By Jeffrey Henning

“Please send us a photo of you placing your pad onto your panties.”

No, that’s not some sick new fetish, but an honest and important research request from Proctor & Gamble for its Always line of feminine hygiene products. And a clear demonstration of the intimacy and comfort that research participants have with their smart phones.

And frankly it is a much less obnoxious request than P&G’s traditional technique: wear these panties we send you, freeze your used pad, then after it has frozen send it to us in this biohazard packaging…

To process those submissions, P&G then needed a biohazard protocol. You can imagine that given the cost and challenge and time delay of this data collection method they were eager for alternatives.

Sion Agami, a research fellow at P&G, and Rick West, of Field Agent, shared the results of this intimate case study today at the Insights Innovation Exchange in Philadelphia.

P&G had three key objectives:

1. learn from women at “relevant moments”
2. leverage new technology
3. stay current with consumer trends

As Sion said, “We don’t know what we don’t know.” They certainly expected to learn something new from this research — if it even worked.

People are used to taking photos with their smart phones. They are used to sharing those photos from their phones. And, even if they don’t admit it, they take those phones with them into the bathroom. Field Agent simply leveraged these behaviors to answer a very personal and private research question.

But would Field Agent panelists, who are typically paid to take photos of products on shelves at retail outlets and to take pictures of their use of products, be willing to provide such personal photos?

In fact, they were, submitting 8,000 photos, of new pads being placed, and used pads before being replaced.

While in earlier research only 4% of women said they placed their pad at the narrowest point of their panties, the photos revealed that 45% actually did so — a huge disconnect between stated behavior and observed behavior. Participants hadn’t been lying, so much as inaccurately reporting a behavior done by habit.

The results were startling — the traditional model of use of feminine hygiene products involved pad absorbency plus pad fit plus pad comfort. They completely missed the importance of pad placement, which ended up being responsible for 25% of the performance of their product.

How revolutionary were these findings in the domain of feminine hygiene?

P&G applied for two patents based on the findings.

Clearly, mobile crowdsourcing such as Field Agent opens up research that might have formerly been considered off limits.

P&G rewarded Field Agent with a follow-on project.

Why toilets clog.

By Jeffrey Henning

Ari Popper led a panel discussion on data philanthropy with Todd Cunningham, Robert Foster, Prasanna Lal Das, Snorri H. Gudmundsson, Kyle Nel and Eric Meerkamper. “Data philanthropy can totally change the world. It is a radical idea, and a controversial idea,” began Ari.

Erik of RIWI said, “Data philanthropy is repurposing data for social good.” Pre-empting concerns about confidentiality, Eric said, “1% of data is competitive, 9% your competitors already know, and 90% is noise to you. You might have data that you think is junk that is valuable to others. A lot of initiatives don’t need personal customer information.”

What’s in it for corporations? A chance to collaborate with groups that might not otherwise be accessible. Kyle said, “We came to a realization that we didn’t individually have enough resources or brain power to understand things fully, so we needed partners, we needed to find other people to work with. When you bring other people together you realize that we are working towards the same basic goal of making people’s lives better, in our own different ways.” Kyle said that to propose their data initiative he focused on what it would cost, what would be required, and what Lowes would get as a result. “We found that this is more valuable than going the traditional route. The term data philanthropy needs help because it is not just about giving it is about collaboration. It needs some rebranding.” He also said that there were times that not taking any risks was in itself a risk: data philanthropy is a risk worth taking.

Todd gave the example of when he was at Viacom forming a partnership with government organizations and advocacy groups looking to minimize teen pregnancies. This led to the data-informed creation of shows like “16 and Pregnant” based on what teens and young adults wanted to watch on TV. Teen pregnancy is lower than it has been in years, and Todd would like to think their work was a small part of that success.

Prasanna of the World Bank said, “We opened up everything we know and every instrument we make around the world, with all the data collection. We tried to take the whole notion of data philanthropy not for philanthropy’s sake but to achieve a goal of solving problems for which we need more data. For instance, for poverty measurement, we find things around the world, and try to figure out how we can measure that in real time at a local level.”

Eric said, “Data is valuable when you have it, but there is other data that is more valuable when other people have it. Last week we intercepted 7,000 people in China to map the spread of flu. We know more and more about things: as insight groups we can have a big impact.”

Robert Foster of AMP said, “Data philanthropy is the path that data takes from information to knowledge to wisdom. We need knowledge to make decisions: sitting alone in a vacuum we will not be able to answer these very difficult social questions. These are very complex situations, so a variety of data sets are needed for innovation.” He shared the example of a classmate taking data about the ocean and using it to develop a predictive model of where cholera would break out.

Snorri Gudmundsson of the Iceland Development Agency said, “Open data is big, big issue. The European Union is launching a fund, Horizon 2020, to allocate for the development of open and linked data to increase Europe’s competitiveness. It will allocate 80 billion Euros. There are a lot of potential partnerships for firms on both sides of the Atlantic.”

Eric said, “Taking the angle of the small organization, if data is the new asset class, we are sitting on a gold mine. Data is also a liability when it is very difficult to know what to do with it. Find a cause people believe in and contribute in ways no one else can: come into this to really discover things and to have a really profound impact. Writing in the Wall Street Journal two months ago, Bill Gates said that the one thing he is focusing on is the efficient allocation of resources and, if do this well, we will save the world through data.”

By Dana Stanley

This morning Imran Anwar of Microsoft helped set the stage for Day 2 at the Insight Innovation eXchange event in Philadelphia with a thoughtful analysis of disruptive innovation in the past, present and future.

Anwar has a long background promoting technology progress. He currently holds the impressive title of Director, Enterprise Architecture, Cloud Computing, Strategy Consulting & Services at Microsoft. As he was introduced to the crowd it was noted that Anwar is considered the “Father of the Internet” in Pakistan.

Anwar has tracked the priorities of enterprise CXOs and observed that they increasingly recognize the need for innovation.

He reviewed the evolution of technology analytics “power tools” – from mainframes in the ‘60s and ‘70s, to the PC and applications in the early ‘80s, to client/server in the mid-80’s, to the internet in the mid ‘90s, to cloud computing in the 2000s. As for the future, he listed a number of important tools, including smart phones, RFID, Square, social, mobile, XASH, micropayments, location and sentiment analysis.

Anwar said an age of disruption happens about every 10 years, but that what his happening now is particularly exciting – and scary. The pace, quality and range of innovation are exploding, and developments in industry X affect industry Y. The development of Gorilla Glass which is used in smartphones is an example of such cross-industry innovation.

He noted that in recent years there has been a “convergence of convergence” – that tools which facilitate convergence have themselves converged to form new tools. He gave as an example cloud computing, which resulted from the convergence of increased computing power, network bandwidth, cheap storage and virtualization.

Another factor in innovation that Anwar mentioned was what he called “Mobilization Globalization, Globalization Mobilization.” The internet is everywhere and is untethered due to the explosion in the number of mobile devices. He mentioned that in some parts of the world illiterate people are using mobile phones to send text messages, inventing codes for a number of things that are normally spoken.

To the common list of four megatrends – mobility, cloud, social and big data – Anwar added a fifth – micropayments, which he indicated will make it possible to monetize nearly anything.

He concluded by urging the attendees in the room to continue to aggressively push innovation forward.

By Jeffrey Henning

The presentation round of the Insight Innovation Competition today in Philadelphia involved 5 minute pitches from a variety of finalists, who then had to answer the judges’ questions. The judges will announce the winner tomorrow at 2 pm.

Turning Emotion into Smart Decisions at Scale
Tim Llewellynn of Inviso discussed an online platform for turning emotion into smart decisions. Based on a 12-year research program on improving human-computer interaction, tested with over 1 million subjects worldwide, Inviso can recognize displays of emotion by focusing on the face in real time, passively, using webcams. It combines cultural understanding of facial expressions as well as universals. It successfully processes out data noise introduced by real world issues such as bad lighting and participants touching their faces. The Inviso solution is available on an ad hoc basis and via subscription; Inviso has 20 to 30 global clients and has run in 20 countries worldwide. It is marketed as a tool that integrates with larger research efforts. Their primary competition is the industry’s reliance on post-rationalization of emotions though questions. Their sweet spot is serving market research agencies for validating concept work in the early stage of video development.

RetailSenses – Optimizing Digital Signage with Automated In-store Eye Tracking
Sean Copeland of Abacus Data shared a story of a quick serve restaurant owner trying to understand how changing to digital menu boards affected purchases. The system, in prototype form today, is designed to optimize digital signage with automated in-store eye tracking, which measures gaze across multiple screens from 10 to 15 feet away without changing the purchase experience. RetailSenses can optimize the digital menu board to catch customer attention, to make it easier to order and to emphasize specific items. Abacus Data is seeking new funding to work on development, to do an in-store pilot, for server software development, and for marketing and sales. The prototype is currently designed for ad hoc work, but the team would like to develop it as permanent installation, as many digital boards are being changed all the time with new products and new promotions. The output takes the form of heat maps and trail maps, showing where they looked first, second, and third; a full bodied data set combined with time-stamped sales data provides even sharper insights.

The “Pop-Up CLT” for 1:1 Consumer-Product Testing – Andrea Poe from Tastemakers Research Group touted the only offline research innovation in the competition (though it too has an online component). Rather than do Central Location Testing through a fixed location, pop-up crowd intercepts are staged at events. It is “both high touch and high tech, resulting in better, faster and cheaper product testing for companies with all sizes of research budgets.” Participants experience a product and then complete a self-administered survey on a laptop (using Qualtrics). The format supports the completion of up to several hundred quantitative consumer surveys per day, with qualitative insights and a topline report available within 24 hours of testing. The format is engaging, with a drop-out rate less than 5% . The service eliminates the overhead of CLT facilities, replacing it with low venue fees. One advantage over online surveys is tighter control of intellectual property, since the product being evaluated is never represented online.

AnswerTap – Zach Simmons and Jim Longo from AnswerTap had noticed that market penetration of online qualitative has not achieved the same results as online quantitative. The main pain points for researchers were that existing methods were too expensive, too slow, and too logistically cumbersome: requiring a lot of 3rd party management and coordination, they could take up to 3 or 4 weeks. AnswerTap provides self-service fulfillment of In Depth Interviews and group interviews — simply define a target market, which recruits respondents from a 9-million member panel to live webcam interviews and video chat sessions, and the system handles scheduling, the event itself and immediately produces audio transcripts (keyword searchable) that are time-synced to the video. A clipping tool makes it easy to share project video with colleagues and clients anywhere, anytime. A project with 10 interviews can be completed in 2 days for $990 using panel, $690 if the client provides the potential people to be interviewed. Rather than competing with existing qualitative vendors, Jim believes AnswerTap will dramatically expand the market for qualitative research by reducing recruiting time, technological barriers and behavioral behaviors.

RawData – Mobile Metering and Surveying – Chad Nuesmeyer from Raw Data provides passive data collection using smart phones. For instance, how many people change the station when a particular radio ad comes on? The audio and ambient data stream collected by Raw Data can be analyzed for events such as this. The technology has been running in a single DMA for ad agencies and broadcasters using a panel of 1,500 consumers who are offered $40 per month towards an unlimited calling plan for their smart phones. The impact of the passive data collection app on battery life is 5-7%, less than the impact of Pandora. The data is being monetized through subscriptions to the passive data stream and for active inquiry. Raw Data has a good relationship with carriers, who are not interested in entering the business itself because of privacy restrictions; Sprint did an audit on Raw Data and began using the service. Raw Data is looking to raise funding for rapid expansion: “We are not satisfied to grow business through single DMA to DMA: we want to grow nationally.”

RIWI Nano-Survey Technology — Neil Seeman and Eric Meerkamper offered a new, randomized, fresh, unincented and scalage stream of respondents in every country in the world except North Korea. RIWI (an acronym for Real-time Interactive Worldwide Intelligence) was incubated at the University of Toronto for NGO pandemic detection and has been peer reviewed. “We are profitable and are on a tremendously exciting journey, given that we have only been commercializing for 12 months,” said Neal. The randomization comes from leveraging the Internet’s architecture, the direct navigation bar, to capturing millions of people on every web enabled device who mistype a URL and end up at a site offering a RIWI survey instead (the company has a patent on the process). RIWI was the only research firm to predict the Egyptian election, using a mobile survey completed by 10,000 Egyptians. Surveys are typically 4 to 9 questions long.

One lucky firm will become the winner tomorrow.

By Jeffrey Henning

Jasmeet Sethi, a regional manager of consumer insights for Ericsson, based in India, framed his presentation around a quote from Soumitra Dutta of Cornell University: “Innovation happens in two situations — either you’re desperate or you’re inspired!”

Jasmeet said, “This is very apt if you look at what we are doing today. We are all desperate to make an impact on our business.” Jasmeet decided to illustrate the quote by sharing a day in his life when he was doing field research in India and a day in his life with his nephew.

Innovate through desperation

Ericsson was running a series of focus groups with farmers in the south of India to better understand the impact of mobile phones and the Internet on them. These are rural settings, without focus group facilities, so in one village they arranged to hold the focus group in a classroom at a school. Of 8 participants who were invited, only 2 showed up. The research firm said that it was peak sowing season, making it hard for farmers to have the spare time to meet. Disappointment and desperation.

As Jasmeet was leaving the village, a priest struck up a conversation with him asking what he was doing; after a brief explanation, the priest invited Jasmeet to use the temple for the focus group. “We invited 8 people, and had 25 people turn up!” Jasmeet continued, “Why did more people turn up? When the research team recruited participants, the participants felt they could not say no to going to the temple, that would have been disrespectful. So now we know temples are the best place for focus groups!”

Consumers are innovating through desperation as well. In this village, they don’t have a constant power supply and when they do it is of inconsistent capacity. A 14-year old boy sells charging services for mobile phones, sells prepaid phones and has “batteries that people can hire.” It was over 100 degrees when Jasmeet was visiting, and the heat and inconsistent power were making his adapter overheat and his computer behave abnormally. His research supplier gave him a bottle of water, “ties the bottle of water to the adapter, and it bloody works!”

“These are examples of the ingenuity of our consumers in these markets, and we have to find our own ways. Let us do more with less.”

Innovate through choice

“Where do good ideas come from? Where do my ideas come from?” Today’s biggest superhero is Iron Man, but Jasmeet’s superhero is his 12-year old nephew. “His superpowers include: sniff food prepared miles away, see traffic jams two miles ahead and hear the falsehoods in the voice of people.” He recently took Jasmeet to an excellent restaurant neither had ever been to, warned him of a long traffic jam that would affect his schedule, and found a shopkeeper with a $50 lower price on the same merchandise. He did this all using apps that he had downloaded for his smart phone: a restaurant finder, a navigation app, and a shopping comparison app.

Jasmeet said of his nephew, “Here is a guy, an early adopter, let me capitalize on this opportunity.” So he asked his nephew “What is your experience with mobile internet?” His nephew than shared the question on WhatsApp with his friends. Jasmeet was so impressed by the results, that he decided to do a research project using WhatsApp. “This is where consumers are, can we be there?” he asked his research firm. “Can we do something with WhatsApp? Of course, when you go to the agency and tell them you want to do something like this, they say it is unprofessional, amateur, not methodical. But a week later they said ‘we will do this for you’. They realized there was an opportunity of being part of something new.”

Jasmeet said, “We took research to the cloud, reaching 50 people across India. We chose to be frugal by choice. They were able to share updates, what they were experiencing in the moment. Of course there are a lot of issues with this methodology but it works for us.” The research agency nows offers WhatsApp projects as a service.

Just innovate!

Jasmeet concluded by asking, “Have we forgotten how to innovate outside of our codified bast-practice models? We need to consistently innovate
and have some level of the frugality market mindset. Forget ‘Perform or perish!’ No, it’s ‘Innovate or abdicate!’ Innovate or give up — be frugal by choice or by necessity.”

By Jeffrey Henning

Charles Trevail, CEO of Promise Communities, discussed inspiring the future at the GreenBook Insight Innovation Exchange in Philadelphia. “The old view was that as long as we had a genius as CEO, we would be led into the future.” Think Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffet. “But 95% of organizations don’t have that kind of CEO, so we need to do innovation differently.”

When there is more choice than ever for consumers, more fast followers among suppliers, consumers are in charge and more and more demanding. “They want to be engaged in the way they want be engaged. They can buy whatever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want.” Industries are shifting from the manufacturer being in charge to the consumer being in charge.

Given these conditions, “Most of us are looking to answer the question, ‘How can you build temporary monopolies?’”

“When 90% of the world’s data will be created in the next two 2 years [according to Gartner], we are progressively becoming more ignorant.” And one area where organizations are almost willfully ignorant is about creating value for customers. “We know an awful lot about our products, what people think about our products, what our finances are, but we don’t know enough about creating value in customer’s lives.”

“When it comes to customers, feelings are facts. Executives don’t like dealing with messy feelings but to consumers feelings are facts. We make nearly all the decisions in our lives based on feelings. Human beings are based on emotion … how do we understand people’s motivation and feelings when there is no time to think? When you stop talking about yourself and start listening really hard to what consumers are looking for, that is when breakthroughs happens.”

Charles shared five ways to break through to true innovation:

1. By creating real relationships. “You need to approach the consumer with empathy, humility and curiosity.” Charles shared photos of a hospital in Detroit, the Henry Ford West Bloomfield Hospital, which looks more like a resort than a hospital. The planned hospital’s CEO went out and spent time with the people the hospital was serve. “He took dinner around to people who lived in the local communities, and he had dinner with them and asked, ‘What do you want out of a hospital?’ And what they wanted was a community center for wellness, not a place for sickness, and he gained the insight by doing the research himself. This particular hospital has a fantastic restaurant, so people come in from outside to eat there. People come in to the greenhouse and garden. They even run weddings out of his hospital. Imagine that!”
2. By asking a big question. Questions like “Do you want this one or that one?” won’t tell you what is important to consumers. “I was lucky enough to be behind the very first flat beds in business class: it gave British Airways a 5-year temporary monopoly. Initially, BA had so much resistance to change.” The idea had always been ripping out seats to put in more seats and make more money; they couldn’t understand, and actively fought, pulling out seats to put in fewer seats.
3. By listening for possibilities. “I had hotel executives five years ago who said ‘please don’t’ come and tell me that consumers want free Internet — we’ve been hearing it, I don’t want to know.’ If you have been hearing it, then do something about it! Too much of what we hear about the pain points in industry are negative.” Instead, use them as positives to inspire.
4. By inventing together. “Invention is a collaborative pursuit. The Beatles were invented together. Consumers are great inventors.” He shared a case study of a hotel that wanted to branch out to yachts, cruise lines, and private jets. “Of course, when we talked to customers, they wanted free Internet and cheaper laundry.”
5. By playing/dreaming. Discover where people keep their dreams. A spirit of play engages consumers, generates better ideas and helps executives better connect to consumers’ lives.

By Jeffrey Henning

Charles Vila, the VP of North American consumer insights for Campbell Soup Company, opened the Insight Innovation Exchange in Philadelphia by stressing the need for brands to become “digitally fit”. In an age where digital is reshaping the life of consumers, it needs to reshape the insights role as well. Children are more likely to own a smart phone than a book, Facebook is blamed for 20% of divorces, and over 30% of 18 to 35 year olds check Facebook immediately after having sex. Similarly, digital is changing consumers’ relationships to brands: “Digital is influencing the entire path to purchase–living, planning, shopping, experiencing.”

As a result, said Charles, “digital fitness is essential: you have to build strength, muscle, endurance, and speed.” Getting digitally fit is essential for Campbell and its insight function. “We have to be as digitally fit as our consumers, or even more so.” Much like health and wealthiness, it is a choice — to be digitally fit for the long term, in how Campbells gather insights, in the programs it is putting into place in its markets. “Digitally fit companies make the every-day commitment. From an insights role, every day we are looking for new opportunities, looking for new ways of thinking and doing.”

“We are gathering insights very differently than we were 5 years ago, and 5 years from now will be even more different. I won’t be waiting for questionnaires to be tabulated or data to be cleaned. I expect to get data at a moment’s notice. Vendors, I am asking you to help me get there. Even our employees are being wired: we swapped out Blackberries for iPhones, because that is what consumers have, and we are envisioning a Genius Bar in our cafeteria.”

Continuing the metaphor, Charles said, “We have to avoid the digital diet.” Digital insights can’t be just the latest craze. “It is is a strategic imperative that requires long term commitment.”

Charles wanted to leave listeners with four main points:

1. “Campbells is getting digitally fit, and I challenge you to get fit as well… Any of you rooted in doing market research the way we have done it in past, you will not be in business.”
2. “We want to ‘engage and connect’ in our consumers lives, so help me do that.” Charles isn’t looking for buzzword compliance, but differentiated solutions.
3. “We need to anticipate future trends, looking further out, to 10 to 15 years.” Campbells works with the Institute of the Future — “much of what they identify is 15 years out, but you can see signals today.” To focus on the future, understand what are the coming disruptions and what are the options they present? “How do I prepare myself choice-fully and deliberately for the future while planning for each quarter?”
4. “Provide us new solutions in insights and activation — I don’t want another generic approach or tool. I want a new solution that will help me grow my business.”

Charles concluded by saying, “Living in the new world is like training for a marathon. But we need to run at a sprinter’s pace.”

By Joel Rubinson

Perhaps no media company needs to understand how consumers choose to access their content across screens more than ESPN so it is no surprise that they have taken an industry leadership role at developing repeatable and robust measurement approaches.  Here is my interview with Glenn Enoch, Vice President of Integrated Media Research at ESPN, who has been leading this effort who describes how ESPN is moving the chains upfield.

Joel: can you briefly describe project Blueprint?

Glenn: Project Blueprint is the first five-platform measurement initiative, launched by ESPN in collaboration with Arbitron and comScore.  This study is the first to measure changing consumption of video, audio and display content across radio, television, PCs, smartphones and tablets.  It uses a hybrid methodology, combining single-source measures and data integration.  The single-source datasets provide usage of the individual platforms, and are used to build information on the overlap between the platforms.  Then, all the single-source measures are integrated into a “duplication engine” which reports on combinations of users across all five platforms.  This enables true measures of net reach and time spend across media platform.

Joel: What are the most surprising findings about how people consume ESPN content across platforms, devices, and places?

Glenn: After twelve years of work on cross-platform research, we don’t want too many surprises!  During that time, we have gathered a lot of information about cross-platform usage of ESPN content, and for media usage in general.  Some of this is summarized in our paper on the Seven Principles of Cross-Platform Research (“Cracking the Cross Media Code,” Journal of Advertising Research, June 2010).  The main idea of Phase One of Project Blueprint was to see if the hybrid methodology would work, and could possibly be a measurement solution for the media industry.  So far, so good!

Project Blueprint does give us the ability to look at mobile platforms (smartphones and tablets) in relation to TV and PC.  We find that we have about as many people accessing our content on mobile platforms as we do on PCs … and it turns out that tablet users are our best customers!  They spent over 19 hours with our content (across all platforms) in February, more than users of any other platform.

Joel: Armed with this knowledge, what will ESPN do differently and what should its advertisers do differently?

Glenn: Our focus right now is on completing the integration of Arbitron’s Calibration Panel into the duplication engine, which will allow us to do 5-way duplications, and add radio to the mix of platforms.  When we have that done, we’ll be ready to make a better determination of what the Project Blueprint dataset “means” to ESPN.

However, the mission of ESPN – “to serve sports fans, anytime, anywhere” – won’t change.  We will still be working hard to get our content onto all platforms, and follow the changing media behavior of the sports fan.  Armed with the findings from this study, we’re going to be able to follow those changes much better, and ESPN Research+Analytics be able to make an even better contribution to the strategic goals and tactical executions of the company.

Joel: Is ESPN planning to make the Project Blueprint solution available to all in the industry, including other media companies?  How do you see cross-platform measurement evolve over time as an industry solution?

Glenn: I think the big-picture learning for us is that the Project Blueprint methodology works – it can produce nationally-projectable results at scale.  The number one objective of our ESPN XP initiative was to “turn cross-platform research from a special project into a standard practice,” meaning we would have access to research on users and usage of our content 365 days a year, at the granularity we needed to analyze specific programs and properties.  We were never looking for a measurement solution only for ESPN – we wanted a solution that would work for programmers, advertisers and agencies.  We feel that Project Blueprint represents a strong solution to bring cross-platform research to the industry.

One of the great things about the Project Blueprint methodology is that it is “future-proof.”  As new measurement solutions are developed, they can be incorporated into the duplication engine.

Editor’s Note: It has been my great honor and privilege to call Larry Friedman, CRO of TNS, a friend over the past few years. He’s one of our most seasoned, erudite, and visionary leaders. I am pleased beyond measure to feature his first contribution to GreenBook Blog, and it is a doozy.

Larry cuts to the heart of the challenges facing the insights industry today: in a world where we don’t necessarily need to ask questions to get answers, what is the role of the market research industry?

I think his thoughts on that core issue will challenge, surprise and perhaps even inspire you. It definitely won’t bore you. This one is absolutely required reading folks.

Larry Friedman, Ph.D., Chief Research Officer, TNS

When I was a college undergraduate, I took a class in Advanced Social Science Methodology.  One of the books I had to read had the rather imposing title “Unobtrusive Measures: Nonreactive Research in the Social Sciences.”  First published in 1966 by Webb, Campbell, Schwartz and Sechrest, the book became a classic text, and has undergone several revisions and stayed in print since then.  A couple of passages early in the book never left me, and I’ve been thinking about them increasingly in the past few years as I’ve thought about the current state of market research, and where we are headed:

“Today, the dominant mass of social sciences research is based upon interviews and questionnaires.  We lament this overdependence upon a single fallible method…”

 

“…But the principal objection is that they are used alone.  No research method is without bias.  Interviews and questionnaires must be supplemented by methods testing the same social science variables but having different methodological weaknesses.”

Now, if one examines the history of market research in the century since its birth, one thing that has been constant has been change.  Over the years, new methods grew up and replaced old ones, and these could be pretty wrenching changes for some.  The transitions from door-to-door interviewing to phone interviewing to online surveys caused some pretty fierce debates, not all of which have died down to this day.  We continue to see new significant developments in survey research, particularly in the mobile arena (which gives us new abilities to understand the “here and now”), in questioning approaches that make use of the latest insights from behavioral economics and neuroscience,  and in “micro surveys”.  Google Consumer Surveys has certainly caused many in the field to re-examine their attitudes towards survey length, and what they can learn through a handful of questions.

While all these changes have been important, they haven’t really challenged the fundamental premise behind the existence of the industry in the first place.  Market research began nearly a century ago to fill a very specific need:  marketers needed information to make good business decisions, and that information largely didn’t exist.  The market research industry grew up to develop that information. As we’ve seen, the methods we’ve used evolved over time, but the basic reason for being for market research never really changed.

Until now, that is.

We no longer live in a world where information is rare.  In contrast, we are overwhelmed with data, Big, Medium and Little. This represents the most fundamental challenge to the business model of market research since its inception.  After all, right now, nearly all RFPs can be summarized as “we have a problem; we want to field a study to find an answer.”  If we no longer necessarily need to field a study to find an answer, does the basic reason for being for the industry largely just melt away?  Do the consultants just take over “our” space in the Insights field?

There are many in the market research community who are frightened of questions like these, but I think we should feel liberated, not scared.  We now have an opportunity to face head on some core problems with surveys (for example, some “standard” metrics like purchase intent for established FMCG brands, have a zero correlation with behavior – why are we still using it?) and move into a more exciting future based on developing insights through different forms of data integration.  Getting to this new place will require fundamentally different mindsets and skillsets on the part of market researchers.

The mindset of Old Research is fundamentally around asking questions.  There are an infinite number of questions we could ask in a survey, and we narrow them down before we start to collect the data.  The skillsets developed over the course of your career focus on data collection:  sample design, questionnaire design, banner and crosstab specs.  You then go on generally to perform a pretty descriptive analysis of the findings.

The mindsets and skillsets of New Research are more around exploring and interrogating existing datasets.  There is a huge amount of data available from multiple sources, but they are not tailored to answer specific questions, so we need to be able to think through how to answer business questions with the data we can get our hands on.  These steps require very different skillsets – how do we find relevant data? How do we make connections among these different data?  We can approach this from a “soft integration” type perspective, where we line up different sources of data and “triangulate” in on an answer.  Or, we can approach it more from a “hard integration” type perspective and  model and derive predictions using very different kinds (and volumes) of data.  The latter is the province of the now famous (but rare bird indeed) “data scientist”.

This is not to say that survey research will disappear; it will be part of the larger ecosystem of data that we will employ.  But, we will need to first accept that old approaches aren’t always the right approaches, and to acknowledge that what people tell us in surveys isn’t always true.  For example, my colleagues at TNS have done a lot of work using “passive listening”.  Using technology, we can tell whether (opt-in) panelists have been exposed to digital ads.  We have recently expanded this capability to include TV ad exposure.  In one test, we asked respondents who we knew were either exposed or not exposed to a test ad to tell us if they could recognize the ad – a fairly standard question in ad tracking research.  We found that the percentage saying they recognized the ad was basically the same for those we knew were exposed and those we knew actually never saw it before, demonstrating the unreliability of “memory tasks” like ad recognition.

So, not only do we need to do a lot of work as an industry to learn how to use the many types of Big, Medium and Little data available to us, we still have work to do to figure out how and when to incorporate survey-based data.  The next five years will be a most exciting time for those with the nerve to help make it happen.  As they said in the Sixties, “if you’re not part of the solution, then you’re part of the problem.”  I invite you to be part of the solution.

By David Brudenell

Opening the Tuesday session of the conference, Bob Pittman, the CEO of Clear Channel shared perspective through the eyes of Executives on marketing and research metrics and their impact in real-world executive decisions.

“I use research as the guide for what we do.” Pittman said as he opened his presentation. Framing up his topic, Pittman remarked that ‘[The] best way to prepare for the future is to listen to your customers.” and that the marketing world has changed dramatically. Consumer control was an introductory theme during the first parts of the presentation “[because] for consumers, everything is customizable, consumption is time shifted and place-shifted and that most importantly, convenience is king”.

Building on the new consumer, Pittman showed examples of how the smart home of the consumer, created in the 1960’s was wrong. Today Americans spend 70% of their time away from the home. This was reflected in some of the Clear Channel product programs where their focus, just in 2011 was on PC-based radio. Today over 60% of radio listening is done on mobile however.

“So how do we all deal with this” Pittman rhetorically remarked, as he navigated his speech to the importance of research and insights to the Clear Chanel budgetary mix. Pittman want on to describe his ‘toolkit’ questions:

1. What are [advertisers] getting for every dollar of their media spends? – And making sure that they measure this success. This is done in a “Culture of Understanding”.

2. New growth will come from being part of the multi platform – specifically Pittman focused on the fact that radio moves with the connected consumer.

3. No ad campaign is standalone anymore – the great campaigns are looking to how and where to connect with the connect consumer.

4. Growing clients relationships into partnerships is key

Moving the conversation from the landscape to the job of the CEO, Pittman outlined executive needs to the research industry:

1. Rapidly evolve with the changing consumer

2. One measurement across broadcast and digital

3. Improvement in media mix modeling to reflect true customer behavior.

Continuing the Tuesday session Aussie invasion, Steve Weaver from Nine Entertainment spoke about his experiences in understanding how Australians engaged cross-platform with Olympic media in 2012.

Weaver introduced the topic by painting a unique Australian media consumption landscape and that there was a need to create an Australian-specific research lab to better understand how media was being consumed during the 2012 London Games.

Illustrating the comprehensive multi-phase technique using six research producing single-source consumer data, Weaver then dove more deeply into how Channel 9 executives and advertisers consumed this powerful data via a slick online dashboarding system.

Weaver showed the eight concurrent media consumption platforms, and discussed some interesting findings on the media mix, including, but not limited to the fact that online consumption was not only higher but offered better impact than print.

Interestingly, Weaver showed content consumption patterns across day-parts was not affected by screen fragmentation, but rather followed historical patterns of consumption. “The content consumption is the same, it just lives in different places”, said Weaver to conclude the point.

While the vast majority of content consumption of Olympic content was in primetime across all devices, diving deeper into the day-part data, Weaver showed the audience that there was noticeable differences between screens – especially around commuting for mobile devices, lunchtime for PCs and tablet usage at night.

“The commute became a very important part of the broadcast” remarked Weaver with 8% of content during commuting hours was consumed via mobile. Weaver discussed the importance of “the best screen” and how they saw this effect during Olympic day-part viewing. Of interest to the writer was that concurrent screen consumption peaked at night as a “companion device”, but with the exception of the morning commute effects, trended fairly consistently with primary viewing.

Short form viewing was also key component to the consumption data and interestingly, according to Weaver, “[secondary screen content] would never make it to broadcast, it’s simply used for these types of short form consumption”.

Weaver concluded the presentation by focusing on the importance in measuring “cross screening” with 48% of Australians dual screening during the 2012 Olympics. The data identifying higher content consumption by these dual-screeners was ‘extremely important to our advertisers”.