Research is the Industry’s One-Armed Paper Hanger

I have written many articles about changes in our industry. We talk about how change is impacting the core mechanics of how we do our jobs, upending our long cherished metrics and data sets and setting even the most complacent executive into shudders.  But in truth, there are some in our industry who believe we are in a comparative lull.

At the recent ARF Re:Think, Keith Weed, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Unilever quoted industry notable Shelly Palmer who said, “Change will never be as slow as it is today.” That might be true, but still to many of us, the rate of change today is unprecedented and at once uncomfortable, vexing, fascinating and exhilarating.

A big part of this change is due to the advancements and access-ability of Big Data which is the bailiwick of Research and Analytics Departments. But the data is coming fast, furious and silo’d. So how does Research keep up? I asked a range of researchers at the ARF about what their priority was in the next six months here are the videos and here their stories:


Charlene Weisler asked notable industry executives what their top priority will be in the next six months:

Charlene Weisler talked to a range of industry experts who outlined their current major projects:

Cross Platform

Many across the media spectrum – from suppliers to agencies to organizations to networks - cited cross platform measurement as a top priority. CIMM CEO Jane Clarke said, “What CIMM is going to focus on is what we have been focusing on over the past few years - finalizing our cross platform measurement service with comScore called Project Blueprint. It is measuring unduplicated reach across television, radio, smartphones, tablets and computers across three media, video, audio and text.” Joan Fitzgerald, SVP Television and Cross-Media Services comScore, concurred, “We are continuing to concentrate on making cross media measurement a reality in the marketplace today.”

Tom Xenos, Vice President, Research, MediaVest said, “One of the biggest things coming up is to better understand cross media measurement - How to get the data, how to understand duplication, how to know what is driving what medium to what platform and having it all come together.” Tom Ziangas, SVP Research for AMC Networks added that he is committed to “coordinating our Big Data efforts to report and understand Video Cross-platform viewing behaviors.”

Targeting

But the media world is not solely focused on cross platform. For Leslie Wood, Nielsen, it is “Targeting. Everything we learned about targeting came from mass media where if you got it wrong you still reached a lot of people. But now that we can precision target, it really matters. What can we look at in our data that gives you the insights you need to make good decisions.”

Mobile

Mobile is the 600 pound gorilla in the measurement room.  According to Josh Chasin, CRO comScore, “What we are going to be working on is holistic measurement solutions that bring TV and digital measurement together and I think it will be around the nexus of mobile measurement.” Graeme Hutton is focused on mobile and its intrinsic synergies with television. He said, “If I had to do one thing over the next six months it would be to look at the interaction between television and mobile. Mobile and TV are known to work strongly together. But I want to know why. Understanding the ‘why’ is very important. The principal way to do that is through neuroscience.”

Data Integration Platforms

Harnessing Big Data is a big priority for many. For example, Bruce Goerlich, CRO Rentrak, is concentrating on data integration. He said, “We are just about to release the Rentrak Analytic Platform which will have respondent level data in it. It will be 500,000 homes in the beginning going up to 2 million. There will be many types of analyses that you can do on this huge data set providing stability, granularity and insights.”

OTT

For Mike Bloxham, SVP Magid, the priority is “the over the top and SVOD marketplace which has the capacity to be very disruptive and has ramifications across the business. If we see a continuation of what we have seen in the past 18 months in terms of viewing figures on broadcast and cable, advertisers are starting to think about how that will impact the way in which they use TV to reach mass audience.” 

Bringing the Next Generation Up to Speed

Change impacts not only those of us in the industry but also those who one day may join the industry. CRE facilitator and NYU Professor Richard Zackon is currently focusing on how to keep his summer audience measurement class at NYU up to date. He explains, “Every year about this time I begin to prepare for my class and every year I have to throw away about 5 or 10% of the material because it is out dated. This year I am going to have to throw out about 30% of my material. I have a lot of catch up work in basically every fundamental topic.”

Can we as a group of researchers manage to keep pace? I am hopeful. There are enough of us taking on a range of different challenges to assure that there will be some progress.

This article first appeared on www.Mediapost.com.

Introduction to Big Data from the CRE

The Council for Research Excellence (CRE), facilitated by industry veteran Richard Zackon, is an industry think tank that addresses many top issues in the media industry with committees focused on such subjects as local measurement, social media, cross-platform, ROI and sample quality.  The CRE is funded by Nielsen.

There is arguably no bigger topic of discussion in the industry today than the one on Big Data. Many papers have been written – from such organizations and companies as Google, CIMM, SAS, CRA and even the White House - describing what big data is and is not, its opportunities and challenges. But there has never been a simple introduction for those in media who may have heard about Big Data but may need more information about it.

The Big Data Committee headed by Stacey Lynn Schulman, EVP Strategy and Analytics at Katz, just released a new Primer on Big Data that serves such a purpose. As Schulman explained, “A lot has been written and a lot more continues to be written but that doesn’t mean that people understand what Big Data is. We wanted to step in and demystify what it is and try to help navigate the waters of who operates in Big Data, how it gets operationalized within organizations today and what the place of traditional market researchers are as well as data scientists.”

I sat down with Schulman and Zackon and asked them a few questions about their Big Data Primer.

Charlene Weisler talks to Katz's Stacey Lynn Schulman and the CRE's Richard Zackon about the new CRE Big Data Primer in this 5:41 minute video:

CW: Can you give me some topline takeaways from the paper?

SLS: It’s called a primer so it’s instructive – it’s a starting point for people so there is a lot of terminology in there, defining terms, what do we really mean by Big Data. We attempt a definition that is very specific to the marketing and advertising industries because, frankly, Big Data can apply to anything in the industry. We wanted to define it for ourselves. We talk about different kinds of companies that are working with this sort of data, various issues that arise in working with this data. It doesn’t go into a significant amount of depth because it is not for the data scientists. It’s really a way to get your feet wet and to feel comfortable having these conversations in your organizations and knowing where to start.

RZ: I had an additional motivation. I teach a course in audience measurement at NYU and I see 20-somethings whose careers are going to be hugely impacted by Big Data and I wanted to give that group a place to start as well. There is also a free online course that I recommend from Johns Hopkins called The Data Scientist's Toolbox.

Schulman and Zackon discuss how companies can begin to use Big Data, how to break down silos and how toinclude non-research areas such as Sales in this 9:07 minute video:

CW: How would a big media company start in the arena of Big Data if they haven’t already started?

SLS: One of the reasons why we wrote the primer is to help market research professionals jump start that process and become catalysts in their own organizations. The first thing they have to realize is that it does not sit in just one division or one piece of the company. Harnessing Big Data, finding the data solutions, knowing what data sets you need or data sets you want or data sets you even have – all of those things require not just the senior researcher but also the technology officers, information officers, contracts for data. Step one is finding the right people in the organization to get together.

RZ: The skills for successful Big Data projects are as much collaborative skills as they are technical skills like machine learning and artificial intelligence.

How does Nielsen use Big Data? Schulman and Zackon discuss this topic with Charlene Weisler in this 5:45 minute video:

Schulman and Zackon give their Big Data Predictions and some advice for the Next Generation of media executives in this5:04 minute video:

CW: Looking ahead next year at this time, where do you see Big Data playing out in our industry?

SLS: You will be seeing more automated programmatic solutions fueled by Big Data. And as more and more transactions happen around data like this, we will start looking at that data much more closely and will need to evaluate the quality of that data.

RZ: My first response is that next year at this time we will be talking about Really Big Data. But actually I think it will go the other way. I think the term “Big Data” may become less common and it may become again just data and we will begin to learn how to deal with the shock of the massive terabytes of data coming at us. I suspect it will all just become part of our world.





This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com