Archive for November, 2010

The American master, George Gershwin, begins his masterpiece, “Rhapsody in Blue” with the plaintive voice of a clarinet. This dissonant landmark in American music was played with visuals to the audience. Our point was that Gershwin had a message for us. He combined dissonance in the clarinet with normal symphonic structures.

In essence, he reached back into the tradition of the nineteenth century and resolved the dissonance by bringing it into the structure of a theme. As the theme is picked up, we find resolution.

Thus we found grounding for our own subtitle—-“The Practical Adaptation of old tunes to make new music.”

The suggestion became obvious to the audience; we must reach back into structured theoretic underpinnings of our sampling past and find thematic assistance to ground our new research. It is our new music.

Probabilistic samples once served as the industry mainstay. Non-probabilistic samples, such as those on the internet, have replaced their probabilistic cousins. The race for easy, cheap, fast data has cost us the theoretical underpinnings so important for maintaining our professional integrity.

It is not that online killed probability samples; it is just that it replaced them as they weakened. Phone struggles under the cost and quality burdens of cell phones, wire cutters, do not call lists, diminishing recovery, increasing costs, and lowered representativeness

We need to assess the status of online research and arrive at a new sampling structure.

Our next musical piece was “The Voice of the Children”, Stockhausen 1955, an electronic simulation of a child’s voice that reminded us of the voice of the internet.
Three photos of Stockhausen google eyed the audience. He was not the best looking guy and our staff had taken some liberties to have the central figure loom out at the audience as the “musical” piece, replete with dissonance, made its way through the air.

I could tell that the audience of about 200 colleagues was glued to the Stockhausen piece. Clearly, it sounded like a confused social network site. They got the point immediately.

Stockhausen did nothing to resolve his dissonance. Instead he represented a threat to the musical world that he invaded. Kind of like the way that online sample has become a threat to quantitative research.

There is no doubt that FACEBOOK was quite a set up for our material. Their presentation exuded quality research using all the buzz words that we employ.
For them it was more than buzz words, given their resources it was something that all of us could just dream of, and yet, we were about to ask the audience to do some dreaming along with us.

Kathy Dykeman, of FACEBOOK, had stated both that they had no plans to enter market research as a platform and that she often felt unattractive in marketing meetings in the company. I grabbed at the comment as the tall shapely blond was anything but unattractive. For now we are safe.

Our talk began with an example of dissonance. Two notes were played loudly as they seemed to strangle each other on their way to harmony. It was intended to be a stunner, grabbing the audience who would likely find it irritating. It worked, and when the two notes achieved harmony, a murmur of relief was founded by a round of applause. It had worked! I felt a surge of adrenaline and a wave of confidence.

The point was that dissonance is irritating and uncomfortable, only when it is resolved do we feel some relief. We need relief in market research. Our sample frame is in tatters and sample theory is a thing of the past. We are at conflict with online sampling and need some relief.

She said that FACEBOOK wasn’t going to invade our space and then she showed us her stuff. Frankly, the research that FACEBOOK conducts makes the norm in commercial research look a bit tepid. They are concerned with representativeness, recovery, projectability and consistency—all the watchwords of quality that seem to allude our industry. Yes, they have the bully platform as well as the pulpit, but they have class and talent as well.

Kathy Dykeman, has worked at Harris Interactive, Knowledge Networks and a host of other quality places. Her talent at presenting was only exceeded by her apparent skill at the trade.

The morning keynote at ESOMAR Panel in Berlin was FaceBook. The half billion respondents of this 800 pound Gorilla represent an incredible platform for market research. Recovery in some countries is quite high and all the respondents are profiled. In addition, the relationship respondents have with FaceBook is such that most will put in accurate information.

For months, the scuttlebutt among many of the panels that we speak with was a fear that giant internet monster FACEBOOK was preparing to release its incalculable resources on the market research industry. As the other speaker in the session, I was privileged to pump Kathy Dykeman who was attending on FaceBooks behalf. I immediately went after the salient question. The answer was a relief.

Although FACEBOOK would continue to do its own research, “It would not become a research platform.”
Big news from a giant. Clearly the landscape of market research would change if a giant with resources like FACEBOOK were to enter our tiny little corner of the planet. Apparently, we are not worth the trouble as Kathy informed us that the privacy relationship with their members was too important for them to risk on such a distraction.

One would think that quantitative research online was dead. One quality research story after the next paraded across the stage. To us, the absence of Quant spoke volumes. The content was good to excellent, but as we are Quant people, this was not our cup of tea.

One presentation on behalf of the Axe brand (Unilever) was appropriately named “Naked Truth”. It was a slick presentation unlike any we had ever seen at a Market Research convention, and we attend quite a few conferences. On display were a number of sexual and humorous videos from the adverts and the TV series City Hunters. Cool stuff. The presentation was engaging and fun.

The day was capped by a sequence of presentations on online security, privacy and the like. These were useful if not a bit dull.

The practice session at ESOMAR PANEL added considerable value to our presentation. We were nervous about the multi-media presentations that we had woven into our talk. What we did not expect was the kinds of advice we received. Alfonso Regalado repeated emphasized that our talk had to inter-relate with the other content in the conference. We were already spinning with the weight of the multi-media components, this new requirement made perfect sense but it sent our heads spinning—just a bit. But it was the next advice that took us to the next level.

We were asked to set the tone for the second day. Not a small request. We were quite lucky though, FaceBook was the keynote before us that morning and Kees de Jong, of Survey Sampling was to speak two hours after us. His talk was highly related to ours making our added responsibility of setting the tone more realistic.

Esomar requested that all participants attend a practice session on the Sunday before the actual conference. Under most circumstances we would find this to be an unusual requirement. We know that some presenters have in the past commented to us that they found this to be an added, perhaps unnecessary, burden. After all, by the time you survive the competition, there were 80 submissions and only 15 papers presented, you are likely to be an experienced pro.

For us it was different. ESOMAR had requested that presentations be multi-media. We had slaved on this presentation and the five visual/musical pieces required coordination. We had worked too hard to take a chance.

Committee members Steve Lavine and Lorenz Graf were in attendance. Alfonso Regalado represented ESOMAR staff along with technical assistance. Alfonso was effusive and quite helpful. He provided encouragement that instilled confidence. Lorenz Graf was to serve as the chair for our session. He made numerous helpful suggestions. We practiced for about an hour and benefitted greatly from the advice received by all in attendance. Unfortunately one of our five pieces had become corrupted and was dropped from our program.

Deep in the bowels of what was once East Berlin, lies a new hotel called L’Andels. Don’t go there to have fun. This place is stark, lacking personality, new and clean. Combined with the overcast weather and the equally dreary East Berlin architecture, everyone we spoke to found the place unpleasant. That said, the conference content and the diverse international attendance made for an overall good conference experience.

Unlike the CASRO event of the prior week, there was no golf outing but no one seemed to be out of sorts because of it. We go there for the content and don’t need to spend an expensive day in forced “relaxation”.

Over two hundred twenty attendees representing thirty five countries were in attendance. Given that we are a global company in thirty-five countries, we felt right at home.