Thoughtpiece - Is Research Keeping up with Technology?

In the 1990s, media fragmentation was characterised by a growth in media choice - more TV and radio stations, more magazines, more of everything. In the current decade fragmentation has crossed media platforms - it is possible to listen to the radio on a TV, to watch TV on a mobile phone and to access the internet from anywhere. Media owners are increasingly running businesses that span more than one medium and they want to measure them all. This rapid pace of change in media consumption has placed increasing demands on the measurement systems that already exist. The quantification of fragmenting and diversifying markets present real challenges, something which has recently been described by Erwin Ephron in his blog as "trying to count grains of sand with your fingers".