For a brief time in 2003 I ran away and joined a media circus. We had finally published the first results from a London Business School study on advertising viewing.
The study was based on eight different households that were videotaped for two weeks. We studied TV viewers’ behavior during every commercial break that occurred in the second week of the study in an attempt to understand what happens when programs end and advertising begins.
With the analysis complete I wrote an article for the Financial Times. I explained that while many households did watch the ads, other activities such as social interaction, reading, flicking and advertising interaction often took precedence. I also described how the peoplemeter system was flawed because measuring the number of people in the room had a variable correlation with the number watching the ads. Indeed, in many instances, increasing numbers of people in the room led to significantly less people watching the ads.
I thought that this was the end of the story. But then all hell broke lose. After the space shuttle and Saddam it became the week’s most downloaded article on the FT’s web page. The story was then picked up by The Guardian, The Independent, and The Daily Mail. It was featured on Five News and, most importantly, on Richard and Judy. As the story went further afield, I even found myself in the rather bizarre position of doing a major Australian breakfast show live from my bed, drinking Horlicks.
This kind of media exposure created quite a response from the ad industry.
It seemed to revolve around two key methodological criticisms. The first was based on the sample size. Clearly eight households was inferior to BARB’s 5000 or more. Well this depends. Eight households can never be representative, but it is better to have eight measurements of the phenomenon you are interested in (advertising viewing) than 5000 measurements of something you are not (people in a room when the ads are on). It seems that much of the ad industry has become obsessed with quantities rather than the qualitative nature of what is being measured. Good research always combines the qualitative ‘what’ with the quantitative ‘how much’.
The second criticism related to the influence of the cameras on the households being observed. Surely the presence of the recording devices affected the behavior of the viewers? This one I have to concede. Despite keeping the cameras switched off for the first week and only telling the households about the purpose of the research at the end of the study, I admit our method must have influenced our subjects. Fortunately, any scholar of research knows of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Simply put, no research method can be completely free of influence upon the phenomenon being observed.
The solution is to combine as many differently flawed methods as possible.
So down with industry standards and dominant measurement approaches and up with multiple methods and methodological debates. Because it is the latter, not the former, that signals an industry striving for accuracy and truth.
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2 comments
CK Lin
March 31, 2009 at 9:04 pm
The line between what we decide on our own accord and what we decide when influenced by branding has become extremely blurred. The study offers an interesting suggestion that when we are distracted as viewers, we are perhaps no longer as vulnerable to advertising and commercials like we would normally be if watching tv alone.
Singongi
November 4, 2009 at 9:59 am
working as a Qualitative Researcher, I have become frustrated by the marketers, clients and agencies that either ‘over analyse’ or fall back on numbers. One must be able to look at a given situation without generalising too much but also without looking for the highest number possible. ‘All the 1000 people we talked to loved it’ is as crazy as ‘the copy MUST not overwhelm the viewer’. While generalisation is important to make decision making easier for the brand owner, nuances – cultural and otherwise must not be ignored so that your communication excites and engages. whether it is a brand, logo or communication brand owners should understand where their audience is coming from so that what ever you do remains relevant but stands out in this all too cluttered world that we exist in.
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