And it really was new: BBC Online was a mere two-and-a-half years old, it had 3 million monthly unique users (it now has nearly ten times that) and fewer than 4 in 10 people in the UK had ever used the internet. What’s more, the kinds of services and devices that are now integral to our lives, such as broadband, MP3 players and even DVDs, were the domain of the innovators at the very foot of the adoption curve.

But it was a time of unbelievable excitement and discovery. Although the dot com boom had officially ended a few months earlier, the bubble had certainly not burst in Bush House. During my first year, the division’s budget doubled to around £100m and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that my research budget was around a million quid. Pretty much everything we did was a step into uncharted territory.

The pace of media change over the past ten years has been so explosive that you might expect most of what we learnt at the time to be consigned to distant history.

But remarkably, a lot of it continues to hold true today.

We learnt a lot about the twin pitfalls of researching innovative new concepts: on the one hand, audiences can’t articulate a need for something which they don’t yet understand, so they may reject some very sound ideas. (Focus groups have famously rejected any disruptive new media over the years, from television to mobile phones.) On the other hand, a ‘wow’ factor can occur, where respondents are so bowled-over by a wizzy new concept that they claim it will become indispensible. And then no-one buys it. We overcame this by using research techniques that could identify unfulfilled needs (from diaries to ethnography) and placing these needs at the heart of the production process – something we still subscribe to today.

We learnt that when it comes to concept development, not all respondents are equal. Rather then screening out innovators and ‘experts’, we actively encouraged their involvement in early co-creation, before sense-checking the emergent prototypes with ‘real’ audiences.

We learnt that technology was converging, but not the circumstances in which content was consumed. We understood that TVs, PCs and mobile phones would increasingly have the same capabilities and connectivity, but that the different screens would retain their own core values and audience expectations. This was something of a heretical view at the time, when platform-neutral content creation was all the rage, but it explained why Top of the Pops karaoke through the red button was a real success for us and web on TV was a complete disaster. Today it explains why Nintendo Wii games belong on the living room screen but Facebook doesn’t.

In essence, the advance of technology was allowing each screen to fulfil its real potential: the living room screen got bigger and brought families back together; the desk screen allowed faster and easier completion of tasks and sharing with distant friends; and the handheld screen became an intensely personal device where content could be truly engaging, but only delivered with the user’s permission.

We knew that the internet would be an important social medium and suspected that user-generated content would become as important as that created by the big media owners. But we didn’t get everything right. What we didn’t know was that video would become such a key element of internet use, or that peer-to-peer file sharing would fundamentally change content distribution, or that Google would reinvent everything from web navigation to the online advertising model, or that a very skinny man in a black polo-neck would persuade millions of people to spend £500 on a media tablet through which you could only watch video that you bought from the very skinny man.

But even a million quid can’t buy you that kind of foresight.

This is all very exciting, but something of a pyrrhic victory as our other two showpiece submissions (some extremely ambitious pan-platform audience work with ITV, and some equally ambitious multi-country, multi-screen customer journey work with Microsoft and Carat) were summarily rejected. We don’t know why.

Fingers crossed for the MRS awards then.

Stuart

Of course, the report in question doesn’t actually conclude that “children who watch television are more likely to be bullied”. But it does seem to conclude that toddlers who are allowed to watch more than two hours of television a day become fatter and more stupid than other children. And this I can well believe. But does this actually make TV the villain? Unfortunately what is missing here is what we researchers would call a concomitant variable. Perish the thought, but could it be that the sort of parents who let their toddlers watch more than two hours of telly a day are, regardless of this, likely to raise kids who are fatter and more stupid than their peers? Just a thought.

Stuart

Nils Arnold has joined us as Director of Quantitative Research. As many of you will know, Nils is a heavyweight quant researcher and econometrician, having previously worked as Head of Marketing Sciences at Ipsos MORI, Associate Director at 2:CV and senior analyst at Dunnhumby. Nils was most recently at Mindshare. He joins us with a simple goal – grow our quantitative research proposition. You can expect to hear from him soon.

Gemma Bradford has joined us as Office Manager. Having attempted to plug the gap myself for the past 6 weeks, this feels like a rather monumental appointment – particularly as Gemma already knows the job inside out, having held very similar roles at a range of TV production companies. Apart from the day-to-day running of the place, Gemma is restoring some much-needed order to our invoicing and credit control. She even has her very own copy of Sage. Which we’ve all found strangely exciting.

Stuart

ARF Re:Think logo

This year the ARF decided to let the industry decide which papers they’d like to hear presented at their Re:Think convention in New York. We’re delighted to say that our presentation, “The Future of Mobile Advertising”, co-written with Microsoft Advertising and ROI Research, was one of those voted in.

Together with ROI, we’ve done some really thought-provoking research and it will help to change the way that the industry sees the potential of mobile advertising in a range of product categories.

With this project, and our ‘House Special’ study, BrandHeld, we’re suddenly all about the future of mobile advertising. And with the recent UK launch of The GSMA Mobile Media Metrics from ComScore, things are really starting to take off.

If you can’t make it to New York, we’ll post some updates from the Convention – and hopefully a copy of the slides too.

Stuart

What’s interesting is that this appears to be more than simple cocooning or feel-good purchasing in the midst of a recession. When it comes to consumer electronics, “must-have” has gone from being an empty marketing buzzword to a pretty accurate summary of consumer attitudes.

Stuart

Seasons greetings.

Stuart

Essential is of course platform-neutral, independent and impartial when it comes to media. But as a Virgin Media customer, I am almost salivating with excitement about the announcement today of this potential tie-up between Virgin Media and TiVo.

Although the FT describes it as a ‘rebuff to Project Canvas’, I’d imagine this has got much more to do with Virgin Media finding a better way of helping viewers navigate through its growing library of VOD content, ensuring that they can always find something they want to watch, which has got to be the holy grail as far as VOD is concerned.

Last year we produced a major study of VOD (VOD: State of Play) which suggested that the next (and potentially most exciting) wave of digital TV will involve the deployment of services that truly help audiences find the content that they will most value, regardless of whether this is delivered through a broadcast, an IPTV service or from their hard disk.

Simon recently blogged on here about an essay by Kevin Kelly of Wired, entitled Better Than Free, which argues that when digital content is all free or infinitely available, one of the eight things that people will actually pay for is ‘findability’. (Another one is ‘personalisation’.) We believe that in a TV context, this means intelligent recommendation tools – an area in which TiVo is a recognised pioneer.

Who would have thought that middleware could ever be this exciting?

Stuart

I’ve just been reading this Research Live contribution from Forrester analyst Tamara Barber, entitled “Market research catches up with Web 2.0”. Tamara confidently asserts that “it’s time for the industry to embrace online communities as a research tool.”

I’m constantly irritated by this assumption that the research industry has yet to wake up to the possibilities presented by “web 2.0”, or that we are somehow failing to grasp its significance. Why does our industry seem to get singled out for this kind of patronising, ill-informed advice? Are there people telling the newspaper business that it’s time to consider desktop publishing rather than all that fiddly typesetting, or suggesting to retailers that they might want to throw away those ancient tills and invest in a decent EPOS system?

But Tamara is sure we all have a problem, and she thinks she might have seen the way forward: “Clearly, it’s time for our industry to innovate, and no doubt companies like BrainJuicer … and others are teaching the rest of us how to think outside the radio button online survey and adopt the next evolution of online market research.” Speak for yourself Tamara. It’s clearly going to be an exhilarating and slightly daunting journey for you, but we wish you luck.

However, there’s one thing that bothers Tamara even more than the prospect of designing online research that doesn’t include radio buttons. And that’s what to call these new online social thingamejigs.

Forrester has apparently suggested the rather catchy “MROC”. Clearly this was the product of quite a few committee meetings. “I’ve been privy to some debates about the acronym and some details about the definition,” gushes Tamara.

I find all of this rather depressing. And it’s not really Tamara’s fault – her article is just the straw that broke the camel’s back. At Essential we’ve been designing and developing online communities pretty much since our inception. We don’t really care what the collective noun is, nor do we see this as a trade-off between ‘traditional’ and ‘new’ research. But we do know that our online communities, when appropriate, add an important new dimension to our existing conversations with audiences as well as presenting entirely new ways for audiences to come together to build ideas, debate, design, reflect and feed back.

No doubt there are some agencies who feel that they need to catch up. But so much of this tedious hand-wringing seems to be borne out of a desire to be “innovative” or to follow the herd, rather than a real appreciation of the fundamentally new ways that audiences are using technology to shape and taking ownership of brands. None of us is driving this revolution. Some, it would seem, are trying to hang onto its coat tails. The rest of us are just happy taking part. And that, as they say, is what counts.

Stuart