The future of multimedia research

The media explosion and the fragmentation of audiences is the hardest curre nt and future challenge for media research. New tools will be needed to sup port the decision-making in the process of media selection. This paper prop oses a practical perspective on how media research can deal with the proble ms of the media explosion by integrating and complementing the already exis ting media surveys. In most markets today we have TV panels, readership, ra dio and poster surveys, to name just the most important, as stand-alone app roaches with divergent information for target group definitions. Planning o f multimedia campaigns currently relies on a medium-by-medium procedure. Fo r the integration of the existing surveys in a multimedia planning system, two additional surveys are required tu close the missing link: a multimedia survey, which establishes the usage of media categories, and a target grou p core survey, which is needed to collect consumer behaviour for target gro up definition. The target group core survey serves as a source from which t he same target group data are spread via data fusions to the multimedia sur vey and to all relevant single-medium surveys. This framework would support a fully integrated planning of multimedia campaigns from budgeting across media categories to optimisation within media categories. The effectiveness of multimedia campaigns has to be controlled by linking investments in med ia categories with outcome indicators like sales or advertising awareness m easures. For this purpose market modelling techniques are appropriate. They can be used to estimate the isolated effects of individual media categorie s. The results are used to fine-tune the allocation of media budgets to med ia categories, either on the run or in the next planning period.