NOP: a brief history

National Opinion Polls was created in 1957 as a unit of the Associated Newspapers group, publishers of the Daily Mail, to enable that paper to conduct its own political opinion surveys. It was the brainchild of Associated’s research manager, Mick Shields, later to become its Advertisement Director, then Managing Director.

Subsequently Shields hired statistician Peter Hyett to run the new unit and build it into a proper research agency. Hyett in turn recruited two managers, John Barter and Frank Teer, who had previously been respectively an accountant and a tax inspector. The four were linked by having all attended the London School of Economics.

In 1966, the year the agency was officially renamed NOP Market Research, Hyett departed, and Barter and Teer became joint Managing Directors. Six years later Teer left to be the first head of RSGB, the ad hoc research division of London-based AGB, which was to become Europe’s largest MR company. Barter remained as sole Managing Director for 19 more years until his retirement in 1991.

During those years NOP matured into one of the UK’s largest MR undertakings. Along the way it created several subsidiaries, including Survey Research Associates, set up in 1978 with Ivor Stocker as Managing Director. Earlier, in 1969, NOP had gone 50-50 with US agency ORC in funding MORI, which Robert Worcester came from the US to run. Worcester eventually bought out both parents, but NOP retained a share in MORI until 1984.

NOP was always mainly concerned with ad hoc research, seen as less lucrative than the continuous market measurement operations of AGB and AC Nielsen. Nevertheless it was financially strong enough for Associated Newspapers to decide in the 1980s to float it off as a separate publicly quoted company. This is what would have happened had it not been for the premature death of Shields.

Associated then changed its plans and offered NOP for sale. Enter Clive Hollick, Chief Executive of a company called then MAI but later to change its name to United Business Media. Hollick, with a merchant banking background, had begun to take an interest in the research industry in 1978 when he funded the creation of Mediamark Research Inc (MRI) in the US.

During the 1980s Hollick had come close to gaining control also of AGB and of Taylor Nelson, but in the case of AGB he was pipped at the post by Robert Maxwell while Taylor Nelson’s management managed to beat him off with the financial help of Jean-Louis Croquet, boss of French research agency Motivaction. Ironically TN bought the UK assets of AGB after Maxwell’s death and became TNS, the research giant Hollick wanted but failed to get.

After NOP in 1989, Hollick bought MIL, another UK research agency of about the same size but greater profitability. The two were merged as MAI Market Research, but later the better known brand name NOP was brought back for the merged company in the form of NOP World.

In 2005, the year of Hollick’s retirement, NOP World, now the ninth largest market research agency globally, was again put up for sale. The company was acquired by German based agency GfK, for a record £383 million. The successful integration of NOP World has since given the GfK Group fourth place in the list of major global market research organisations. The GfK Group has 13 subsidiaries in Germany and a total of more than 130 companies in over 70 countries throughout the world. Of the more than 7,700 employees, around 80% work outside Germany.