Research, as we know it, is dead by 2012

These are very famous words said by P&Gs Kim Dedeker (Global head of consumer insights) some time last year. Her general premise is that the research approaches we’ve been using for the past 40 years simply don’t work in today’s media and consumer environments and if we don’t start doing something about it, brands will have no real tools to understand or make decisions on anything relating to profitably marketing to consumers. I’ve probably completely bastardized her thesis but you can read more here.

The main quote is:

“After issuing dire warnings about the future of consumer surveys, the two biggest advertisers and buyers of market research in the world — Procter & Gamble and Unilever — are linking with the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) for an industry effort to embrace online chatter and other naturally occurring feedback like never before.

“Without transforming our capabilities into approaches that are more in touch with the lifestyles of the consumers we seek to understand, the consumer-research industry as we know it today will be on life support by 2012,” Kim Dedeker, VP-external capability leadership, global consumer and market knowledge at P&G, said in a statement provided by the ARF.

To tackle the issue, the ARF will hold two industry summits in the coming six weeks to support new ways of listening to consumers that don’t involve the traditional question-and-answer format.”

OK…she says on life support but I’m a member of the ARF and was at their Industry Leadership Forum this past Oct. and I swear she said “dead”…but maybe I’m just hearing what I want to. We decided to become members of the ARF because of how important research (and its transformation) is to our business. Through this association I can have very candid conversations with the folks who are on the front lines of evaluating mediums like ours every day.

We all recognize how important research is to our business (on so many fronts) but sometimes you have to wonder whether we’re all just chasing our tails. Last week, I spoke about the “new media triad” and how different it was than the old media triad. Each of the new mediums has spent Billions trying to retrofit their businesses into old media world interpretations and measures of acceptance and success that always seem a little wonky in terms of consumer adoption, use and acceptance of our mediums…i.e. it just seems that measuring mobile or Digital OOH under the same pretense as TV or radio is a little off. This is the 3rd time I’ve had a startup in a new medium (previously Internet advertising and Mobile) and every time, you have to go back 40 years to catch up to today. That being said, for now, we’re stuck with it so I’ll stop whining.

So it was with just a little bit of mirth that I read Jack Myers’ post today….did I just use the word mirth? wow…yes…yes I did.

Jack is an old (and very respected) hand in the media business. He has a great commentary on the state of media and the myopic view of research and media we’ve all come to accept. as he states:

In the advertising business, we are settled in the anergic state. We know there are problems. There is a virus attacking the health of the advertising system. But efforts to respond have been passive at best. The industry is waiting for a signal to take action. But what actions? And who is responsible for sending the signal? Becoming overly dependent upon research for addressing issues of advertising effectiveness is analogous to assigning the white blood cells the job of the brain. We stand in danger, in the advertising business, of becoming so reliant on information and its methodological purity that we lose our ability to think intelligently and logically about that information.

You should read the whole post here.

It’s why so many folks in the media business aren’t as caught up in research as they are in insight. Insight actually involves using your brain to deduce things. Research, as we all have learned from the TV business, can be made to say anything. Insight is what the “new” media needs in transforming to a new way of thinking and that means more knowledge.

Keep educating folks…your clients, suppliers, partners, etc….the insights will eventually come….let’s just hope a new model shows up sooner rather than later

UPDATE: Just found this. It’s a long read. Great supporting line of proof, because the same applies to DOOH.:

“The web ‘may be’ changing ‘faster’ than even the most knowledgeable researchers ability to observe it”

UPDATE 2:

Classic. Graeme, my VP Media and Retail partnerships, twittered a bunch of the NRF sessions he was at….it will be on the ADCENTRICITY blog shortly but found a comment that supports the above post:

Joel – the problem is that we’re trying to take the old way of doing things and adapt them to the digital world.

UPDATE 3:

I just realized it sounded like I called Myers’ “old”. I can only hope he doesn’t read this post