Tag: The New Market Research
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Is Insights a Profession?
Yesterday, like 100 million or so other Americans, I tuned into the Super Bowl. I was not there to see whether the Flying Elvis would beat a team that was only there because of one of the most glaring officiating errors in the history of American football. Rather, I tuned in to hear Romostradamus, the…
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Online Sampling Again
Last week two posts on the GreenBook Blog, one by Scott Weinberg and a response by Ron Sellers, bemoaned the quality of online research and especially its sampling. And who can blame them? All of us, including me, have been known to go a little Howard Beale on this issue from time to time. We…
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Today is Privacy Day!
Almost 20 years ago some colleagues and I edited a book with the inviting title, Computer Assisted Information Collection. Experts on a wide variety of computer-assisted methods contributed the chapters and I was tasked with writing the last chapter, a look into the future of technology and survey research. At the risk of tooting my own…
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Aligning practice and principle in the NewMR
Regular readers of this blog (assuming they exist) may have noticed that since retiring almost three years ago posts here are few and far between. That does not mean lack of interest. Much to my surprise I have discovered that my fascination with market, opinion, and social research remains strong, even when I no longer…
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Game-changers and same-changers
I am a political junkie. I wish I could write “recovering political junkie” but I know I’m not there yet. One current challenge is to not buy Double Down: Game Change 2012, the new book on the 2012 US presidential election by the same guys who gave us Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain…
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“Is it legal?” is not enough
I just posted a link to this Computerworld article on my Twitter feed, but I think it's so important that I have decided to mention it here as well. The article describes the dangers brands are beginning to face with over aggressive big data and data mining practices. The key point is that it's not…
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Is research on research the real deal?
David Carr had a piece in last Sunday's New York Times about the difficulty of distinguishing journalism from activism. His first sentence sums up the issue pretty succinctly, "In a refracted media world where information comes from everywhere, the line between two 'isms' — journalism and activism — is becoming difficult to discern." His case…
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Sir Martin on crowdsourcing of ads
The March issue of The Harvard Business Review has in interview with Martin Sorrell. At one point the interviewer asks whether crowdsourced ads and algorithms are the future model of advertising. Sir Martin’s response is interesting: You are tapping into the knowledge and the information of people all over the world. That’s fantastic. And the…
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Measuring the right stuff
A few weeks back I saw a post by online usability specialist Jakob Nielsen titled, “User Satisfaction vs. Performance Metrics.” His finding is pretty simple: Users generally prefer designs that are fast and easy to use, but satisfaction isn't 100% correlated with objective usability metrics. Nielsen looked at results from about 300 usability tests in…
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Accuracy of US election polls
Nate Silver does a nice job this morning of summarizing the accuracy of and bias in the 2012 results of the 23 most prolific polling firms. I’ve copied his table below. Before we look at it we need to remember that there is more involved in these numbers than different sampling methods. The target population…