Televisionaries

‘Research’ is in danger of losing its point. It has become a much abused term these days; days when a few (albeit well-intentioned) questions can be tossed at a small, random sample of wholly unrepresentative people and then their answers offered up as evidence of something significant. For such significance, you may as well hang around the stage door at a Westlife concert and ask those clutching autograph books who their favourite band is. It isn’t going to be the Wu Tang Clan, worthy of our respect though they are.

So we get things like this on the usually wonderful Brand Republic. Half a dozen people in the street are asked their views about DTRs and then those views are published as fact, complete with apocalyptic headline. We responded to the article with the facts and yet, still, people who should know much better come along, dismiss the facts and say that, because it doesn’t ring bells with their own lives, it can’t be true for others. A little blinkered?

I’m all for opinion, but it has to be informed. That’s one of the driving ambitions behind Televisionaries; to arm everyone with the (proven, reliable) facts and then let them loose to argue about the future. Reckless and misleading research shouldn’t be acceptable for any topic, but in an area like this it is criminal because a) people’s claimed behaviour isn’t reliable and, more importantly, b) there’s no need to ask them anyway because we already have regularly updated, hard, reliable, robust data available from the likes of BARB (data from 1,100 homes with a DTR), panels like Sky View (data from over 7,000 homes with Sky+), and studies like the one conducted by London Business School (which observed and recorded thousands of commercial viewing occasions). They all show how viewers actually use their DTR’s, with real time monitoring of large numbers of people who are selected to be representative of the general population. When rigorous research exists to tell us something that doesn’t necessarily tally with our own experience, should we really just ignore it and go looking for evidence to feed our preconceptions, no matter how ropey or unreliable?