Starcom's Fielding on
research's new tools

Rising client expectations in a global economy

By Kevin Downey

Richard Fielding is the new vice president and director of U.S. media research at Starcom North America. He replaces Kate Lynch, who has taken on the role of director of global research at Starcom MediaVest Group. Fielding relocated to Starcom’s headquarters in Chicago from Hong Kong, where he was the regional research director for Asia-Pacific. He spoke to Media Life recently about the growing importance of media research in a media environment notable for the growth of multinational clients, media mergers, and cross-platform media buys. He also spoke about the development of new research tools to more effectively evaluate media in that changing environment.

Media research seems to have become more multinational over the past few years with the introduction of TV optimization systems, data fusion, and other research tools coming to America from other countries. Why is that happening?

There are a number of reasons for that. The most obvious one is the globalization of our clients. They expect similar offerings in the U.S. as they get in other parts of the world.
 TV optimizations are one example of that, with reach-based planning and buying. Clients say that they want the same approach, especially in the U.S. And other markets like Asia are catching up because these tools can be applied across these regions.
   China is a good example of how research companies have come in over the past two to three years and developed research and introduced syndicated studies to the market.

  One of them is a research tool designed in Asia called Media Pathways. It’s one that Starcom MediaVest Group is building and rolling out gradually. It’s basically an umbrella approach that goes beyond mere media content. It’s more holistic.
   Most research tracks the amount of media that is reaching people.
   We’re media neutral and are stepping back and looking at all platforms and assessing the media effectiveness of delivering a target audience. Media Pathways is a framework that allows us to look at how people interact with all media. It’s not just a 30-second TV spot or print, for example, but how they work together and how the internet works with that.
   Another buzzword is multimedia optimizations. I’ve got an agreement with SRI and will be rolling out a multimedia optimization tool. It will not be exclusive to Starcom but we worked with them in developing it and have preferred status here.
   It’s not a specific tool, it’s an approach to learn the various basic facts we want to know about people’s consumption of various media, using a single-source.
   The usual approach is having people completing time-use diaries throughout the day and recording whatever media they were exposed to.
    We also identified moods and linked that to receptivity. We initially found results such as people in the morning listening to the radio but who might be distracted by a number of other tasks. So it might not be the most effective way to reach people. We did it across the whole day and had some product consumption data as well.

   What we are doing is consulting with SMG on it. What they are doing is not only trying to make it work in the U.S. but also working with our clients to develop it.
   [The alliance with] Knowledge Networks has just gone public but we’ve been working with them for some time.
    It’s a Web-TV based panel with the ability to be put into up to 250,000 households. The way it works is the respondents are given free Web-TV. They agree to answer a questionnaire once a week, which is online and downloaded.
   When you have such a large panel, you can constantly delve into specific target groups. Clearly, over the years, mail-in surveys and random-digit dialing have not been reaching representative samples of the population. So this is the way to go and we can link it to all media usage.
    There is no limit to the way the panel can be accessed. We’ll have a lot of information about households and individuals in those households, including media usage, product usage, and even the sampling of new products.
   As the panel develops, we’ll build up more information about media consumption. The Web-TV will be able to record channel viewing behavior. It’s a wonderful combination of viewing behavior and product usage.
   There’s also an agreement with one of the internet companies, so we can track internet usage.
    We’ll be able to find out how campaigns are working and how effectively they are working.
   It’s a joint venture with Bcom3, so there will be some commercial aspects to it, but we will have exclusivity on certain panels that we develop with them.

  There’s always a big debate about wanting to get as much information from a respondent as possible. But there’s the issue of wear-out.
   There’s the idea of fusing surveys together, especially TV audiences with product usage, in order to link the TV messages with the products used.
   With single-source research, you don’t have to use data fusion because you can track the same person through what they watched and the products they purchased.
    Data fusion will always have a place and it’s not necessarily new. There have been panels in the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand. But there is a debate in America about how statistically accurate it can be.

   One way research can change is to look at the effectiveness of cross-platform deals. That’s what makes Knowledge Networks so important. It will give us the opportunity to answer how strong such deals can be.
   Nielsen is soon releasing the results of their convergence panel. That’s going to be the first time that a decent sample of people with both a People Meter and internet measurement will start addressing some of those issues. It will answer how cross-platform works to add incremental reach you can get from TV viewing and the time people spend on a web site.
   You will see more of that happening with panels that deliver effectiveness across media.

   From my perspective, it’s one of those things that need to adapt to the changing role of media. That is especially true in the U.S. with the consolidation of media. That’s where we can add value to our clients.
   Media research will become more and more important because as media fragments and clients struggle to keep up with options, media research presents some clarity on fragmentation, convergence and divergence.
   The role of media research is to advance the value of the strategies and tasks of media planners.
   To a certain extent, the buying process is becoming more of a commodity, especially if all you’re doing is focusing on how cheaply you can buy media.
  Moving to the States, and the largest advertising market, and the opportunity to work in this marketplace is very challenging. Media research is an area with a lot of cross-functions.
   The metrics used to measure media is one area that needs to be brought up to speed. One example is the Nielsen TV ratings. There are encouraging changes, like the development of the local People Meter in Boston.
   Plus there is the challenge of developing good, accountable research to measure media more effectively. That’s an ongoing trend.

     Again, that’s a lot of the things we’re talking about, like Knowledge Networks. It’s to assess the effects of multimedia, things like wear-out, about how gradually the effectiveness of a particular piece of commercial wears out and how often it needs to be rotated.

-Kevin Downey is a staff writer for Media Life.

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