This morning I listened to an interview of Eric Salama, CEO of Kantar (and now TNS as well), on Radio NewMR. I know Eric Salama by name only and was interested to hear his take on the future of the industry.
Overall his message seemed to be that our industry should focus on its strengths rather than becoming distracted by worries about big players from other industries coming in and eating our lunch. There are now many sources of insight that go beyond the world of surveys and focus groups. MR might exploit some of them but he sees no mandate to exploit them all. Four things in particular stood out in my mind:
- Surveys are not dead yet. There are some things you can only learn by asking people questions.
- There sometimes is a disconnect between what we hear about the explosion of new methods and client spend. His specific example was social media whose current share of client spend he characterized as "unimpressive."
- MR firms generally lack the technology to compete with major players like IBM when it comes to Big Data. Crunching massive databases of unstructured data is not what we are good at. We are good at analysis and that's where we should focus.
- Qualitative is a major opportunity, at least for a big player like Kantar. He sees the qual side of the industry as still very fragmented and a place where there has been a good deal of innovation still to be leveraged.
The interviewers—Ray Poynter and Lenny Murphy—did their best to get him to bite on more apocalyptic futures for MR but he would have none of it. Still, it was an interesting half hour. But don't take my word for it. You can hear a recording of this morning's show along with previous shows here.