Sequent Partners and Mike Bloxham began to collaborate after the first of Ball State University's Middletown Media Studies had begun to attract industry attention. As the first major piece of cross-media observational research conducted in many years, it was unique in addressing the full array of media consumed in the average person's day wherever they went. It was fully consumer-centric.
In 2005, Sequent Partners became the first Industry Research Fellows appointed by the Center for Media Design (CMD) at Ball State and from then on worked closely with Bloxham and his team (notably Professor Michael Holmes, the Associate Director, Insight & Research who remains the key methodologist at the CMD) on the continual refinement of the method and the development of a range of research initiatives and industry partnerships.
Projects they have collaborated on include the second of the Middletown Media Studies, the Media Acceleration Project and the Video Consumer Mapping Study, a multi-million dollar media cross-media consumption study, funded by the Nielsen-funded Council for Research Excellence. Their collaboration has contributed to the publication of a number of White Papers (again with Professor Michael Holmes of Ball State University) and conference presentations. The success of this close working relationship set the scene for the establishment of The Media Behavior Institute. Two other working partnerships dramatically built on this foundation to position MBI in a particularly strong position: the exclusive licensing agreement which started in mid-2008 with IPA to bring TouchPoints into the USA and the strategic partnership starting in early 2010 with Mediamark (MRI).
