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IIEX Conference Flyover Day 1


Innovation is only as good as the methodology underneath it.

On this episode of Ponderings from the Perch, the Little Bird Marketing podcast, host and CEO Priscilla McKinney gives you a Day 1 overview of Greenbook's IIEX North America conference in Washington DC. She moves through the event to have open conversations with eight industry leaders. They discuss how AI, market research, and data quality connect, and what it means to design tools for an industry where thoroughness is essential.

The innovation conversation at IIEX is loud and it is moving fast. What it is not always doing is asking who is actually doing the building. The platforms are multiplying and the promises are getting bigger, but a tool is only as good as the understanding behind it. Knowing what a research project needs and knowing how to build software are not the same thing, and the gap between those two things has consequences that do not show up in a demo.

"I can tell whoever built this has actually run a project before," Jeremy Antoniuk explains. "And that's a really big thing because there are a lot of companies out there that sound like they have great tech and they have wonderful marketing, but at the end of the day, it's built by people who have never actually run a project."

The data quality debate, the multicultural research argument, and the case for keeping the human ear in the loop. None of it lands the same way once you have heard what is actually being said on the floor at IIEX North America. There are eight voices in this episode, and every one of them is operating at that fault line between what the industry can do faster and what it still cannot afford to get wrong.

Connect with the professionals featured in this episode and if you do, let them know Little Bird Marketing sent you their way: Reggie Alston at Ebony Marketing Systems, Jeremy Antoniuk at Scalafai, Rich Berenson at my-take, Belinda Brown at Gazelle Global, Daryl Collins and Derry Moore, PhD at Decodis, Char-lynn Griffiths at Faire, Carlos Hevia at Multilingual Connections, Bonnie Janzen at Decision Analysts and Heather McKinney at Talk Shoppe.

Music written and performed by Leighton Cordell.

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Priscilla McKinney: Hello and welcome to Ponderings from the Perch, the Little Bird Marketing Company podcast. I'm Priscilla McKinney with you as always, CEO and mama bird, but I am here in DC. I love Martha and Jaime from Q2Q Global's presentation. It was really just an ethnography about the use of AI with children around the world. It was such an interesting piece. If you are remotely interested in what is happening, and how we're bringing technology to bear with children, this was such an amazing study they conducted.

I would imagine it would have been very hard to conduct this study, getting all of the parents in alignment, working around school schedules and everything else. But boy, that was one of those pieces as a cultural anthropologist I really loved hearing from. Another one that was interesting about neuroscience was with Carrie Lee Gregory. She is with NeuroSense and she presented with somebody I had just met at the past, Sofia Gomez-Garcia, and she's over at Warner Brothers.

It was a really interesting look at how people are actually, what they would say, snacking on short form content out there. And thinking through, do we lose these stories and the story arcs when we're actually looking at very small snippets of things? And it was interesting on a societal level, but it was also interesting with where we're going in insights.

I got to walk around, of course, talk to all old friends and find new ones and have interesting conversations. I hope that you enjoy a few of these conversations I had here and there. But a big shout out to Scalify for sponsoring this flyover so you could get a piece of the action.


Priscilla McKinney: I'm here with Reggie Alston with Ebony Marketing Systems, and I am curious, as you look out here at IIEX, who is the perfect client for you? Who could benefit the most from coming to your team?

Reggie Alston: I think anybody looking for penetration in the multicultural marketing field or anybody who wants to actually get a cross-section of what's going on in the multicultural markets, specifically Black, Brown, Asian Pacific Islander, LGBTQ. So it would be anybody — it pretty much anybody who wants to see how these different marginalized communities are actually, what they're saying, and giving a voice to these communities is really, really important. And that's the work that we do.

Priscilla McKinney: Well, I'm a cultural anthropologist and I'm just going to say right now, I'm going to throw you a bone here, no matter what it is you're saying. It's my podcast. I can do what I want. I truly believe if you're not doing multicultural research, I'm sorry, what are you doing? Like, look at this country, you know? So what do you have to say when people, they haven't been thinking about how they're calibrating the respondents they're using either in qual or quant? What's your typical response there?

Reggie Alston: Well, they're missing out. That's number one, but I think when I look at this country, I see a salad bowl, not so much a melting pot. So if I think of a salad bowl, you can pick out the croutons, you can pick out the tomato, you can pick out the lettuce, but all together it's one hell of a salad, right? So if you're really looking at what you're trying to do to get either your message or your product or whatever out, you have to look at that salad bowl and say, okay, what's good for the tomato? What's good for the lettuce? What's good for the crouton? And if you're not really paying attention to all the different parts of that salad, you got a pretty bland salad — nobody's buying a salad anyway.

So the more you put in, when I make my salads, I put everything in it — not just white iceberg. No, heck no, heck no, heck no. We're really extending this metaphor, Reggie, and you're also making me hungry. I love it, I love it. And I love a good salad with croutons and cranberries and all the things in it, because that's what makes it — the more that you put in it. And I think when you look at your research, that really is what makes rich data and rich research: when you put more into it and you can really get a cross section of that proverbial salad when you're looking at the population of this country.

Priscilla McKinney: I love it. It's a great point of view. Thanks for joining me.

Reggie Alston: My pleasure. My pleasure.


Priscilla McKinney: Jeremy Antoniuk with Scalify. We're at a conference specifically about innovation and we're all talking with our colleagues, trying to make sure that we're not left out of what's next. But word on the street is that Scalify is definitely at the forefront of innovation. So tell me about that.

Jeremy Antoniuk: We are. It's a really interesting time to be in market research. As I look around, I see a lot of organizations in the qual space. I see quite a few companies doing parts of what I would picture as an overall solution for the quant space. But I don't really see as many organizations really embracing what I would call the agentic AI experience from end to end.

When I want to walk around and see former clients or former colleagues and do the obligatory, hey, what have you been up to? Tell me about what you're doing. I said, well, you know, we have an end to end platform. You can have the AI write the survey, program the survey from the Word document, field the data, automatically clean the data, do the analysis and weight the data. And at the end of that, get a very graphics rich, very nice professional PowerPoint. And they just kind of look at me like, that's incredible. Is that real? And I'm like, yes, it is.

Priscilla McKinney: Well, and it also sounds like maybe you've done that before — before you started this company, you've been in this industry for a long time. And one interesting thought about that is that you really do understand the workflow. So tell me, when you designed Scalify, how you were thinking about that genuine workflow that researchers go through.

Jeremy Antoniuk: Yeah, it's — when I think about when I first started as a project manager at this little startup called eRewards that eventually became ResearchNow and Dynata, now I walk the floor and I see the Dynata booth, I see my friends, the rep data and the work I did with Research Defender and their research desk platform there. And really a lot of that expertise that I've collected has just been built into the platform.

The feedback that we hear when we're doing demos that just frankly gives me chills is: I can tell whoever built this has actually run a project before. And that's a really big thing because there are a lot of companies out there that they sound like they have great tech and they have wonderful marketing. But at the end of the day, it's built by people who have never actually run a project.

And if you've ever run a project, you know in this industry more than any, it's the devil's in the details. And there's all these little landmines and pitfalls that if they're not done correctly, can end up with poor quality data or skewed data. And I think a lot of people aren't thinking of also the soft costs of all the interruptions — like the pieces of technology that don't work together — and we leak out all this kind of efficiency. So it seems like your team is thinking about how do I bring this together and how do I make it more natural to the researcher as opposed to just applying technology on the top like a band-aid?

Jeremy Antoniuk: Yeah, there seems to be a renewed sense of purpose in finding solutions. Frankly, talking to agencies and brand teams 12 months ago about agentic AI and embedding that into your research operations, it wasn't a lot of excitement. It's like, yeah, we should maybe think about that. And we've got a guy dabbling in ChatGPT. Okay, I don't want to hear that anymore. We got a guy...

And now when I talk to teams on a regular basis, multiple times a week, it's: we have a team. This is a priority at the executive level. We have people specifically focusing on R&D that are evaluating new systems — we are actively exploring. And that's an exciting time because it was difficult 12 months ago to see there's so much opportunity out there to streamline and to make the process of being a market researcher or project manager dramatically easier. It doesn't have to be so complicated. So it's refreshing to see that renewed sense of purpose and, hey, we don't have to continue to work the way we've always worked just because we're used to it.

Priscilla McKinney: Things that used to take several days now can take like 20 minutes. That is actually brutal. So tell me — you must be doing demos like crazy because people kind of need to see it to believe it. Is that what you're experiencing?

Jeremy Antoniuk: Oh, a hundred percent. The biggest change I would say — I call it the great recalibration, right? You think about from the time it would take to field a project, like let's say you've got your pre-field writing the survey, programming the survey, setting up your sample, you've got your field work, collecting sample, and then you've got the analysis.

What we're seeing is there's a tremendous amount of compression in the prefield. Things that used to take — programming a survey used to take two days, it cost several thousand dollars. Now it takes about 23 minutes and costs a couple hundred dollars. Full tables with banners and demographics and stubs used to take a day and a thousand or $2,000 to send it to a data processing shop. Now we can do it in five minutes.

And then that becomes the foundational component that feeds the written report of the analysis or the presentation. So I mean, frankly, I describe it to people and I'm conscious of what I'm saying is probably so different than what they're used to. And I get that. I frankly, I sit at my desk and I see these things happening and I just kind of shake my head like, am I really doing this? I wish I could take credit for it, but so much of it is using the AI models, using the agentic AI solutions, but in a way that's aligned with rigorous research methodology.

Priscilla McKinney: Last time I talked with you, you were actually doing pilot programs and I found that to be very interesting because it meant that you were involving people who would actually use the system very early. And so that learning focus, or maybe it was a mindset where you were going to learn from the people who would actually use the tech right from the beginning — I really appreciated that.

Jeremy Antoniuk: Yeah, well, I've been through that. I mean, 2013, 2014, ResearchNow was a Confirmit shop and we moved to this new platform at the time called Decipher. And frankly, it was painful. And we got through it — we had over a thousand people in the organization, global programming team. But I know how difficult it is when you go from: I'm used to working with this platform, we've fielded project after project, we all know all the nuances, to: hey, here's a new platform.

Having been the person that signed a lot of those Decipher contracts in those days, I never heard a single organization say, we are so excited to implement a new survey platform. That does come down to change management. That's what it is. It's 100% change management. And so I'm like, okay, well, how do we get people comfortable?

I can do a demo and I can show you our standard Nike, our Air Jordan study or our country music study. But when it came up with what we call a retro project — because we can program things so quickly, because we can do the analysis so quickly — like, let's take a study, let's sign the NDA, let's take a study that you did a month or two ago. You could program the survey from the Word document in 20 minutes. We can import your response data and we can do all the analysis and a couple hours later we'll have your PowerPoint presentation and you can see what the platform did with data that was critical to your environment. And that to me, that is the only way you can really get comfortable.

Priscilla McKinney: I love it. Well, we're going to put just a link to your demo in the show notes. So Jeremy, so good to see you out here at IIEX. Thanks so much.

Jeremy Antoniuk: Absolutely. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure.


Priscilla McKinney: Rich Berenson at IIEX from MyTake, and we got to meet last year at another conference. So why this conference right now?

Rich Berenson: It's just an exciting time. I think AI is exploding our world. There's both fear and excitement around all the things that people can do with technology now. And it's accelerating the conversation around data quality and security. So I just think it's a great time to be talking, learning, sharing with each other, and advancing the craft of what we do.

Priscilla McKinney: I love it. And what's your actual take at MyTake?

Rich Berenson: Well, I think at MyTake, we focus on insight communities — so real humans at the center. And we're moving ahead with AI, developing the right tools that enhance kind of a humanistic approach where the human's at the center. But we're also cautious in listening to our clients and where their concerns are, to make sure we move at the right pace, and also offer solutions that can toggle AI on and off at the right times.

Priscilla McKinney: Ooh, I love that. I don't think I've heard that little ditty, so that's a good take. Thanks, Rich. This was great.

Rich Berenson: Thanks, Priscilla.


Priscilla McKinney: I'm here with Belinda Brown from Gazelle Global. And I have to say, I so respect your company specifically because of the way you guys have given back into this industry. And your co-founder, CEO, Anne Brown, is a major believer in women in research, always supporting those kinds of efforts and such a great mentor to so many. But you are a past futures honoree — so many cool things to say about where the industry is going. But you specifically give back in a lot of ways. Tell my audience what you're doing volunteer wise and what groups you're involved with.

Belinda Brown: Absolutely. It's baked into Gazelle Global to be giving back. It's always been important to our founder, my mother, Anne Brown. She's an incredible giver to WIRE — has been since its inception. And I've carried that on. I also participate in WIRE. I'm also the president of the Central Atlantic Chapter of the Insights Association.

We've got some really great events in the Northeast happening this year. I'm really excited to be communicating and engaging with our membership. I'm also an SMR rep, which is an incredible organization. You know, as well as I do, these events — they're these juried, incredible papers with incredible sessions. So we're really excited about that. We have an event in Atlanta this year. The North American SMR Conference is in Atlanta in November. I'm really excited about that.

Yeah, I just love giving back. I love Green Book as a past Futures honoree. It's an incredible organization. I also have the MRC, the Market Research Council, which we had a great event last night at the conference. And we're looking forward to Quirk's New York and our Hall of Fame celebration. Yeah, the Hall of Fame luncheon is a really, really great event. I kind of think it's a little underrated because that is a star-studded room. It was started by Nielsen. You know, I mean, all the major hitters — you've got the Gallup, the Nielsen — it's an incredible organization.

We're going to be in our centennial year in January, so I'm really excited for this Hall of Fame, and we've got some great honorees. It's a star-studded event.

Priscilla McKinney: You're right. We have a little bit of fun, and actually, full disclosure, Little Bird Marketing is going to split a table this year with Gazelle Global because it's so fun. We want to be together and we want to really honor other people who have done some very cool things in the industry. And the speeches — when they get their awards — they're amazing and I'm like, what are you doing? I was in tears last year at some of the speeches. It was incredible. And for listeners of this podcast, we'll be doing a flyover episode during the Hall of Fame. So stay tuned for that and we're really excited.

Belinda Brown: Oh, that is so fun. Okay, we'll see you soon. Yeah, thanks.


Priscilla McKinney: I'm here with Daryl Collins and Derry Moore from Decodis. And I have to say, full disclosure, we had a great time last night. It's so wonderful when people in the industry get a chance to be human and have dinner. We did have a great dinner. But what an amazing conversation. And I am just dying to hear and have my audience hear what you're thinking here. This is IIEX — it's about innovation, it's about tech in the space, it's about what's new. So tell me what that means for Decodis.

Daryl Collins: So Decodis is a voice analytics company. And what we try to do is understand people's emotion in their voices. And then we work with the themes that come out of the text of what they're saying. And then we knit that in with the voice analytics. And that tells us not just what they're saying, but how they're saying it.

And so in particular, with AI and AI moderation, there's a worry that we're going to be losing some of the emotional layer, and we want to add that back in. And so in many ways, our mission is to make voice analytics a very standard part of research going forward — research that is market research and understanding customers. And that's about understanding humans. So all three of us are parents, so we all know that there's a big difference between having one sibling apologize to another sibling — it's not what they say, it's how they say it.

Priscilla McKinney: So there we go. Let's bring all that tech down to earth. But Derry, you and I pretty nearly became best friends last night. And as a cultural anthropologist and you as a linguist, there was just a lot to talk about and unpack about what is the nuance — it's not just words, but their meaning. So tell me why there's a linguist on staff at Decodis. This is so interesting.

Derry Moore: So a couple of different reasons. So one is we're situating our methodology in ground truth. So we need a linguist to understand language and situate that. I'm a sociolinguist and so that's why we're connecting the cultural anthropology line, right? And so it's an idea that we're situating the way people are saying things — not just the how — and situating that in how they position themselves with respect to what they're saying. It's a stance taking.

As we talked about, there's this idea of identity and how does that identity say something about themselves internally. So using emotion to access that layer. And I think a linguist is perfectly poised to understand how those things get reflected in the actual voice that's coming out.

Priscilla McKinney: That is so amazing. And I think that AI, like to your point, Daryl, AI is doing this tremendous part, but it is that layer on top that is so juicy. Like there's so much there and it just gets really exciting. So tell me what you think the possibility is for your tech in this space. What would you like for people to do with it? A little wave the magic wand, Daryl.

Daryl Collins: Yeah, well, I mean, I think as AI is allowing us to do more at scale, you could be listening to every interview and every focus group. But given that we're going to have so much, how do you actually wade through that? It's just way too much to actually listen to. So our methodology is really helping you to create this understanding of emotion across tons and tons of humans and lots of voice.

So we'd really like to see this methodology used to bring back this notion of emotion. And also, you can think about how that ends up being used. So a brand could say, well, people mention things like, oh, this is good versus, oh, this is good, right? And they could tell that one thing about the product was more emotionally important to the customer than something else. Or it may sound like the customer likes the product, but they really don't. We all know how to be polite, right?

Derry Moore: Exactly. That's — to Daryl's point — about actually grounding then the insight into that human truth. That's the tie back.

Priscilla McKinney: And I really love that. Guys, it's been a privilege talking with you.

Daryl Collins: It's been really fun also for me.

Priscilla McKinney: So glad to see you guys at IIEX for the first time. Hope we see you more often.

Daryl Collins: Thank you. Thank you so much.


Priscilla McKinney: I'm here with Char-lynn Griffiths from Faire. I did get your session and got to listen to this B2B segmentation study. I found it very interesting that when you were already niched down to a B2B retail owner, all of a sudden the world opened and there were six different types, different personas. And I love me a good persona. So tell me a little bit about this persona work you did.

Char-lynn Griffiths: Yeah, I know, right? It sounds like we already are working with personas in such a small vertical of people that we're talking about anyway. But what we really found is that with retailers, like anybody else, there's definitely mindsets that exist within them. And those mindsets really determine how they make decisions.

And in our industry, the people that we're talking to, it's really important to consider their mindsets because their work is so personal to them. And so that's really where we start to see the differentiation in the way that they make decisions because it really is a reflection of who they are as people. And so that's kind of how we found that.

Priscilla McKinney: Yeah. So if you're wanting to improve your decision-making and really the approach to these people, I found it very interesting to see the CEO decision-maker or the manager decision-maker as really more — what is on their mind, as you say, these mindsets — but also there seemed to be a lot of personality involved there. Some of them were big curators, some of them. So tell me a little bit about that, like all the way down in that detail.

Char-lynn Griffiths: Yeah, it's true, right? So if you think about it, there's a bunch of different dimensions that we looked at. So we looked at something psychological, like extroversion — are you an extroverted person? Are you more introverted? Are you a more conservative or passive person? Or are you very liberal and progressive and innovative?

And so we asked those questions along with just business decision questions, and we were able to kind of triangulate them. And I know Heather and her team at Talk Shoppe, who worked with us on this research, they looked at a bunch of different ways to cluster audiences statistically. And some of those personality types were really where the differentiation came in. So we didn't make any assumptions on what was going to go into that segmentation before it was done. But what we ended up finding is that those — are you a passive person — really does impact the way that you buy things for your shop.

If you are an introverted person, you don't want to be at a trade show, right? You want to be at home and be able to do that on your own. Which is great for Faire to know, because that's kind of the person that we want to find — the person who wants to do things like that, doesn't want to have to travel to be able to stock their stores.

Priscilla McKinney: I love it. And that's basically saying — truly they are the decision maker. Let's help them make the decision in a way that is most in alignment with their natural style. And that was just such a great insight. So thank you so much for joining me, Char-lynn.

Char-lynn Griffiths: Of course, it was great to talk with you today.


Priscilla McKinney: I'm here with Carlos Hevia and just so we're clear, we're very good friends. And it's my podcast and I get to have anybody I want on it. And it is so fun always to talk with you, obviously, because I'm a cultural anthropologist. And so what you do is just so interesting to me. But I just spoke with Reggie over Ebony Marketing Systems. And we were having a conversation about multilingual connections, what it really looks like to reach out to marginalized groups in the US. And I know that at Multilingual Connections, you guys do global research and everything, but even in the US, there is a need for translating and for nuance in how research shows up to people. So tell me your thoughts on that.

Carlos Hevia: Right. So in the US and in other places here — this is my first time at IIEX, and I've always had it in my brain as like, this is the ResTech place. This is the place where the ResTech comes out, where the new things come out. And then obviously here, there's a lot of talk about that. I haven't seen as much talk about multicultural marketing as I would have expected, but the things I have seen brought to the surface a few topics that are always on my mind and Jill's mind, your friend Jill's mind.

And that is: when you're thinking about using technology for research, these models are all based on very specific data sets. Culture and language happens differently. Spanish happens differently in one part of the United States than it does in the other. It certainly happens across Latin America in very, very different ways. Same words, very different meanings at the same time. And that can be a real issue depending on how you're training your models.

So that's one thing that has really stuck out to me today and yesterday: how are researchers thinking about the models they're using, and how well do they understand how those models have been trained and what data they've been trained on?

Priscilla McKinney: That is super important because if you're not careful, you can fall into a little coma of just allowing AI to even do your translation and not have someone look at it.

Carlos Hevia: Well, the issue is the same as it has always been, right? The issue now is that it's scaled to a point where people are relying on data at such large scales that it's easier than ever to miss nuance, because now it's data that you'll never even see the underlying data half the time. Nuance has always been an issue. These things that I'm just talking about — like the concept of having multiple meetings across different cultures, different segments of that culture in a given country — that's always been there. But now that the data is at such scale, it's easier than ever for it to get lost.

Maybe someone listening to this might not have heard this before, but we like to use the strawberries analogy. Now you're not looking at just a basket of strawberries — you're looking at a whole damn truckload of it. And so where are the bad strawberries in that truckload? That's even harder to find.

Priscilla McKinney: Yeah, that outer layer may look fine, but underneath it — ooh, there's something rotten. So just for our English speakers, if you don't speak another language like you and I both do, maybe you're not aware of it. And it's kind of one of those issues of you don't know what you don't know. And so we think about in English, you know, in the US, some people say soda, some people say pop, some people say go. Well, that seems silly to you, and of course you understand what it is. But then you think about going to the loo in England. Well, we're not going to a loo.

And so people — there is misunderstanding. That's a very low level extrapolation of what's going on. But as you move up and up different language ladders, these get very complicated and people don't understand each other. As we like to say, it's completely lost in translation. And when you're trying to get quality data, oh my gosh, if it's lost in translation, how that data just really stinks. So tell me who is perfect for you all. You focus a bit on the market research industry — who is a perfect client for Multilingual Connections?

Carlos Hevia: I think a perfect client for Multilingual Connections are the people that are doing the deep dives, right? The people that are doing full service research, the people that are really taking both qual and quant data. I won't say everyone takes their data seriously — so it sounds like that it's exclusive — but honestly, if someone is looking for a first round view of something and good enough is good enough, then they probably don't need us and they probably wouldn't leverage value with us.

But the people that are doing the deep dive, the people that are really looking for the nuance, the people that have the time and budget, frankly, to get to that level of nuance — those are the people that should be working with us.

Priscilla McKinney: I like that. And I'm so glad you joined us here at IIEX because then there's more places you and I get to connect around the world.

Carlos Hevia: Exactly. Although we haven't had a meal yet.


Priscilla McKinney: I'm here with Bonnie Janzen with Decision Analyst. And I just love the culture you all have at Decision Analyst. I see the executives and the leadership really giving back to this industry. So I just want to give you a shout out for that. But tell me a little bit about how you all see some of the mentorship you're involved with and supporting of things like women in research and so many more — I could name many more. But what's your thought on that?

Bonnie Janzen: So we do really love supporting other people in the insights and innovation space and in the industry. And none of us would be here if other people hadn't supported us. So it is definitely our honor and our pleasure to be able to do that.

So I've been involved with WIRE for a good while and I just love everything that it's about, what it stands for. And so a number of us, including myself, are WIRE mentors and my relationship with my mentee has actually been probably more rewarding for me than it has been for her. Our meetings are helping her with her career and her path and kind of helping her figure out what to do, what's next and what to go forward with. But she's teaching me so much about what she's looking for, what she needs out of her career.

And she's more of a UX researcher than I am. So I've learned a ton about her part of the industry. It's a give and take. I've learned so much from her and her enthusiasm and her kind of grit to hang in there in a tough job market. And now she has this lovely job. She's moved across the country and she's doing amazingly well. So every bit of it has been amazing for me and for her.

Priscilla McKinney: I love that. Let's give back a little bit to you for some of that. So Decision Analyst — what are the big challenges people are facing who end up coming to you? What is it that you're answering for clients right now in the industry?

Bonnie Janzen: Sure. And it's a broad spectrum of things. So a lot of it is innovation, it's unspoken, complicated needs. So we spoke yesterday with a client — had the privilege to do that — and it was qualitative, in-home ethnographies, innovation, new product development, and then quantitative testing. That's just a case study, but many times it's product portfolio management. How do we manage the SKUs? Because the retailers need to shrink those down. It's pricing strategies. So a lot of analytics, a lot of pricing strategy, and it's really all about activation. We do a great deal of segmentation work.

It's the really complicated strategic work that our clients need help with, and a lot of it is about activation.

Priscilla McKinney: I love it. Bonnie, it's so great to see you here. I really appreciate you — you're just a breath of fresh air in the industry. And thank you so much for being here and always having a big smile. When people see you across the room, it just kind of lights up, and we all know we're here. In fact, you just saved me from probably spilling my drink on myself. I appreciate that.

Bonnie Janzen: We're here for each other.

Priscilla McKinney: Exactly. We got to stick together. Love it. Thank you.


Priscilla McKinney: I had a great time at Green Book's IIEX here in DC today. Boy, trying to wrap this up is going to be something fierce, because I love this show. I love what Green Book does about thinking through innovation, about really asking people who are presenting to drive value — not just present things and not be salesy, but what's going on in this industry?

And I gotta say, it was a really great kickoff on the big stage on day one — that was Sam Passani and Steve Mayall came in from the Logic Group. And this is the kicker, I think. They talked about using AI and the idea of innovation and what can happen, but if we're not careful and don't apply it correctly, it can lead to breakdown instead of breakthrough. And I thought that was a great way to talk about this conference.

And I went through so many conversations with people as I met them in hallways and I got to sit in on other sessions and I got to actually get on one of the stages and meet a lot of the speakers — that was constantly in the back of my head. And I really appreciated that concept because we all do need to be careful. But just as a highlight, I loved hearing from Heather McKinney, no relation, from Talk Shoppe. She had a client with her named Char-lynn Griffiths, and they talked about looking at B2B segmentation differently. And I thought that was interesting. So you might want to follow up with her about that.

From all the peeps here at Little Bird Marketing, have a great day and happy marketing.

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