Which future for market research companies?

This is an interesting question. I wanted to give you leads about a conference I attended with my master at Dauphine about a market research institue that was introducing its new way to evaluate a communication campaign. The institute reckons advertising efficiency has been diluted with the multi channels campaign. It is hard to know what created good brand image for a company, wheter it is the TV or radio ad, the Internet campaign or the public relation's one. Thus, they try to develop some new ways to estimate the value. Thus, they propose to a tester to sit in front of a computer equiped with a media center. Thanks to this process, the tester will see a TV show with ads, then will listen to radio, and read some news online. This procedure has been thought to estimate which media brought what results.

In my opinion, this is not the good solution. Indeed, it is very hard to evaluate a TV campaign impact, it will always be hard to. I don't think however to use the media center, because it is not the same thing to listen to the radio in the morning, then read the news paper at lunch and watch TV in a bed than to have all of that at the same time in front of a computer.

Therefore, this person has not convince me in any way. I still consider important to test campaigns, and also admit it will never be very sharp. That remain one of the main difference between Internet and media campaigns : results control.