IIeX. Insight Innovation Exchange. A place where buyers and sellers of insights generating tools and practices come together a few times a year all over the world and discuss what is pushing them forward, and what is holding them back. A place to measure our progress and call out our vulnerabilities. A place to applaud ourselves, challenge ourselves, and chastise ourselves. And this year’s North American conference in Atlanta last week was no different.
The conference saw a mix of end client brands, agencies, and downstream suppliers. And when you look across all of the presentations, panels, workshops, and demonstrations, you get a simultaneous sense of excitement and worry. A realization that we are both advancing and stagnating in important ways. Let’s talk about excitement first.
When you look across all of the presentations, panels, workshops, and demonstrations, you get a simultaneous sense of excitement and worry. A realization that we are both advancing and stagnating in important ways.
We are evolving our technology and our data, which is resulting in broader and faster insights.
• Corporate brands spoke with enthusiasm about larger data sets that include more than just survey data.
• Consulting agencies spoke with pride about agile research practices that are changing the speed and style of insights generation.
• Technology providers spoke about artificial intelligence advances, virtual reality success stories, and automation all along the research path.
• The innovation contest showcased another set of entrepreneurs that are harnessing the highest potential data opportunities to drive industry growth. The innovation winner, Mind Probe Labs (mindprobelabs.com), created an immersive cinema experience for testing movies and media content.
All of these concepts have been introduced and evolved in just the past few years, and our industry’s adoption of them makes it clear that we love improvements and are open to change.
Or are we? For every innovation conversation, you could walk down the exhibit hall to a separate track that focused on the practical side of the industry – data collection and the people who take our surveys and share their data with us. People who walk into these rooms got a very different feeling. The first thing you notice is that the corporate brands aren’t there. The room is filled with data about 60% collection and panel companies, 30% agencies, and the rare and somewhat confused end client. The discussions focus on the crisis in participant engagement. Facts from tech and industry reports layout the problem:
• Only about 20% of research participants enjoy the experience
• The smartphone market is maturing, but our ability to engage the smartphone user in research is still nascent.
• Today’s consumer is now asking for surveys to take less than 10 minutes, while we are still trying to get them under 20 minutes.
• Companies who score surveys on device compatibility say that our survey health scores haven’t improved in the last few years.
• We don’t even agree on what representative or mobile friendly means.
There is a breakdown in communication between the panel companies and the corporate buyers. Buyers appear far too insulated from the urgency that is needed to address survey design concerns. Out of this conversation came two important talking points that you shouldn’t miss:
1. Suppliers are banding together, setting aside their competitive concerns, sharing data, and establishing a cross industry and stakeholder group to tackle the problem. The initiative is new, and if you’d like to participate, please contact Melanie Courtright (mcourtright@researchnow.com) or Frank Kelly (Frank.Kelly@lightspeedresearch.com).
2. Everyone agrees that unless the consumers of research, the corporate brands, are in the conversation and forcing change from the top down, we will still be talking about this problem 5 years from now. And in that time, the data will be less representative and parts of our ecosystem may die off completely.
That’s the beauty of IIeX. It’s a conference that both congratulates and convicts. Well done, MRX for evolving our technology. But shame on us all for not evolving our surveys. If our job is to stay close to the consumer and know their needs, we had better do that not only for our clients, but for our own practices as well.
