to become much more critical in evaluating different sources of data and understanding what’s appropriate,” she said.
“As researchers, we want to tell everyone about everything we’ve found but actually the skill is distilling that to find the nuggets.”
As well as metaphorical helicopter pilots, media research – given recent trends – will also need to ensure it has statisticians, data scientists, behavioural economists and neuro-scientists to help it keep pace with change – not to mention avoid fluffing it entirely and ending up like the largely discredited opinion polls.
Indeed, comScore’s SVP strategic partnerships, Paul Goode, said hiring people with the the right kinds of technical skills can be a problem.
“There aren’t enough out there,” Goode said.
“When you write a tender you know there’s going to be one or two people on a technical committee who will really be able to push you and answer the valid questions – and sometimes we don’t even get asked and the decision criteria goes on a whole load of other reasons because it gets difficult to find someone who you can have a robust conversation with about these assumptions.
“We’re having to build these castles in the air and you need someone to challenge you.”
However, despite the new wave of skills being used by the industry as it tries to unpick the masses of big data it now feasts on, there is still room for old-fashioned qualitative research.
Sarah Gale, OMD
“Data is brilliant and some of it can predict intent and start to understand the why behind the what, but actually we still use qual a hell of a lot to really get under the skin of behaviours and find out why people are doing the things they’re doing,” Gale said.
“You can also lose your creativity if you’re not careful. If you’re just looking at data and hypotheses you potentially don’t look outside of your little world and you don’t get those new sparks of ideas that can be incredibly important for brands in media environments.”
Chris Havemann, chairman of RealityMine, said new platforms like Streetbees are finally allowing qualitative research to be done at scale through mobile technology.
Streetbees’ platform allows brands and agencies to access any consumer segment anywhere in the world – and watch ‘real’ consumer habits, in real-time, instead of relying on claimed behaviour.
In the same way that technology has contributed to the many measurement and insight challenges that media research has experienced in recent years, it is then perhaps technology that will help it evolve and find new and better ways of working.
So how might things change over the next five years?
For Gale, it’s all about the consumer.
“I’m hoping we’ll get to a stage where we can define what we can actually do with a whole host of digital data and hopefully start to develop some predictive models that can start to look at intent and signals of intent.
“[Our] job is to put people and behaviour back at the centre of what we do…so I hope we won’t change that much; it’s just making sure we use the tools that we’ve got appropriately to build audiences and help reach people at the right time with the right message.”