Panelists included Fran Kennish, Mediaedge: cia; Jon Mandel, Chairman/MediaCom US and Chief Global Buying Officer MediaCom Worldwide; Jessie B. Solomon, NSA Media and Barbara Zack, IAG Research. This panel tried to figure out ways research can move forward from today, filling in gaps in certain media, like magazines for example, where it is hard to track readership geographically and demographically. Do the buyers and advertisers trust the numbers? What can be done to make them more reliable?

Barbara Zack - One of the things she thinks needs to happen, and she's seen some indications that it is, is some of the advertisers are actually stepping up and engaging in dialogue to drive change, and force the rites of passage to happen. But that also includes willing to support and fund research: "We are in a bit of a conflict of interest here. We've got advertisers who for a long time have been pressing their agencies for lower and lower fees, which ends up eating into research first, because it is the least visible component. And yet, our roles are becoming more and more complex and we need to have smarter and better analytics. Yet they're not going to fund them."

A question was raised on whether going direct to set top box data, as coming off of cable and satellite DBS providers, could provide a reliable sample/survey, given it could use a larger sample. Panelists said it could be a step in the right direction; however, what they're looking for is who was watching, whether they were paying attention, and whether they remember any of it. All agreed, short of putting cameras on the heads of every viewer, like some of the gear the soldiers wear in Iraq, to measure attention paid, we may never get to that point.

Jon Mandel - Commented on how too much negative attention seems to be being paid to TV research: "We used to do research to learn something. Now it seems a lot of people use research to defend that what they did was OK...The way research is so focused on television, we trash TV. DVRs are coming. They will be in a huge percentage of homes in a number of years. Nobody is watching the commercials. Well, you know what? When you go to the Internet, people say there's a 1% click thru rate. It's accountable, great. So 1%-2% works. Nobody talks about the 98% online that don't respond, which is worse than TV. When you focus on television only, and when you focus on the bad of television, or even the bad of radio, instead of on the good-that advertising actually does work for all people, it's not [productive]."