Data mining

The news that the BBC is planning to spend £50m finding out what its audience wants raised eyebrows at the start of last month. Director of Audiences Nick North made a rare visit to Linkedin, which has started a long-running thread of point-scoring by marketing and research types around the globe. 

Nick said "For the record, we've found that looking at our spend as a proportion of our total income is a useful benchmark, to enable us to compare the efficiency and effectiveness of our spend against other public service media organisations.

Measuring and understanding all audiences' attitudes and media choices across the ever changing competitive set, across all of the UK, certainly costs money, but is vital to ensure that the BBC delivers value to all licence fee paying households."

So the BBC is out to tender for four-year contracts. The biggest is the "Continuous Tracking Studies Research" - "integrating behavioural (use and consumption) and perception (experience / satisfaction) and applying a leading edge of technological development in data collection and processing and brand tracking studies. Total value of £42,100,000."

For slightly less money, I've been researching Mr North's media tastes: He's a fan of Now That's What I Call Music 48, the ABBA museum in Stockholm, 80s reggae and cycling.