What we never discuss.

The Entertainment Audience Research Association and its Next Practice program operate in full compliance with the antitrust laws of the United States, including the Sherman Act, and with the competition laws of every jurisdiction its members work in. This policy applies in every association setting: the monthly calls, the in-person meetings, the Discord server, member polls, publications, and side conversations at association events. There is no setting where it does not apply.

Associations of professionals from competing companies are lawful and common. What the law prohibits is using one as a vehicle for agreements that restrain competition: fixing prices, dividing markets, coordinating against suppliers or employees. The association’s purpose is the craft of audience research, and this policy keeps every exchange on that side of the line.

The following are off the table in every association setting, with no exceptions:

• Prices and rates. What anyone charges or pays: project pricing, vendor rates, panel costs, license fees, budgets, discounts, or payment terms.
• Compensation and hiring. Salaries, benefits, or hiring plans, and any understanding about not recruiting or hiring another organization’s people.
• Markets and customers. Dividing or allocating markets, clients, territories, or projects, or coordinating who pursues what.
• Collective refusals. Agreeing together not to work with any vendor, platform, supplier, or client. Individual experience with a tool may be shared; a joint decision to avoid one may not be made.
• Bids and procurement. Current or planned bids, RFP responses, or procurement intentions.
• Competitively sensitive information. Costs, margins, contract terms, strategic plans, release plans, or anything unreleased and confidential. If your legal team would flinch, it does not belong here.

Members compare professional practice: research methods and their tradeoffs, experience with tools and workflows including what failed, navigating privacy review and legal approval in general terms, published or properly aggregated industry information, and the development of the profession itself. Discussing whether a method holds up is the association working as intended. Discussing what anyone pays for it is prohibited by section 03.

• Member polls are anonymous, reported only in aggregate, and subject to a five-response floor.
• Polls and publications never collect or report current or forward-looking commercial data: no prices, no costs, no budgets, no bids.
• Publications report the state of practice across the membership and never identify a member or a member’s employer.

The rules are restated in thirty seconds at the open of every session. Sessions follow a set agenda of open professional questions. If a discussion moves toward anything in section 03, any member should say so and stop it. If it continues, leave, say why, and report it to the Chair. Sessions are never recorded, and that changes nothing: the rules apply identically in unrecorded settings.

The association does not endorse vendors, does not negotiate or purchase collectively on behalf of members, and does not rank or certify providers. If the association accepts sponsorship, sponsorship buys no influence over the agenda, admissions, or publications.

Admissions run on published, objective criteria, applied uniformly, including the vendor rule. Membership decisions are never used to disadvantage anyone competitively, and no one is excluded to protect any member’s commercial position.

The discussion stops, the moment it is recognized. Violations are handled under the member agreement, which carries the enforcement details. Antitrust violations can also carry personal civil and criminal exposure entirely outside the association, which is why this policy is applied without exceptions.

When in doubt, ask before raising something in a session: hello@nextpracticeassociation.org. An honest question ahead of time costs nothing.