Johanna Blakley
Media | Entertainment | FashionArchive for Knight Foundation
Launching the Media Impact Project
Yesterday, I was very excited to launch the Media Impact Project, which aspires to be a global hub for the best research on measuring the impact of media. Supported by $3.25 million in initial funding from the Gates and Knight Foundations, I’m optimistic that the Norman Lear Center can help make media more accountable to audiences and contribute to a better understanding of the role that media plays in people’s lives.
The New York Times picked up the story and I was thrilled to see reporter Michael Cieply focus on this aspect of the program:
to provide tools on an “open-source” basis, putting socially minded nonprofit groups on a more equal footing with corporate advertisers, who use sophisticated, but expensive, measurements.
As Bill Gates pointed out recently in the Wall Street Journal, accurate measurement is the key to innovation. Without benchmarks, we don’t know where we’re going. Because media is such a pervasive presence in human life, we need reliable systems for measuring its impact. It’s difficult work, as our funders have pointed out, but with the rise of social media networks and the prospects of big data analysis the academy has an unprecedented opportunity to step up and to provide mechanisms for measurement untainted by profit motives.
The entertainment industry is notorious for adjusting its numbers to service an often inscrutable bottom line. And all of us – including everyone who variously produces or consumes media content – have been ill-served by cookie-cutter audience segmentation techniques and panel-based research methods that cannot account for what’s happening in the “long tail” of our global cultural economy. The insidious audience segmentation techniques that valorize age, race, gender and income over every other facet of human identity have contributed to a media system rife with stereotypes about how humans tick. (You can find out more about my thoughts on this in this TED talk.) The awe-inspiring data sets emerging from social media networks offer us the opportunity to understand ourselves, and our engagement with media, in a far more nuanced way.
My vision here? Ultimately, I want media makers to have the resources to make data-driven decisions. Rather than depending on their “gut” and random comments from their kids and colleagues, I want them to grapple with meaningful feedback information that demonstrates how real people have engaged with their work and what effects that interaction has produced.
I also want media makers to have a far more sophisticated and detailed understanding of their audience’s needs, values and taste. For me, it’s an issue of respect. I want our media environment to be respectful and responsive to the needs of global audiences, not just a few prized, but deeply misunderstood, demographic groups.
Interested in media impact? Follow the Media Impact Project on Twitter at @mediametrics and find us on Facebook.
Looking for a job? The Media Impact Project is hiring! Find out more.
How do you measure the impact of TED?
Not only do I get to go to TED this year (hooray!) but I also had the great pleasure of participating in a truly brain-tingling workshop whose goal was to help TED figure out how to better facilitate the spread of breakthrough ideas.
Of course everybody (and their mother) is obsessed with web analytics these days: how many hits did I get? How many likes? But media engagement pros (and the workshop was chock full of them) realize that counting clicks doesn’t really begin to tell the full story. Who’s clicking and why? Did they talk to their dad about that TED talk over breakfast? Did they laugh or cry? Did they feel empowered to do something? Did they make a donation? It can be really difficult to accurately measure the impact of any piece of media (including a TED video) without finding a way to bridge that daunting divide between online click trails and offline actions. One way to do it? Surveys!
I’m a big believer in supplementing rigorous web and social media analytics with survey research. And I’m an even bigger fan now that my team at the Lear Center has developed some innovative new methods for taking into account self-selection bias in media consumption (i.e., only certain people decide to see certain TED videos – there’s nothing random about it – which makes it tough to accurately measure impact).
So, imagine my delight when I heard that the Knight Foundation is partnering with TED to work on amplifying and measuring the impact of their content as it “ripples through society, producing technology tools and best practices for connected action.”
One key theme that emerged at the workshop this weekend was the importance of sharing the discoveries that TED will make when they develop their new kick-ass website and state of the art dashboards for tracking engagement. Information is power and nothing is more empowering to an engaged audience than access to information about how their beloved TED talks, along with all the content and actions that they themselves have generated, are moving the needle.
I’m looking forward to what comes of this . . . stay tuned!
If you’re at TED2013, be sure to check out the Knight-sponsored pavilion centered on Tech for Engagement.
