Ipsos UK and Lumi Mobile have picked up the inaugural MRC (Mobile Research Conference) Award for their project ‘APPCAST: Live mobile engagement & insights – I’m having fun, can this really be research?’
The key goal of the Appcast project was to develop a research method that supplies clients with rich research insight and increases participants’ enjoyment of the experience. Taking full advantage of mobile phones and tablets to provide instant feedback on live TV broadcasts, the project produced powerful results for the ABC Network during the 2011 Oscars. Over 75 per cent of those who started the research event were still participating more than three hours later. And more than 75 per cent agreed it improved their TV watching experience. Furthermore, ABC Network issued Oscar press releases less than 24 hours after the end of the broadcast, extolling the valuable insight they had gained through the research.
“We introduced the awards programme to the MRC this year to encourage and recognize innovation in conducting market research through mobile devices,” says Lorenz Graef, CEO of Globalpark, which sponsors and organizes the Mobile Research Conference. “We were not disappointed. The winner and finalists clearly demonstrated what can be achieved through mobile research; how research boundaries can be pushed and its challenges surmounted.”
The Globalpark MRC Programme and Awards Committee were so impressed by the standard of the shortlisted entries that they awarded an Honourable Mention to two finalists and identified a runner-up as well. 
The runner-up award went to The Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex for its ‘Good Quality Mobile Panels: Possibilities and Pitfalls’ study, which evaluated the prospects for high quality mobile panels of the general population.
The first Honourable Mention went to The Nielsen Company and Techneos for its ‘Using Mobile Digital Ethnography to Measure the 2010 World Cup’ study, which used BlackBerry smartphones to measure the engagement, media consumption, and brand purchasing/awareness of S. Africans throughout the 2010 FIFA World Cup.
The second went to Zokem for ‘Providing a 360-degree view on the mobile medium with on-device measurements: a case study with music copyright society teosto’. The goal of this ongoing study is to overcome some of the limitations of the current industry standard for mobile audience measurement and to understand how people engage with mobile media, both online and offline, what services and content are consumed and where, how consumption changes based on different contexts, and how consumption changes over time.
There’s more information about the MRC Awards here.
