• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, February 25, 2008

In what is likely the most ambitious ethnographic study ever observing how people actually consume media, Nielsen Media Research is funding a highly regarded academic research group with $3.5 million to follow hundreds of people around to see how they use both traditional and emerging video platforms inside and outside their homes. The project, one of the pieces of primary research to be funded by the Nielsen-backed Council For Research Excellence, will be conducted jointly by Muncie, Indiana-based Ball State University's Center for Media Design, and New York-based brand and media metrics consultancy Sequent Partners.

The CMD, will utilize the same rigorous academic approach it applied to its highly regarded Middletown Studies, but will implement them on a much broader scale - tailing 350 people in five major media markets (Dallas, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Chicago and Seattle) - and will conduct them twice over a six month period.

A second, ancillary component of the research will observe how the media behavior of 100 people in Indianapolis is influenced by "accelerating" their adoption of new digital media technologies. The so-called "Media Acceleration Process," will survey them once before they adopt the new technology, and once afterward. This component has been dubbed an acceleration, because the respondents will purchase at least one new digital technology - partially subsidized by the researchers - between the two intervals.

"The goal is to really research how people are accessing content today and get a handle on what the implications would be for those emerging technologies," says Shari Anne Brill, senior vice president-director of programming at Carat, and one of the members of the Nielsen funded council. She said the goal of this project was to dispel some of the "mythology" circulating around the advertising and television industries, such as how DVRS are killing the effectiveness of 30-second TV commercials, and to look at and try to understand how people are actually using media.

The study is one of several projects being funded by the council, which has accrued a budget of $7.5 million from Nielsen to date. Another multimillion dollar project being fielded will look at the behavior and impact of so-called "non-respondents" to media research surveys.

Other smaller projects include a "universe estimates" study designed to understand the best way for determining the size and scope of the consumer population for various media technologies; and a "marketplace practices" study that will review how audience estimate research is used in media buying and selling.

To date, the council has committed to spend $5.8 million of the $7.5 million granted by Nielsen. Other potential projects being considered include: studies on commercial avoidance, measuring cross-media effectiveness, cross platform consumption, passive person measurement, 2009 analog to digital switch, and psychographics.

Mike Bloxham, director-insight and research at Ball State's Center for Media Design, said the new observational study is likely to be the kind of academic research that industry professionals and social researchers look back on as a benchmark for how people use media for the next couple of decades. Ball State has a rich history with its Middletown Studies, which span nearly a century and first began as general lifestyle studies, but became focused increasingly on media usage in recent years.

The new study will look at 17 major media categories, as well as 17 major lifestyle patterns so that researchers can understand, for example, how people utilize media while preparing meals and consuming them.

A pilot version of the study conducted last year proved that the academic researchers could get a high compliance from a broad cross section of consumers, including harder to reach types such as certain ethnic groups, high tech and affluent households.