• by Joe Mandese , April 5, 2006

Mediamark Research Inc., a media research company that is perhaps best known as Madison Avenue's primary source for magazine audience estimates, appears to be expanding aggressively into the measurement of other media. MRI, which has been pitching a radio industry proposal to develop a new radio measurement system, Tuesday announced a new push to measure how people use all forms of media throughout their day.

MRI, which conducts massive semiannual, in-home surveys asking people which media they use and what products they purchase, is adding a new phone study that will re-contact a portion of those people and ask them specifically where they are when they use each medium, what else they are doing at the time, and how engaged they are in a particular medium.

The study, dubbed MediaDay, will launch with an initial sample of 8,000 people, followed by a survey of 5,000 consumers each subsequent year.

The study is the latest in a drive toward so-called engagement research, as Madison Avenue shifts its orientation from simply understanding how advertising and media reach consumers, to understanding when, where and with what media they are most engaged with advertising messages.

"With more and more people 'multimedia tasking,' it's essential for marketers and their agencies to understand each [medium's] role and how those roles interact with each other," Kathi Love, president-CEO of MRI, explained.

Among other things, the study will measure how, when and where consumers used TV, radio, Internet, magazines, newspapers and outdoor media during the past 24 hours. It will also ask them what other tasks they were doing while exposed to those media, including:

* Household chores
* Working
* Shopping
* Exercising or participating in sports
* Interacting with others
* Using other media

The study will also seek to measure their level of engagement, asking consumers to rate the level of "focus" they have with each medium.

The MRI study comes as others have begun measuring a holistic view of media usage, including Ball State University's so-called Middletown Studies, which directly observe how people use media, and Knowledge Networks' Multimedia Mentor surveys.