On the Intersection of Media Studies and Market Research: Exploring the Exchange Between Academia and Business

The SCMS Professional Development Committee has asked me to consider the opportunities for Film and Television Studies doctorates for work in the so-called "media industries." Immediately betraying my own academic roots, I must start this project with a series of caveats, large and small. The largest caveat is that I must situate all my comments and analysis within the very specific world of "market research" within the media industries. It's the region of the bulk of my own work within the industry, and I feel that it would be disingenuous to extrapolate to other areas within the media industries (such as production, distribution, new product development, and finance). While there is certainly movement between market research and these allied areas, most media researchers stay within the boundaries of marketing, occasionally venturing into the closest allied fields of creative advertising, marketing strategy, and media planning.

Market research occupies a particular niche within the media industries: closer to the "technical" field of finance and further from the creative fields of production and development. Compared to the worlds of consumer packaged goods, market research is considered to be an imperfect fit by many for the media industries. Creative executives often chafe at the idea of considering consumer insights about their film, TV, and multimedia products. Nevertheless, insights from market research inform a variety of levels within the media industries: from market sizing to pilot testing and ad testing. The world of media market research operates along two sets of axes: quantitative/qualitative research and client/supplier affiliation. Generally, most media market research divides into two functional areas: quantitative research (large-sample testing through online, phone, or occasionally mail surveys) and qualitative research (small-sample projects including focus groups, in-depth interviews, ethnographies, and usability testing). These projects are usually serviced directly by suppliers for clients, although, in the recession, more market research is being conducted in-house by clients rather than outsourced. So, keep in mind that my own boundaries and my analysis are set by media market research within the realm of marketing.

Further, I want to stress that my comments are, first and foremost, driven by my own direct experience from both fields: market research and academia. Anyone seeking advice through an informational interview in the media industries soon discovers that almost all "objective advice" is filtered through the prism of personal experience and lived history. Rather than hide this tendency, I want to foreground it, with the hope that my personal experience may be useful to others in traversing these fields.

Media Economics: Another Time, Another Place.

My own academic training encompasses both Economics (BA degree at the University of British Columbia) and Film and Television Studies (MA and PhD degrees at the University of California-Los Angeles [UCLA]). In large part, my academic and media industry career has been an attempt to reconcile the diverse learning from these fields. The differences are readily apparent, but the similarities may not be so visible. My economics training was focused strongly on neoclassical microeconomics, centered on the theory of the consumer, the producer, and the marketplace. Built around a fixed set of objectives (maximize profit or utility), agents (consumers, producers), and interactions (production, consumption, exchange), neoclassical economics posits a worldview that is inherently narrative in nature: everyone has goals, and these are met, as closely as possible, through trade and exchange. Consider, for instance, the construct of the "Invisible Hand"—the notion that consumers acting selfishly toward their end goals leads to resources being put to their best use and prices being set to clear the market. Rather than leave the concept abstract, the name gives it a strongly visual presence and encourages the narrative of economic theory. The pioneering work of Deirdre McCloskey considers this characterization of economic theory through the rhetoric used by economists to build their arguments, theories, and tenets. McCloskey's work demonstrates how my interest in economics and in narrative and storytelling dovetailed. I discovered the world of Film and Television Studies, then, through model building, albeit models encapsulating the...