Managing change and maintaining quality maintaining quality in the rapidly changing, cost pressured media measurement landscape

Many people have heard the old cliché “be careful what you wish for.� In many ways, the authors of this paper believe we are
entering the “be careful what you wish for� era of media research. Long-standing media consumption habits of the population
have always changed gradually as new technology and lifestyles are assimilated. However, technology building upon
technology, enabled by rapid successive innovations in communication, data processing and storage functionality, are leading to
significantly accelerated options for how consumers can consume media and significantly lower price points for media with
broad appeal.
Consumers, particularly young and young ethnic consumers, in the U.S. are embracing these changes in a manner that many are
studying, but few truly understand. It is clear that multi-tasking, mobile, Internet, interactive, digital, on-demand and the
consumer electronics facilitating these technologies and usages are changing the way media is consumed in the U.S. – so not
only can consumers acquire this content, for example new ways of accessing the written word, but they are using these methods
in growing numbers. Many young consumers are less familiar with the concept of reading a daily newspaper or a weekly news
magazine (as compared, for example, to accessing the publication’s web site, a news portal, or social networking), and many
likewise don’t understand the concept of conventional radio listening (as compared to their MP3 player or Internet streaming).

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