Dr. Duane Varan

Once upon a time, the media landscape was remarkably stable. Suddenly, however, innovation is perpetual.

Content is constantly taking new forms, transcending ‘programs’ to a near-endless array of opportunities competing for their attention.

Never before has the need for high-quality insight played a more critical role in guiding us through the changing landscape. Simply relying on cookie-cutter data while fitting our needs to generic and common measures clearly won’t suffice. Now, more than ever, we need best-in-class measures designed to address our specific communication objectives.

We have heard our calling. At MediaScience, we don’t think of ourselves as a mere business – we think of ourselves as part of a movement seeking to elevate the very atmosphere in which media and marketing research is conducted. Our goal is to help match specific communication needs to the best measures for each of those objectives.

This requires measuring human emotion. Because people can only tell you about the rational interpretation of their own emotional journeys, all self-report data (whether survey, interview, focus group, etc.) on human emotion is inherently flawed. People lack direct access to their own emotional encounters. Accordingly, it is critical that we measure human emotion directly – and this is something which MediaScience has excelled at – drawing on skin conductivity, heart rate, facial expression analysis, eye tracking, and even EEG.

It’s important for measurement to be done at a highly granular level – so that data can be aligned to the manner in which consumers experience content at the second-by-second level. And, of course, where possible, it’s best to facilitate such research in a controlled environment where variables can be isolated to better understand their effects. In this way, by drawing on the power of the scientific method, we not only know what impact content has; but more importantly… we understand the why.

Facilitating such research requires a high level of innovation – across all parts of the research value chain: From software programming to properly provide the right test environment (enabling digital ad insertion, for example, in respondent’s native social media feeds), to properly collecting data (making the experience as natural as possible) to analyzing data quickly and accurately using best-in-class algorithms that properly address the complexities of human physiological differences. In our domain, no company has been more innovative than MediaScience in responding to the challenges of the new media landscape in a credible path grounded in science.

And so we hope you’ll join us in our movement! We look forward to collaborating together in pioneering new frontiers. These are, undoubtedly, challenging times – but it’s in those times that the greatest opportunities are forged.

Dr. Duane Varan
Founder & CEO