9. Demand and Market Research for Media and Information Products

The chapter discusses how media companies organize their demand research. How do they collect data? At the user level, the approaches to data collection include surveys, focus groups, test marketing, demand experiments, and biometric testing. Automatic audience metering has made great inroads, especially for websites. Measurement at the provider level include retailer surveys, self-reporting, point-of-sale measurement, and the tracking of downloads, Internet traffic, website visits, and exposures to advertising. Once the data has been collected it must be analyzed. “Big data mining” techniques include statistical inference; clustering and anomaly detection; and association, correlation, and econometric regression; also discussed are techniques of A/B testing, conjoint analysis, and diffusion models. The final section deals with challenges in audience and market research: coordinating and integrating multiple user data flows, internationalization, privacy issues and restrictions on data collection and uses, and the creation of new research methodologies. Tracking these themes is the case discussion which looks at the market analysis by the media company Viacom for three interrelated new media products.