Say no to ads

Last year's MRS conference saw a paper delivered by Geoff Bond and Steve Griggs about segmenting people in terms of their attitudes to TV advertising.

The paper caught the attention of two members of the audience, BRMB's John Samulels and Richard Salmon, who felt that the ideas put forward could impact greatly on media planning and certain aspects of the conduct of survey research. This being the case, they decided they were worthy of further study.

Back on the podium at this year's MRS conference, they delivered a follow-up paper focusing on advertising "Rejectors", those who are significantly more likely to think that TV advertising is annoying and devious, and significanlty less likely to find it interesting or entertaining. The other side of the coin was affected by the "TV Generation", who hold the reverse opinions.

Bond's paper suggested that Rejectors were massively under-represented in qualitative work concerned with advertising development and the TV Generation was massively over-represented. Samuels and Salmon wanted to find out, among other things, the demographic, attitudinal and media consumption characteristics of Rejectors, and whether print media would be a better vehicle than TV to reach them,

The relevance to the AQRP is that they also wante dto find out if we screen out Rejectors in groups. We have volunteered the services of ten organisations to help in this area. Our contention is that if Rejectors are not interested in advertising, they are of little interest to us and no help in the development process. Their view is that if they are screened out on a general basis, it makes our samples unrepresentative.

It is a debate that will run and run.