So you can communicate with them but how many of them are there?

At the UK Media Research Group conference held in November 2004 in Madrid, out of the 25 papers presented, well over half were not about media research at all. The winning paper, entitled “Influencing Consumer Decisions� was a hypothesis dealing in psychological terms with the process of decision-making, contrasting the “social cognition approach� with the “behavioural decision theory approach� but quite how it helped a busy media planner select an optimum schedule from a large number of candidate media was not explained. Furthermore, the keynote speaker, the chief executive of a very large media services company, complained that “media research currencies are ‘commoditising’ (sic) media� and pleaded for “a world without trading currencies� and “media research that focuses on communication effectiveness�. He finished by suggesting that the name of the Media Research Group, that has been providing a forum for discussion of media research issues for 40 years, should be changed to the “Communication Research Group�. While the formation of a separate group to discuss communication research might indeed be of interest, communication research is not the same as media research and it is alarming to find that the CEO of a large media services company either thinks that it is or thinks that quantitative media research is not important at all.

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