Sequent, BSU Launch Media Behavior Institute

In what may be an industry first, a leading research and consulting group has teamed up with a renowned American university to launch a new privately-held media research company that will utilize state-of-the-art methods to track consumer media behavior. The Media Behavior Institute (MBI), was unveiled by Mike Bloxham, director of insight and research at the Center of Media Design at Ball State University during an opening keynote at Wednesday's session of the Advertising Research Foundation's audience measurement conference in New York.

BSU, which is perhaps best known for nearly a century's worth of so-called "Middletown Studies," highly regarded observational research that directly observes how people actually use media, had already been working closely with the private sector, especially Sequent Partners, the research and consulting group formed by former ARF President Jim Spaeth and Marketing Science Institute President Bill Moult, on a variety of industry research initiatives, including a $3.5 million Nielsen-funded Council for Research Excellence study that will employ BSU's observational methods.

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During his presentation, Bloxham said the institute's goal was a pragmatic understand of how people use media and how it affects their behavior, and that it would employ and embrace a wide variety of methodologies to do that in a way that would "scale" and be cost efficient for the industry.

"We do not have the monopoly on good ideas," he said, adding, "It will start with the observational method, but the observational method is best when it is put in tandem with other methods."

To that end, Bloxham revealed that the institute already had licensed the highly regarded "TouchPoints" methodology from U.K. based IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising).

Following the announcement, Bloxham was circumspect on the details of the collaborations, but told MediaDailyNews, "The institute is a private entity that has been born of the long-term collaboration between Ball State and Sequent Partners. It has been established to best facilitate the further development of the observational method, its integration with other methods, the development of new research products and services and the establishment of collaborations with third parties. By addressing these issues through a private entity we are better able to work flexibly and on terms that work for potential partners."

During his keynote on the state of planning and measuring "cross-media," Bloxham characterized the current state of knowledge as something akin to "chaos theory," but indicated that progress is being made from a variety of sources that are beginning to map how people utilize multiple streams of media. Drawing upon BSU's own work, including its seminal observational studies, and more recent work, including the Council for Research Excellence, and a "media acceleration" project with Time Warner, Procter & Gamble and PepsiCo., Bloxham described how new insights are coming to light on consumer media behavior, and suggested they may not be what industry executives necessarily assume them to be.

Drawing on the media acceleration project, which measured what happens when households adopt new digital media technologies, Bloxham sought to dispel the industry notion that the presence of more media devices result in increased time spent with media. In reality, he said, BSU found that time spent with media either goes down or remains flat, but the quality of the time spent with specific media appears to improve.

"What we found was that overall less time was spent with media, but more attention was spent with media," he said.

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