MRG Conference 2008: A Brief Review
After a full and varied three days, this year’s MRG conference ended on Friday evening.
In previous years, the MRG has attempted to set a theme for the whole conference, but this wasn’t always successful and papers tended to be “shoehorned” into that theme.
This year the MRG committee decided not to set a theme, and this gave the conference a more broad outlook, allowing it to cover many different areas of media research.
The intention was to have smaller themes running across each session, but I don’t think this came across very strongly as personally I wasn’t aware until it was explained at the end of the conference.
There were several papers based around TV including a couple on researching video on demand. However, other media unfortunately were not as explored, with press and outdoor having minimal coverage and radio and cinema having no specific papers – cinema also didn’t have any representatives from the industry attending the conference.
The keynote speeches from Jim Kite, MediaVest USA (see MRG Conference 2008:Postcard from America) and Mark Howe, Google (see MRG Conference 2008:Surviving The Slump With Search), on days two and three, were very informative, motivational and set the tone perfectly for the forthcoming papers. Both speeches were warmly received by the attendees and delegates were actually pleased when Jim Kite overran.
Day one’s keynote speech from Steve Barrett, editor of MediaWeek, (see MRG Conference 2008:Promotion of Research in the Media) was loosely based around promoting media research in the trade press to maximise exposure and therefore survival during the economic downturn.
On paper, this seemed like a very good area for discussion, but it didn’t appear to hit the right tone with the audience.
David Brennan, Thinkbox, and Hugh Johnson, Channel 4, questioned Barrett about his speech, with Johnson suggesting that Barrett’s Media Week didn’t care about research, only the celebrity of media in terms of who’s won which account, who’s left where, and would only publish research to fill in gaps on pages, to which a spontaneous ripple of applause broke out.
Aside from the keynote speeches, the quality of the 18 research papers this year was very high, with strong presenters and effective charts, including great papers from Stuart McDonald, News International, on the free element of media, Denise Turner’s presentation on MPG’s new Fabric research panel and research company Sparkler’s suggestion of music being considered a medium.
Thinkbox’s excellent presentation on TV sponsorship (see MRG Conference 2008:What Lies Beneath – Getting Under the Skin
of Sponsorship), the last paper of the three days, was voted by delegates as the paper of the conference, winning the IPA award.