CASE STUDY
Rethinking What “Losing Relevance” Really Meant for MTV
By 2010, the media landscape was moving fast. New digital music channels were emerging, and MTV was picking up an uncomfortable signal from conventional research: surveys and focus groups suggested the brand was losing relevance with younger audiences and risked being overtaken by newer platforms.
The findings were worrying. MTV looked out of touch with youth, at exactly the moment the digital explosion was gathering pace. But the team wasn’t convinced these conclusions reflected how young people actually felt.
MTV decided to look beyond self-report methods and find a more direct way of understanding genuine audience sentiment.
Three of the Split Second Research team were involved in what was, at the time, the largest multinational study of implicit attitudes toward a major media brand. Using implicit response-latency tasks, designed to capture instinctive, System 1 reactions, we measured emotional engagement with MTV and its competitors across ten countries.
The study involved 2,528 respondents aged 14 to 24 in the UK, Mexico, Sweden, the Netherlands, South Korea, France, Poland, Italy, Australia and Denmark.
The results told a very different story from the earlier research. Across every market tested, young people were more emotionally attached to MTV than to any other international media brand. They associated it with being forward-thinking, engaging, enjoyable, dependable, trendy and unique which is hardly the picture of a brand in decline.
Two other things stood out:
Far from falling behind, MTV was well positioned for a digital future and audiences were already there, just expressing their attachment in new ways. These findings gave the brand the confidence to double down on its multi-platform strategy, and the growth that followed proved it.
When conventional research said decline, implicit research found something else entirely: a deep emotional connection that standard methods weren’t built to detect.
The research was published in the International Journal of Market Research.
FROM THE CLIENT
Client Feedback
Using neuropsychological research techniques enabled MTV to understand the deep emotional drivers of its consumers for the first time. The insights – both explicit and implicit – have been embedded into our marketing, communication and creative strategies, as well as helping to inform specific measures for multiplatform campaign reporting for clients of MTV.
We have since conducted other projects that have employed neuropsychological techniques and continue to utilise these types of tools to inspire our consumer understanding to better support the goals of the wider business.
Helen Rose, MTV's insight director
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