• by Mike Bloxham , Op-Ed Contributor, February 27, 2008

Monday's TV Board featured a rousing call to action from Tracy Scheppach of Starcom, urging all sides of the media business to do their part in making set-top box data an everyday part of the research, planning, buying and selling processes.

It's a call that most of us (myself included) would heartily endorse as the prospect of wholesale and routine access to such data continues to move closer to reality, yet still remains tantalizingly out of reach (with a few notable exceptions).

Obviously we are getting there, but as John Grono of GAP Research observed in a response to Tracy's piece, even when we have all the set-top data we could wish for, we still won't know whether or not content is being viewed (unless channels are constantly being changed or a return path is active and enabling us to log different interactions with the content) or by whom.

No set-top box is going to be staring into the home in "Truman Show" fashion, recording every second of behavior in front of and near the TV to tell us when and for how long people are out of the room, when they are using other media, talking, sleeping and so on. This is an issue we addressed at Ball State in a pilot research project called Remotely Interested and in a white paper called Engaging The Ad Supported Media.

Leaving aside the cost and privacy issues of enabling electronic surveillance through the set-top, these days you'd have to wire up the entire home to account for the multiple TV sets typically found in the home.

But the other problem with set-top data is that -- valuable as it is -- it ultimately only tells us about TV, thereby helping to perpetuate the silo-based approach to media research and measurement. Although TV remains the primary medium in terms of time spent in the average day, still the ways in which we can use the TV and the number of video-capable platforms continue to proliferate -- so even set-top data will leave questions unanswered. And we'll still have the perennial problem of trying to meld together disparate sources of data intended to serve different media, as we search for a clearer picture of media use in context.

Often it's like trying to wade neck-deep through a data swamp that keeps pulling you down with no obvious way out.

As content becomes available on more platforms and as content owners seek to monetize it accordingly as the audience delivered by each platform grows, so the need to understand the way in which each platform is interwoven within people's daily lives increases. Yes, we still want better and more accurate measures of media use by platform, but unless our understanding of how they relate to each other improves also, we will be increasingly out of step with the silo-free consumers we seek to understand and reach. After all, when was the last time you encountered a single-silo consumer in this cross-platform, multitasking world of ours?

Of course all this is easier said than done. Adventures in cross-media research are still in their relatively early days (aside from one-off, generally proprietary projects). Where initiatives are underway, they typically revolve around just a couple of media rather than a more comprehensive mix of the media available to consumers. Some rely on self-report -- which, when you start asking questions about the use of several media, become very shaky indeed (to understand just how shaky, check out the first Middletown Media Studies report, which examined the difference between phone, diary and observational findings).

Naturally, there will always be a meaningful place for research that addresses specific issues relating to the consumption of individual media, but for those of us seeking a broader and deeper understanding of total media use (and it's context), there are few options available.

This week's announcement by Nielsen and the Council for Research Excellence of the decision to fund the Video Consumer Mapping Study will result in a very significant contribution to an understanding of the consumption of video across all platforms (full disclosure -- the study is to be implemented by Ball State and Sequent Partners). But while the observational method it employs will capture video use across all platforms and locations as well as the behavioral context in which it occurs, the method is necessarily costly and is ultimately most valuable when triangulated with outputs from other research -- something that will undoubtedly be done with the study.

This suggests that data fusion will have a role to play in our continued pursuit of media enlightenment. And yet -- unlike in Europe -- fusion seems to get a mixed reception here in the U.S., so the rate at which it becomes an accepted part of the process is uncertain.

One thing is certain, however. As complex as the media ecosystem is right now, it is only going to get more complex - and at an ever-increasing pace. What looks challenging and difficult to navigate now will probably look like the land of milk and honey when we look back in ten years' time. As such, it is equally certain that no one solution is going to provide us with what we need to optimize communications efficiency. We will increasingly go digital in our measurement systems, but we will still need to understand the context of media use that data harvested from devices and meters will never capture.

As goes the complexity of media, so goes the complexity of research and measurement. And unless we truly master the latter, we'll never be able to make best use of the former. Instead we'll find ourselves ever-deeper in the data swamp - loads of information but no real way to assess reliability or extract value from it .