Stumbling into intelligence

American Demographics, April 1, 2004 by John McManus

Byline: JOHN MCMANUS

"The rules of politics apply until they don't apply anymore."

This recent quote is from Time magazine senior writer Joe Klein. Participating on a panel of media/political luminaries that Syracuse University's Newhouse School brought together in late February in the imposing shadow of the New York Public Library, Klein's observation was about what factors motivate people to vote for who they vote for, and how the media's political reporters and commentators try to decipher and keep pace with those motivations.

Klein might have been referring to any number of societal and business arenas that function according to common practices and rules, and fail to function as those practices and rules bumble into obsolescence. Research, for instance. Particularly research as it regards not voter sensibilities and motivations, per se, but consumer behavior, buying behavior. Research is at a crossroads, and which rules apply and which ones don't is on the minds of lots of the people who collectively will spend a projected $276 billion in the U.S. ($450 billion worldwide) on advertising this year, and are still ever so curious in that John Wanamaker sense about which half of that amount is wasted, and which half is working.

Research itself - marketing research, that is - is about a $16.5 billion industry globally, according to ESOMAR, the World Association of Opinion and Market Research Professionals, and is expected to expand a moderate 4 percent to 6 percent as companies invest some of their growing sales into trying to find out how and why those sales grew. The thing is, practically everybody who's not actually in research and of research is talking about how research is broken. Meanwhile the people in research and of research are mostly talking about how their particular methodologies, samples, data sets, deliverables and analyses are valid compared with those of their competitors, which doesn't necessarily wind up putting the best combination of those tools and solutions into the hands of the customer. So what you have is a group of smart people at research organizations - each trying to grab a bigger slice of the $16.5 billion research expenditure pie for themselves - locked in a war over the relative merits of qualitative vs. quantitative, offline vs. online, etc.

In the scramble, companies that are best known for selling data on what people either read, watched or bought are doing all they can these days to get their client customers to see them as more than purveyors of data. And everybody else in the business - from focus group moderators to anthropologists to brain wave scanners - are part of a cacophony of claims to greater validity, each offering value to clients on a case-by-case basis, but none adding up to more than a partial solution.

Meanwhile, the companies that buy the advertising research in $40,000- to $2 million-dollops that include everything from focus groups to viewership diaries, to mall intercepts to Internet questionnaires to syndicated studies to transactional data analysis to visual ethnography - namely advertisers, advertising agencies and media companies - are in a furor about what they can learn about consumer behavior beyond sketchy "unaided recall" numbers and overwhelming "household level" transaction data and a host of other outputs that leave them scratching their heads, wondering what they're missing, and more important, how to act based on the information they've gathered. They want the ad research marketplace to proffer an economical solution to the question, "What's the next metric?" so that they can follow consumers through their real, complex consumption and involvement behavior when it comes to their contact with media channels and marketing messages, be it in their living rooms or cars or on the elevator up to the office. What's more they want it now, at least that's what they're saying.

People on the advertiser, agency and media company side go so far as to use advertising research and its current shortcomings as a punch line for some of their more barbed inside-baseball ribbing. Lisa Seward, media director with Fallon North America, shared one such quip among fellow panelists in the "Keeping up with the Changing Consumer" session at the American Association of Advertising Agencies Media Conference in Orlando this past February. One of her Fallon colleagues, she said, has this retort to a statement of even the toughest of today's marketing challenges: "That's nothing that a whole lot of awareness won't cure."

Perhaps one of the most powerful and influential expressions of the way the rules of research no longer apply came from Procter & Gamble global marketing officer, Jim Stengel, at that same Four A's event, who devoted a section of his "Future of Marketing" keynote speech to his conviction that "our tried and true systems of measurement don't account for new technologies and connection points." Stengel's presentation invoked the memorable words, 10 years earlier, of then P&G CEO Ed Artzt, who used the Four A's meeting soap box in 1994 to rip the advertising agency business a new one as he suggested "the advertising business may be heading for trouble." Stengel's updated "Ten Years After" report card on agencies, with its overall grade of C-minus and a "we-have-work-to-do" conclusion, had particularly harsh appraisal for progress in the media research area.