BrandRepublic has announced this week that Simon is the web’s 113th ‘most influential blogger’ in their BR200 list. Now that’s quite an accolade.

Hopefully this is some compensation for failing to secure one of ten seats on the MRG committee this week. (There were eleven candidates…)

Simon’s blog is here. But you knew that already.

We’re doing a couple of focus groups amongst regular users of Sky Player – Sky’s web-based VoD service. The groups are scheduled in for Wednesday 18th or Thursday 19th May, here in the Essential Lounge (SW6 4LZ)

So we are looking for people to take part. We’ll pay £40 cash for your participation. Groups are 90 [...]

Today we decided to say goodbye to our binder. (Shout quickly if you want one – it’s off to Freecyle shortly.) I felt strangely resistant to this. As a grad trainee, learning to use the binder was pretty much Point 1 on the induction plan. So the fact that our binder is now redundant feels [...]

I was feeling very popular earlier. I’d just successfully fielded something like my twentieth unsolicited sales call of the day. But I was curious. Why all this sudden love from suppliers whose names all sounded vaguely like teams on the Apprentice? Impact! Check. Progress! Check. Vanguard! Check. (I’m making these up, but you get the [...]

We’re delighted to say that Essential and ITV picked up the ‘Best Consumer Insights’ Award at last night’s Research Awards 2010. The award is for last-year’s cross-platform audiences study, looking at X Factor, Coronation Street, ITV Football and This Morning. Big thanks to Suzanne Lugthart, Sarah Messer, Mat Watson, Luc Hippolyte and of course Chad [...]

Hot on the heels of our ‘Best New Consumer Insight’ award shortlisting at the forthcoming Research Awards, we’re also in the running for ‘Best Media Research Supplier’ (or ‘Best Research Team – Media Research Supplier’, to give it its full title) at this week’s inaugural MRG awards.

The winners will be announced at the MRG Gala [...]

Essential and ITV have been shortlisted for the 2010 Research Award for New Consumer Insights for our large and ambitious study looking at cross-media consumption of ITV’s major TV properties including the X Factor and This Morning. Winners are announced in early December.

We hope to reveal a bit more about the study soon.

Ten years ago this week I started a job that was to change my life, heading up a new BBC audience research team in what was then called the ‘New Media’ division.

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 [...]

The Brandheld bandwagon continues to roll: The MRG has asked us to present the findings at their conference in Malta in November, which means that Simon gets to add another country to his list of ‘countries I’ve visited’ – of which there are currently 4.

This is all very exciting, but something of a pyrrhic victory as [...]