Thanks Wieden & Kennedy for pimping up ugly old data with this beautiful jewellery range based on fluctuations in major financial data.
Their brochure describes the moment of inspiration which gave rise to the jewellery idea: data can actually be beautiful but only when you squint at it.
In my experience, the more you squint the greater the chance of getting to the fundamental understanding behind the data. Human beings have a limited capacity for active processing of information, and as research debriefs are typically packed full of information, most of it fails to communicate.
One or two nice pieces of jewellery, figuratively speaking, should be about right for the average research project. Quantity in market research should not be mistaken for value.
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In this climate, businesses rightly hesitate to commit a lot of money to market research. It’s a sunk cost - you have no idea if it’s going to bring you a return until after you’ve spent the money. Instead, many are taking the option of doing quick and dirty research - getting what they hope is most of the answer for a fraction of the cost.
The downside of corner-cutting in research is that you also raise the risk of actually losing revenue for your business - it cuts both ways. The greatest risk is when savings are made more on the thinking side, than the doing side of research.
A recent survey concluded that only a tiny minority of people will pay for online news from a newspaper publisher. The fieldwork may have been robust, but the conclusions are less so. The question itself exposed a fundamental lack of understanding about what people get from newspapers. Which is things to talk about, things to laugh at, things to think about. Suddenly these seem much more valuable to a research respondent than dull old “news”. Research is only as good as the questions you ask, no matter how many good people answer.
OK, so business decision makers are clever enough to take a piece of PR research with a pinch of salt, and no publisher is going to make an online pricing decision on a single piece of evidence.
But this is when cutting out the thinking time starts to undermine the whole brand of research. If people start to think that cheap is too risky, and expensive is unaffordable, where does that leave the entire industry?
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Last week’s delirious ramblings by the Daily Mail’s latter-day inquisitor Jan Moir drove up traffic to the Daily Mail website by 21% . Which of course would be great news for the Daily Mail’s ad sales team, but for the small detail of advertisers pulling from the page in question.
The newspapers have fought back valiantly in the last year against declining ad revenues by breaking great stories like MP’s Expenses (Daily Telegraph) and Trafigura (Guardian), and the resulting web traffic increases have beaten circulation gains several times over. But this audience boost is of entirely a different nature.
With UKOM now in the pipeline, to allow us to make side-by-side planning comparisons between online and offline media, how do we tell the difference between positive and negative impressions? It's never really been an issue with offline media, content tends to be self-selecting - people don’t read, watch or listen to what they don’t like. But the online environment, with its relative lack of regulation and signposting from familiar media brands, represents a riskier advertising opportunity in this respect: it’s effortless to come across something you won’t like, or to access content like Moir’s for its shock value, but all count equally as impressions. And the effect on advertisers around this content isn’t going to be positive.
Stories like this make the online environment feel like advertising’s wild west. It’s a good job that UKOM has made the technical decision to exclude Apple Macs from their panel - us Mac owners are just the sort of righteous liberals who read Jan Moir online with revolted fascination.
Another unexpected outcome of the demise of Setanta: Saturday’s world cup qualifier between Ukraine and England can only be viewed live online, as no TV broadcasters were willing to pay the usual fat fee for what is, let’s face it, a dead rubber.
The rights holders, sports agency Kentaro , are confident in the£4.99 online PPV offer (“commercially, this will work”), which will be streamed by Perform (who do most of the online Premier League stuff), and marketed hard through national newspapers. They plan to restrict subscriptions to one million, I read as I snort my derision into my cornflakes. My forecast is in the five figures, no more.Why do these people not think of simply asking consumers a few intelligent questions instead of falling victim to their own hype?
Live streaming is with us - BBC Sport’s incredible performances at the Beijing Olympics left us in no doubt. But hard evidence suggests five good reasons why Ukraine vs England PPV online will dive, in a manner not seen since Eddie the Eagle...
1. The BBC’s coverage of Beijing was a huge step forward for web streaming. But data from BMRB Sport showed that these 32m web stream requests all came from only 11% of the population viewing live events online, vs 71% who viewed live on TV. So, we can start forecasting the potential audience for this match with a figure of around 5m adults who have the inclination and technology to view sport live online.
2. While Beijing captured the TV viewing of 7 in 10, England’s first qualifier in this campaign against Croatia on ITV was viewed by a more modest 7.3m, or around 15%. Still a great audience, but I’d say we can factor down that 5m top-end web streaming sports audience to more like 1m for an England football match, assuming it were free to stream... still with me?
3. Paying a minimum of £4.99 is another matter, especially when the BBC will be broadcasting free commentary on 5 Live, which consistently attracts over 6m listeners. A very conservative estimate would suggest that the free household-name radio station will get nine listeners to every one viewing live online on god-knows-where.com. So where are we in factoring down the audience potential? a maximum of 100,000.
4. The demise of football PPV or subscription offers over and above Sky Sports suggests that even football has limits in its ability to make money. Prem Plus was closed, Setanta ran out of money. I wonder why a provider unknown to the general public believes they will succeed? Cleverly, they are using PayPal as the payment method, perhaps bypassing fears over online payment. But even a generous count has PayPal penetration at half the adult population. Assuming many people would fall at this hurdle, our 100k is soon into five figures.
5. The final omen of failure? Rio Ferdinand thinks it’s a good idea. After all, he read the IAB press release that Online advertising has now overtaken TV advertising, so it must be true. Personally, I blame statisticians for failing to ensure the education of their audience ;)
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Artists, advertising creatives and the crew at West Coast Customs have always known it: our senses are drawn to things we find beautiful. The downside is that this is a emotive reaction, hard to predict and control. Take Sarah Jessica Parker for example. No thanks. But beauty is a tool that market research needs to take more seriously.
People’s brains are brutally efficient at filtering messages, using their subconscious processing power to judge the relevance of information coming our way, and then file or dodge the vast majority without having to use up precious thinking resource on it. But a thing of beauty can open up the door to the conscious brain.
In a business context, anyone trying to make an information-based argument needs people to think, or their intended communication will probably fail. But we’re dealing with human beings, and data-heavy reports or presentations are hard to pay attention to.
Our business seems to have conditioned itself to expect lumbering presentations packed with data charts and hundreds of words to a slide. We know it feels wrong, but somehow researchers feel safer doing it, and clients feel they’re getting value when they see it.
But data doesn’t have to be ugly. I first read “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” by Edward R Tufte ten years ago. It includes examples of data visualisation over a century old, but if every market researcher followed its guidance, research would be a much more stimulating place. Go buy it now.
Pimping up research has even got the attention of TED, the now legendary series of technology lectures. Here’s Hans Rosling demonstrating some great software that packs hundreds of years of data into a single animation.
And finally, a video I’m particularly pleased with, because I created it myself for MediaTel’s recent Future of Radio conference :)
The Tories will slash social research spend. It has thrived for over a decade since Labour had the brilliant idea of actually listening to the electorate, but opponents have always mocked Labour’s perceived reliance on research. Measuring everything brings new accountability to Government, but perhaps it has been done too expensively for Conservative tastes. Every policy area gets measured using the finest sampling techniques. Millions are spent on near-identical surveys from different departments and NGOs. The Tories won’t want this burden on their decision-making or their budgets, with a major impact on the agencies who rely on this sector.
Procurement will cement the big agencies’ hold on the big projects, at least until buying managers start to understand that the value of research is in the outcome not the process. To even get to the point of tendering for a procured project, agencies need a list of certification as long as your arm and a long track record of work in the relevant sector.
Research agencies will respond to commoditisation - by becoming more of a commodity. Senior talent with the ability to solve client business problems is expensive, and agencies find it hard to make the case for a price premium based on talented staff. With margins squeezed to the limits, cutting such people offers a tempting saving with little short-term downside.
Big syndicated studies will suffer. As discretionary research spend is cut back to the bone, the opportunity cost of buying into Superpanel, JD Power, TGI, or Mintel etc seems even higher. Even if they do offer more data for your research pound, buying the same data as everyone else is less of an attraction these days. Marketing agencies in particular will come up with innovative ways of side-stepping these big costs and at the same time looking unique to their clients.
Data companies will erode market research revenues, in the same way that online advertising has eroded traditional advertising. The researcher’s ideal of single-source data, with its depth of insight and opulent price tag, is becoming a luxury. Free or cheap data sources linked together forego a bit of accuracy, but offer greater usefulness and huge financial savings as fusion techniques unlock its latent insight.
The June edition of the Journal of Advertising Research, entitled “Advertising Empirical Generalisations”, listed 23 hard and fast rules about how advertising works, backed up by rigorous, long-term studies by the world’s best marketing academics.
I bet most of us haven’t read them. We’re too busy, they’re written up in complicated academic language, by white-beard academics who can’t possibly teach us about the real world. But consider some examples:
“If advertising is to be sales effective in the long term, it must show immediate sales effects”. Yet one of the common arguments raised against econometric models which show no advertising benefits, is that the model wasn’t long-term enough.
And then there’s the rule of Double Jeopardy: brands with the greatest market penetration also have the highest frequency of usage, and as penetration declines, repeat usage also does, at a slightly higher rate. How many media owners argue that they might have a smaller reach than their main rival, but their audience is somehow more loyal?
Advances in behavioural science have been tearing down the idols of old marketing for the last few years, and it’s made us feel like only modern marketers are enlightened. But what is ironic about these new ideas is that many are not new at all, it’s just that we now have the technology to demonstrate them.
By listening to those with experience, both academics and older colleagues, we’ve got a chance of avoiding expensive mistakes well before a computer gets round to telling us the same thing.
It’s therefore a great pity that when cost-cutting in a recession, it is often those with the greatest knowledge (higher salaries, but not necessarily senior managerial positions) who get the chop.
So PowerPoint is 25 years old. A clinical dissection of its shortcomings was most read item on the BBC News website today.
It quotes Microsoft stats: the average presentation is 250 minutes long, from startup to shutdown, eclipsing the Guinness Book of Records entry for continuous human concentration many times over. The average PowerPoint slide contains 40 words. Snappy.
Our business is as guilty as any of PowerPoint Abuse, especially my own dear research discipline. It is used as a catch-all communication, covering presentation, speaker’s notes, research report and data tables in a brutal assault on the left brain.
And this despite the fact that we work in the heart of the communications business. How long would a planner last if her response to all communications challenges was a poster with a hundred words on it?
Given how easy it is to produce targeted messages in a multitude of media, why don’t we find many 30-second research videos, animated dashboards, podcasts or e-bulletins?
In part because companies invest a lot in generating research, but very little in its activation. Memo to boss: unused research loses you money.
If you haven’t read the article, check it out
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The American MRA (equivalent of our MRS) is trying to come up with a definition of market research. One of the marketing industry’s favourite pastimes - anyone who has done a CIM or similar will have learnt the equivalent for marketing, which runs to a succinct 12 words: “The management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably”
There’s a little less brevity in the MRA’s 64-word effort...
“The term ‘bona fide opinion and market research’ means the collection and analysis of data regarding opinions, needs, awareness, knowledge, views and behaviours of a population, through the administration of surveys, interviews, focus groups, polls, observation, or other research methodologies, in which no sales, promotional or marketing efforts are involved and through which there is no attempt to influence a respondent’s attitudes or behaviour.”
But verbosity isn’t the only difference. In all of the 64 words of the research definition, there is no reference to outcome. The 12-word marketing definition manages to cram in a whole process, including the all-important profitable outcome.
Some will argue that MR is just a process to deliver the quality data that commissioning clients want, so that they can do their bit and turn it into insights. But it’s this process-focus of MR that results in the stultifying and ultimately useless powerpoint marathons that give my trade a bad name.
We’re well into the new era of data ubiquity and return-on-everything. If there’s anything these times are telling us about market research, it’s that the process must just be reliable, but the outcome is everything else.
Anyone got any suggestions for a better definition of MR?
In a week I have to submit a proposal for a relatively small but complicated research brief. The procurement officer sent some clarifications today. To me. And 39 other bidders. :0 .
This is a proposal that will take several days to pull together, with plenty of brain time, and involving half a dozen people in all. Add that up 40 times and you probably have the best part of a year’s work. And all to win a five-figure contract.
This amounts to a gross breach of etiquette, even if it’s all too common in marketing now.
Procurement is an inevitable part of market research’s future, and we’re going to have to get through some teething pain before the process truly starts to work for clients and suppliers. But in order to work it really does have to be a win-win.
Is this procurement officer conditioned by past experience of disappointing and expensive research? Before we judge him or her, it’s worth considering that insight-less research was around long before insight-less procurement.
Should I turn the other cheek and write the proposal, or demand satisfaction with a spreadsheet duel at dawn?
JAMES SMYTHE
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Member since: 03 Jun 2008
Last login: 19 Nov 2009
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