IIEX EU Flyover

Priscilla McKinney: Well, we've kicked things off here at IIEX in Amsterdam. I love the show. It's always so much amazing conversation, really kind of figuring out how to bring the everyday into bigger conversations and move businesses forward. So I have with me Imran Choudhary from Latana. So tell me a little bit about some of the conversations you're expecting to hear at this show.

Imran Choudhary: Hi there, wonderful. Thank you for asking the question. Really looking forward to this year in particular because there's so much happening in terms of AI and the kind of use of AI. You can't go to any sort of conference or event without AI being mentioned. But brand tracking is what we specialize in, and that feels to be something that's almost been left behind, and it's something that we repeatedly hear when we attend events like this, that we've heard a lot of cool innovations, but rarely do we see something trying to address a long standing solution like brand tracking, which to be fair hasn't really been updated, hasn't really seen any new innovations in a very long time.

So the conversations we're looking for is how are you attempting to modernize and approach the kind of long standing challenges associated with brand tracking and why now. So they're the kind of conversations we're looking to help. The other angle I'm hoping to hear, I'm expecting to hear, is clients will be talking, brands in particular, about how they are being asked to do more from the board level around modernizing. I mean, go back ten years, everything was about digital transformation.

And now everything's about how do we use AI, embed it in our business, get it working with all our data points, and kind of make it more than the sum of its parts. So they're the kind of conversations I'm expecting to have over the next couple of days here.

Priscilla McKinney: There are some of those provocative titles that I hear in this industry like market research is dead or brand trackers are dead. I get where they're coming from, that idea of this traditional approach is not going to cut it. So tell me a little bit about the flexibility that you bring to it, what you have done to modernize the brand tracker so that we can basically get off of that crazy moment. Of course, brand tracking isn't dead because all brands need to know how their brands are progressing, what everyday consumers are thinking.

There's no getting around it. But what is it that you do at Latana that really is innovative and does help brands understand how to really get down to a really deep understanding of the consumer today?

Imran Choudhary: It's interesting because I've worked on brand tracking myself for nearly two decades now. And we're actually presenting today later on to talk about how we're modernizing this. But in a nutshell, look, brand tracking is problematic for many reasons. Primarily when you are going to find the right target audiences, when you are trying to repeatedly ask people representative of your market at scale, it then can become quite problematic to get longitudinal trends that are reflective and reliable and accurate of the population and segments they're trying to measure.

So the challenge you have here is that these big brands have these questions about how is my brand perceived, how is that changing over time based on the marketing I'm investing in market. And the problem with traditional trackers is it's done a certain way. You have to go through consumer panels, you have to incentivize respondents. Often traditional brand trackers are very long surveys. There's problems in the broader research space with fraud, an AI driven kind of bot answering surveys.

That more broadly, there's growing problems with fraud and how AI driven bots are now answering surveys on behalf of people. So when you combine all these factors together, brand tracking typically is usually about anywhere up to about a third of a brand's annual insight research budget. And people often say it's really expensive, which implies they don't get the value. It's hard to change.

So if you have changing consumer segments, a new brand enters the market, brand trackers don't like these changes because once it's set up you kind of need to let it run. So the way we're doing things quite differently is we're addressing these five or six key big challenges head on. For example, at Latana we do not use consumer panels. We've realized that they are the limiting factor because you only get about one percent of a population on a consumer panel.

They end up taking surveys very regularly. So they become less representative of the real population. Secondly, we do not incentivize respondents to answer our surveys because we've realized when you do, that's when they artificially try to answer in a way because they want to get to the end and get their reward. That's why you see very high levels of overclaim in kind of traditional brand trackers, which then makes it really hard to trust the data when you apparently have sold your product to half the population when you know that's categorically not true.

So at Latana we're doing some clever things. We're using ad based sampling, we're bidding on interstitial ad space as people are browsing hundreds and thousands of websites and apps so they can answer the surveys natively there and then in interactive ad space. They're non incentivized surveys which means we get incredible reach and high reliability, and if done correctly, we can do this at a fraction of the cost compared to traditional providers.

Priscilla McKinney: Well, we are at an innovation conference, so I think that totally makes sense. And it's nice to see something as important, as stalwart as a brand tracker, but still we have to understand where it fits in the puzzle today. Thank you so much for joining me.

Imran Choudhary: No, any time, pleasure. Lovely talking.

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Priscilla McKinney: Seeing new faces. I have Mathis Anselme here. He's from Verso. I haven't seen this company here. So why don't you give my podcast audience a little bit about Verso?

Mathis Anselme: Yes, so first time for Verso here in Amsterdam. Very happy to be here. Very glad. So we are Verso, we build a customer OS for marketing brands and agencies companies. We build a customer OS with an AI led interviews, qualitative and other types of research all in the same platform, so you can create different personas with all your insights, like your qualitative, your quantitative data, or even your other data of your company.

Priscilla McKinney: We're always looking for new companies and new faces here. Tell us how to find it. Is it Verso AI, Verso.com? Where can we find it?

Mathis Anselme: You can try with Ask Verso on Google or try with Ask Verso on LinkedIn, or Lydia Belawell, our CEO, on LinkedIn.

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Priscilla McKinney: Robert. Wait, gotta start. I was gonna say Robertson. Everyone does. Okay. I have Robert Robinson here with Deep Sites, now that's powered by Market Logic, a name I've known for a long time in this industry, but I haven't heard of Deep Sites. So tell me a little bit about this product and this different approach.

Robert Robinson: Yeah, so obviously we have a lot of market research agencies here who work very hard to provide insights to their customers. And I think one of the challenges for many businesses is the wealth of data and information flowing through the business can become quite unmanageable at times. And for someone to find an answer to a question may take hours to search through all the content from Mintel, from Opinium, from GfK, just to name some of the agencies in front of me.

So Deep Sites puts all of that information together on a platform that's easy to access for any user within a business, and they can quickly ask questions and work through the insights on the platform from those research agencies. And all of that is connected throughout the business to stop all of this information being siloed.

Priscilla McKinney: Okay, and is that what you're talking about when you say active intelligence? Because I see that all over this booth here. And so I'm wondering if that's kind of how you all frame that conversation up.

Robert Robinson: Yeah, and I think that's the sort of the next step forward. So with AI, I think knowledge management and market research, AI goes hand in hand with that, with all of the information. Making it easier to access is such a key value. But now the next sort of frontier for us is instead of having to come and question the data, get answers back, actually having agents behind the scenes asking the important questions for your business, constantly monitoring all of the information, analysis, and insights coming in, and then proactively providing you insights instead of waiting for you to come and ask. And that's a big thing now with a lot of our products we're helping our customers too.

Priscilla McKinney: That's so interesting to even bring the concept of things always being on to the insights world. And so it's an exciting time and it's interesting to see what you're all doing with it. So I look forward to more. Thanks a lot.

Robert Robinson: No, thank you.

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Priscilla McKinney: I've just met Levi Pither here at Escalent, and now this is such a big brand, big company of so many different brands. And I have not seen the Enlightener before. So do you want to tell me what that is?

Levi Pither: Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. So Enlighter is our proprietary tech, originally created from Hall and Partners. I guess this history comes from being able to visualize brand tracking data, but a lot has changed in that time. So now we've enabled it with AI, we're able to tell stories with you, using our AI, as well as Sam is featuring some new AI features that you'll have to find on the purple stage I believe.

Priscilla McKinney: Okay, well this won't go live so hold on, we're time sensitive, okay, so let me ask another question. Let's see. Okay, I'll just ask you more about your day to day, what you do. So Levi, what does your day to day look like at Escalent?

Levi Pither: Yeah, no, absolutely. So I'm in a client facing role. I'm actually part of the commercial team, which is actually now a global function. So we have about six heads in the US, and now there's two of us in the UK. So in twenty twenty three Escalent acquired C Space and Hall and Partners, so a lot of my role is learning how to speak to clients, communicate our value across those three different brands.

Priscilla McKinney: I will say, okay, here we go. So the family of brands though is pretty known for integrating behavioral science into the rigor of market research. What are you talking about with your clients? What are the conversations sounding like? What is it that they're needing?

Levi Pither: Absolutely, I think that's a really good question, and there's a few that come to mind. In a world where it's really competitive, there are agencies throwing all sorts of things at people, and what really seems to stand out is landing those insights. So what we often hear about is siloed data, failing to get C suite buy in. So I think the first step is delivering insights and the second step is activating them across the business. So really trying to be a consultant in that sense, helping businesses activate insights, communicate insights, and making sure there's exposure to the whole organization.

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Priscilla McKinney: I'm going to clear some things up in this industry. It's Panoplai, people. This is how you pronounce it. Panoplai and not panoply. Okay, this is my good friend Adam. We see each other all over the world, but I love what you guys are doing. There's a lot of talk about digital twins, and people just whisper in the corner, I just don't know what it is. So can you give people a little bit of a primer? Because I think that's where we need to have these conversations out in the open.

Adam Bai: Yeah, I mean I always say that nobody knows what these terms mean. There aren't really set definitions in the industry. Nobody knows what good looks like. So we want to make a bit of a contribution to clearing things up, at least from our point of view. To us, a digital twin is a person or a segment of people that exist actually in the real world. And then imagine moving that segment of people or that person into virtual space, so that you can engage with that segment or that individual continuously in real time, that you can ask them questions about things that are already known, things that already you know in your data, whether it's quantitative data points or qualitative, and about future stuff, future propositions, whether it's a marketing strategy, a piece of content, or an innovation concept, and get a reliable answer about how that group of real people in the real world would respond if they were locked in the room with you.

Priscilla McKinney: Right, that would be wrong. That would be a human rights violation, and we don't endorse that. Okay, well, let's talk a little bit about synthetic data, because I feel like it really needs a marketing makeover, it needs to glow up because it's horrible. Synthetic data, just in the name, whoever decided to name it, that's horrible. But you go with digital twins. This is a much better view of it. However, whether it's synthetic, basically what we're talking about is there is a lot of magic behind the scenes that needs to be understood. And so in this industry, we need a lot of transparency about what is going on that then gets brought forward.

Adam Bai: What gets left behind. So tell me about that trust factor, because I really see you guys leading the way in this industry, being very transparent about what you're doing behind and the rigor of the research in order to bring the digital twin forward.

Priscilla McKinney: Yeah, I guess, well, two things. Number one is, in the end, I'm an anthropologist, it's how I was trained. I don't actually think that the entire world is a bunch of nails to be hammered with the digital twin or synthetic data hammer. So I'm very selective when I talk to clients, everyone at Panoplai, when we talk to clients, about the best uses for these kinds of technologies. We believe in a hybrid approach forever and ever. We don't think human data is going away, that human research is going away, but we think that certain aspects of it will become increasingly important in a world where digital twins and synthetic become more common, more popular.

Adam Bai: So that's where we are, where we'll always be. I think the second thing is we tend to do better as a company when clients ask more questions. It means that we spend a lot of time with prospects and answer endless questions, but we don't want a prospect ever to listen to some platform saying we're eighty five percent accurate and say, cool, that sounds good. We always want them to ask the next question, which is what do you mean by that, how are you measuring it for our use cases, and the answer is always going to be nuanced. Because in the end, if we don't, it's going to be a really cool pilot for twenty thousand bucks, and then we're never going to hear from them again. And who wants to run that kind of business, right?

We don't want a universe of a billion pilots. We want a universe of a bunch of happy clients that we're working with for years to solve real problems.

Priscilla McKinney: Well you have a long list of really great clients there, so obviously you're doing something right there, and it's great to see you around the world, but please keep leading that charge and talking about the transparency needed for this kind of technology. I really love it. Thanks so much, Adam.

Adam Bai: Yeah, yeah, well I don't know if I'm leading a charge, but I'll keep saying stuff a lot. And we appreciate you asking us questions and listening and being provocative in your approach to helping everyone understand the industry.

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Priscilla McKinney: He's so famous, he's so popular. I'm here with Chris Sluder with Opinions LTD, and I'm just curious, what is the biggest problem that you feel like you and your team solve?

Chris Sluder: I would say definitely it's more of like doing the real life surveys with individuals in person. So where there's a lot of these online solutions that are helping connect dots, but we're really making sure it's validated by in person with people touching, feeling, tasting, seeing the actual products, that would probably be it.

Priscilla McKinney: And with so much AI coming into the market, I can kind of sense from what you're saying in the conversation how important that we don't leak all the rigor in between. So tell me what's an ideal client for you, what is it that you would love to be testing?

Chris Sluder: Anything in a grocery store, honestly. So like FMCG stuff that has high turnover and you have to be responsive to the market as it shifts, as trends change, as demand changes.

Priscilla McKinney: Well and that changes a lot lately. I mean I think about from COVID, really how much disruption in shopping there's been. It's just ridiculous how much people are changing where they shop, the way they look at value, and that's not even necessarily low pricing, it could be wanting the higher price, but something smaller. It's interesting how much change has happened since then, and then with online shopping. Do you deal with online shopping as well at all?

Chris Sluder: A little bit, not a ton. If so, it's kind of part of that consumer journey. So it's maybe an initial touch point. So we're seeing a lot where maybe people put things in their Amazon basket, but then they go to the store still picking things out, and whatever they can't get in person for that instant gratification, then shows up the next day or two days later on Amazon.

Priscilla McKinney: Okay, I see, that goes to our point of just how radically different our shopping journeys are. So tell me a little bit about why you're here at IIEX, it's the innovation show. What are you hoping to get?

Chris Sluder: I mean obviously making connections is always a huge priority, but also seeing the transitions of what tools can be implemented, what AI tools make sense or not make sense, in a different lens, because the way that we have things, it's still utilizing a lot of like the five senses for in person, it's different how we need to approach it. So it's like how do I properly plug that in and where do I stay true to old school and where do I start innovating and adding new things.

Priscilla McKinney: That old school, I hear what you're saying about that. It's about really knowing that that validation is so solid, so that insight is so quality. So I totally appreciate that. Thanks so much for joining me on the podcast.

Chris Sluder: Thank you. Thanks for having me, Priscilla. Have a great day.

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Priscilla McKinney: Joseph or Joe?

Joseph Jackson: Yeah, Joseph.

Priscilla McKinney: Okay. I'm here with Joseph Jackson. Actually we have never met before, so this is super nice to actually see a new face. But we're here at the Tremendous booth. And for those who are not familiar with Tremendous, what is it that you all provide here in this industry?

Joseph Jackson: Yeah, so Tremendous is a research incentive payout platform. So essentially we're that last mile where you need to pay out research participants in over two hundred and thirty different countries. We've got over twenty five hundred redemption options as well, all localized based on where people's countries are at. So odds are it's fast, easy, really quick to send out payments with us, and we're free to use, so no annual contracts, no monthly subscriptions. You only pay for the rewards that you send out, which is a huge plus to our clients.

Priscilla McKinney: Yeah, that difference of who starts a survey and who actually gets it done and who needs to be paid, it's a big part of it. Give me something that people don't ask that you wish they knew about Tremendous that you feel is a big selling point, but it just doesn't seem to come up in the initial conversation. Do you have something like that?

Joseph Jackson: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I would say the main thing that I wish people would dig into a little bit deeper is obviously we can manage manual incentives, right? We need to pay out a few folks who have participated in the study, and we can go into Tremendous and do it. But if you dig deeper into our API, we essentially can integrate within your platform, and you have like a white label payout solution directly within any research platform. So we have a lot of clients leveraging us for that, and I think that's something that people who should be interested in exploring, building out a white label payout solution, we have the infrastructure there and we can get that live in about a week or two for you. So I'd say that definitely, an API integration.

Priscilla McKinney: I love it because the more we can get done in an automated fashion, the better.

Joseph Jackson: Yeah. Fantastic, exactly.

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Priscilla McKinney: I'm here with Dale Evernden at IIEX, and I was lucky enough to catch your session with Oura. And I have to say, first of all, kind of jealous, it sounds like a great partner when we talk about innovation. Here we are at an innovation conference. And so you gave us a little bit of a peek behind the scenes of the work that you're doing with them. I found it completely interesting. So tell me a little bit about that partnership.

Dale Evernden: Yeah, thank you. So first of all, we're extremely fortunate to be able to partner with Katie Lab over at Oura Ring. And we've really been working with them for close to two, maybe almost three years now. And with all of the innovation that we're investing in on the AI front, they've really been a wonderful co innovation partner. They're willing to work with us to evaluate and test our hypotheses around how to create value with AI. And they're willing, where appropriate, to use their community to really test the boundaries of what we can deliver and how we can iterate and evolve that relationship.

Priscilla McKinney: So one thing I love is that having already shipped over five million rings and having already ten years of research in the bank, they still needed to innovate and they came to you all with this need to really get closer and closer to the consumer. And one thing she mentioned in the presentation, which I want to underscore, was that she felt that they really get this always on cache of just continually fresh signals from members' lived experiences, and that that was what was empowering them to make really good decisions and constantly be able to pivot the company as needed. So tell people who don't really know what Rival Technologies does why it is that your group is able to give these kinds of signals on a very regular basis.

Dale Evernden: Yeah, you know, it all comes down to the conversation format. We've from the beginning invested in conversation, mobile first approaches, which creates an intimate platform for getting deeper, richer insights. And so we're meeting people where they already are, and we're giving them the opportunity to provide feedback, both qual and quant feedback, on their device and the computer that's in their pocket. And I think for a company like Oura, their consumers are particularly tech savvy, typically, and they feel comfortable in that context. And so Oura has all kinds of data available to them based just on the products and services they bring to the market, and they're really empowered by digging into the why.

And I think some of the AI innovations that we've invested in that allow Katie and her team to do both qual and quant in the same research activity has really generated a ton of value for them. And the goal is to be able to come back and continue to have those conversations. They've invested in community and they have that longitudinal relationship with their consumer, which gets them the real gold over time, and they can build a picture of the consumer in a more holistic way because of that long term relationship.

Priscilla McKinney: I love it. You need to go check out what Rival Technologies can do. And it's a bigger part of the Rival group. So there's a family of companies, a family of brands. And it's just really interesting. I'm so happy to see you guys here at IIEX. It truly is part of the innovation in our industry.

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Priscilla McKinney: Nadine van Rooyen here with WEX, and this is kind of an interesting confluence of my life. One of my other companies that I own is a credit card processing company. And so I know WEX payments, and they're pretty big in the US. So it was interesting bumping into you and your colleague here. And you're going to be presenting tomorrow. So tell me a little bit about what you're going to be talking about.

Nadine van Rooyen: So we're actually going to be taking a topic that Irina and I have managed to find in our day to day life. We generate all these wonderful insights and then they end up in decks that just sit on people's laptops and nobody actually implements them. And so we then went and rethought about how we actually look at the success of whether an insight gets implemented or not. And we found that there's a whole value path that goes all the way to when it gets implemented. And we're going to go through that value path tomorrow, and changing the way we measure the success of an insight.

Priscilla McKinney: I love this. Okay, so this flyover episode for my podcast is a little bit for people who weren't able to come. So can you give me one little sneak peek, one little thing about what you're going to present tomorrow? What would you say is one of the biggest reasons how you actually pull something that is so important from the insights and bring it to the surface so that people can use it and it can create impact?

Nadine van Rooyen: Yeah, actually what we argue for is that the purpose of the insight is not necessarily to end up being implemented or being acted on, but actually the purpose of the insight is to influence the decisions. And so when you make better decisions because of the insights, that's already value added from the insights that we've generated.

Priscilla McKinney: I love that, and that's an interesting take. So many people in this industry kept talking about like, here's the insight, this is what drives the business.

Nadine van Rooyen: No, it's about a really sound symphony, really. It gives you a much better foundation from which to make a decision, and that's super interesting.

Priscilla McKinney: Okay, if you weren't able to make IIEX, then you're really glad that I just bumped into these ladies, and it's Irina, that's I R I N A, and that's Irina of WEX, and Nadine van Rooyen. So look them up, N A D I N E, van, R O O Y E N. Check them out on LinkedIn and get connected with these ladies. Thank you so much.

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Priscilla McKinney: I have Leander here from GetWhy, and this is his first Insights conference. This is so great to get new faces, but you're not new to these big questions and these challenges. You come from the consulting world. So tell me about what intrigued you. Why did you move over to GetWhy? What was the thinking? When you talk to businesses and you're helping them move forward, what was lacking that you thought GetWhy could really be the answer to?

Leander Wandsøe-Isaksen: I think what's really interesting about AI powered qual and GetWhy actually is the notion about getting empathy into more decisions, right? So a lot of times you'll have commercial decisions being taken by whoever's loudest in the room, but having more people talking to more customers and putting empathy at the forefront of these decisions, I just think is a really nice mission.

Priscilla McKinney: That is, and it's very different. It is this focus on the human. Even before AI came out, GetWhy was thinking this way. So tell me a little bit about the conversations you're having with customers right now. When you're thinking about what it really takes for them to be successful with their project, how would you put that together? What do you want to tell them?

Leander Wandsøe-Isaksen: I think AI powered qual has promised a lot of speed and a lot of cost reductions. Great, we're realizing that and the benefits are real. But I think the rigor and the quality in the reports, the insights you're making, is as important as the speed. So I don't see a reverse, but I see a reemphasis on getting quality into those insights and getting the insights deployed with the business stakeholders that use them.

Priscilla McKinney: How powerful is it in the moment when you can be in a meeting with a client and actually show a clip of someone saying really what is going on, what they're thinking, their emotions, or how they're processing the why behind their actions?

Leander Wandsøe-Isaksen: It's really funny you ask. The first client meeting I was in presenting with GetWhy, we went down to a Danish bank, and we had a lot of business stakeholders from the bank saying, like, it's great customer service to call our customers. And I said, actually your customers say they don't like being called, they think it's a scam, and they're like, we don't believe you. And I was like, all right, I took out a video interview with this young woman who talked about how she didn't feel very safe when people called, she thought it was a scam when the bank called, and she had anxiety issues, and a lot of her friends had anxiety issues. And I was sitting across from these twenty bankers that were really dismissing what I said, but when they heard that woman say those things, I don't know if they could see their own daughters in it, but I think that really changed them. And they went from we don't believe you to, all right, I'll buy.

Priscilla McKinney: Welcome to this industry. It's fun to have a new face, and I hope to see you at the next conference.

Leander Wandsøe-Isaksen: Thank you.

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Priscilla McKinney: So I'm here with Elliot Kim, Checkbox. I haven't seen you guys here before, and maybe that's my fault, but for my audience, why don't you tell us a little bit about Checkbox?

Elliot Kim: Yeah, actually, this is our first time here at IIEX. Extremely excited to be here because we're based here in Amsterdam. We are an online survey software company, and we have two different products. One is an online SaaS product that you're probably familiar with, and the second offering that we have is an on premises version, if you want absolute control over your data and who sees it and can access it.

Priscilla McKinney: Okay, I love it. So why did you choose to come here? Tell me a little bit about your thinking and what you're looking for in this industry and why this innovation conference.

Elliot Kim: Absolutely. So innovation is what drives us because we're a software company, and we're very excited about the market research industry. It's something that's new for us, not somewhere we've historically been active in, and when we saw that the premier event in Europe was here in Amsterdam, in our backyard, we had to come and see what's happening.

Priscilla McKinney: Okay, so you're American living in Amsterdam, I can tell, I can spot one of us. So already jealous, that's great. Now why did you base the company here out of Amsterdam?

Elliot Kim: There were a lot of good reasons to be here. First of all, it's a beautiful city to be in, so that's a huge draw. But second is that this is a good market for us as well. So in the Netherlands it's English speaking, and it's a great hub for business connecting with the rest of Europe. So this was a good place to build a team. We want a good environment for our team members, so we can serve our customers the best that we can. And this is really why we ended up with Amsterdam as a place to be.

Priscilla McKinney: Now you're a little bit new to market research, but do you specialize in a particular industry, or did you kind of have to get known in a particular industry or vertical, or are you really across all different ones?

Elliot Kim: Number one for us is the technology. So my background is in technology and in software, and that's what I bring to our company today. And in market research, historically it wasn't the focus for us, but because it's such an important part of the users of surveys, this is why we're paying more attention to this part of the market.

Priscilla McKinney: I love it, and I love highlighting new people, new faces on our podcast. So it's so nice to meet you, Elliot. We'll catch you next year in Amsterdam, then, since you're based out of here. Don't miss next year.

Elliot Kim: Thanks so much. Really nice to meet you.

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Priscilla McKinney: Got Gav Holt here from Verve, and I've got to say this is completely new branding, and I was a big fan of Verve from the beginning, but this looked completely different, it looked like a completely new company. So tell me about the rebrand, and also tell me about the pivot, what is different, because my podcast audience does know Verve, and they're going to want to know what changed.

Gav Holt: So we've always been founded on human and cultural truth, and that still remains a really important part of who the business is, but I guess Andrew, our CEO, about three and a half years ago really felt the hard pivot into AI was almost like a change moment. He came from the days of Research Now, where he saw that internet moment of like, my God, the internet has completely changed the game, and he's seen that repeat itself with AI. So we found that having been in that space of the panel research business back in Research Now days, he found that the quality of samples now are really bad, whereas simulations are much better as a way to make decisions of consequence essentially.

So we're taking all of that great human truth and cultural data, and we're building out simulations of customers based on all of that for our clients. So we've managed to recruit loads of different brands on board already, and doing lots of different use cases across knowledge personas, whether it's future experts, experts in disciplines and domains, and customer sets. So it's really taken off, enjoying it.

Priscilla McKinney: Wow, it is very different, and for my podcast audience who has known this brand, you also need to go to a different URL. It's addverve, A D D V E R V E dot com, so go check it out. But okay, my question for you, Gav, maybe that's a little bit more focused, is when you're having conversations with clients, they're facing their own challenges, but what are the conversations you wish you were having more often? What do you think is important out there that maybe people aren't asking you about?

Gav Holt: It's been a journey with AI, and in the last year it was about discovery, and now it's moving into embedding into things. But what we've found is, especially in the world of personas and simulations, there's lots of different offers out there, and clients should be asking what are the decisions or consequences they want to make. Because yes, anyone can throw a few documents into ChatGPT or Claude and create a persona, but what we've worked through in the last two to three years is personas and simulations that can really give decisions a consequence.

We've got a massive eight stage process which we go through to essentially ensure that brands like Samsung, Mars are showing up and able to make decisions in that moment using AI. So I think for clients who are on a journey, it's really scrutinizing what is in the build, not just a black box environment. We can show auditability and transparency about what is happening, and that gives people faith in terms of that leap of moving into AI in that realm. So I guess clients should be asking what is behind the AI and working with a business that has come from a consultancy edge. That's where we feel we're supporting businesses in that way.

Priscilla McKinney: I couldn't agree more. I think that transparency is a big piece here, and that's what's going to continue to build the trust. Gav, thanks so much for taking a few minutes to be on our podcast.

Gav Holt: Thank you.

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Priscilla McKinney: I'm here with Lidia Palmi from Wonderflow, and I have not seen this company before, so why don't you give us a quick overview of what Wonderflow is?

Lidia Palmi: So Wonderflow is an AI powered company. We specialize in product intelligence. So we basically listen to what people are saying online, like from e commerce platforms, social media, forums, and we understand for our customers obviously what people are saying about their products, their competitor products, what trends are out there, what they're looking for, what they can improve, what they like, dislike. So again, our core is really understanding what people are saying about our customers' products, to help them improve what they do and make people's lives better through their products.

Priscilla McKinney: Yeah, so there might be places where they're absolutely delighting it, but maybe they're finding some gaps. It sounds to me from what you're saying that this is an always on type of platform.

Lidia Palmi: It is, because people are basically writing literally every second things online, and they're very eager to share their experiences with products, with brands, and they very proactively share a lot of knowledge that is out there. It's just very difficult for companies to grasp because it's everywhere and it's overwhelming in terms of volume. So we do the hard work for them. We basically collect everything that is out there, and we synthesize it into something that is meaningful and understandable. So we translate human language, what people are writing out there every second, and we translate it into numbers so that they can act upon it basically.

Priscilla McKinney: I love it, and it's nice to see new faces here. So nice to meet you, Lidia.

Lidia Palmi: Thank you for having us here. Very interesting to see and meet a lot of people.

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Priscilla McKinney: Sometimes old friends are the best friends. I have Trip Gorman here with Listen Labs, and we talk quite a bit. We see each other all over the world, not every time in Mexico City in an actual wrestling ring.

Trip Gorman: Exactly. So sometimes we have to just meet in normal places, like Amsterdam.

Priscilla McKinney: Normal, a fun normal. Priscilla, it's amazing to see you as always. Okay, so Priscilla asked me right before this, you want to jump into the question? I want to talk a little bit about what is that pressing question, what is that big challenge, what is the problem that people are facing that you're having conversations about? Like what is that customer worried about when they start talking with Listen Labs?

Trip Gorman: Yeah, so broadly it's kind of understanding the customer needs and the market wants, but because we're in Amsterdam, I'll give you a region specific one. So in Europe, typically we're here, we're talking with the Benelux team, maybe the DACH team, maybe even the UK Ireland team. But a lot of these global European teams, they want to basically get insight across Europe quite quickly. And what Listen allows you to do is we have a recruitment operations team that's going to find people in every European country, and then the AI moderated researcher on our platform will ask them questions in their dialect, not even just their language, in their regional dialect, and across the entire country, across the entire region, will give you those insights at scale.

So very interesting tool. You could be in your office in Amsterdam, you commission a study across twenty different European markets, and then a day and a half later you get all the data.

Priscilla McKinney: Well, I'm bilingual, and then I'm also very unreliable in French. But you mentioned something and it is about dialect. There is nuance. My Spanish from growing up in Spain is very different from when you and I were in Mexico City having a good time, right? So very different, and so it is important that people feel most natural when they're being asked questions, because the more natural they feel, the more natural the question, the answer, and then the deeper the insight. So I do think that's really important. I wanted to call that out and underscore it.

But I also have to underscore something else, which is one of the funniest things in this industry, is the Listen Labs famed very quick forty five second demo. And thank you for not putting us all to sleep during the presentations. Who came up with that?

Trip Gorman: So Priscilla is talking about, I don't know if anyone here has seen a Listen Labs demo at a conference, we basically have a famous slide towards the end typically, where we press play and then you see the entire Listen creation flow, and then the moderation, and then the analysis, and then the recruitment. We'd be happy to spend fifteen to thirty minutes on a call showing you later, but I think people see so many demos at conferences, we just want to give you a taste.

Priscilla McKinney: If you want to come by later, let us know, but we don't want to bore anybody. I love it because you do it right in the conversation where people are going, yes, but just let me see it, let me see it, and they're like, here you go, forty five seconds, so it's very great. But you have someone with you today. I want to give a chance to my audience to actually meet Odin. And you are now into the EMEA region. So tell me, tell me what your role is.

Trip Gorman: Yeah, so I'm one of the first hires for the European markets, kind of setting up the European office, based out of London. So we're hiring new people both on the market research side and inside, really building out that presence in Europe, because we have so many clients that physically want that presence, and that's what we want to double down on now.

Priscilla McKinney: I do love me some London town. So we were just at Quirks New York and had a chance to be there and do that. But how do you think the European audience is different from the US, from talking amongst yourselves at Listen, is there something different that's on your mind as you break open this part of the industry?

Trip Gorman: Yeah, I think the European market has a lot of nuance. If you're going after Germany, France, the UK, it's just completely different personalities, different cultures, and figuring that out throughout a sales process, and then having specific people for the different markets, I think is quite important. So that's just something that we're working on, just getting deeper into the knowledge spaces within those different markets, and building that out over time.

Priscilla McKinney: It's great to have a new face, so please go out and meet him, Odin Hoffman. It's O D I N, Hoffman, H O F F M A N. Go connect with him on LinkedIn and let's bring him into this community. Thanks, Odin. Thank you very much.

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Priscilla McKinney: Wow. I come to IIEX because I do want to hear about innovations, more than anything I want to know how brands are moving forward. So Amishi, you and Summer Bell from Coke really killed it in there. One of the things that I think was super strong was Summer talked about how important it was for Coca-Cola to see the real behavior themselves, because then they felt those signals from the consumer were so strong that it gave them no doubt they were able to make very strong moves. So tell me what that means. I'm sure that makes you feel really good over at Nailbiter.

Amishi (Shah) Takalkar: It does. It's very rare that clients actually come back and share how they took actions with the data that we gave, right? They'll always tell you, yeah, we're using it, it's great, but to actually see it in action is just gorgeous. So one of the things, one example I can give, is that when they watched the videos, they saw that people were using the mini cans on the go much more. It was more of a snacking occasion that they were using it for, versus more of, I want this to last me for a bit. And that actually then led to their communication strategy, their social media strategy, the role of mini cans, and just gave them confidence that they're not going to cannibalize their main twenty ounce. So I think that was the big thing, just watching in the videos how people were making those trade offs and choices between the sizes, because it's so hard to get that in a survey.

Priscilla McKinney: I don't know if I should go tell Summer myself why I use the mini can, it has to do with cocktails, has to do with that freshness, I only want a certain amount.

Amishi (Shah) Takalkar: Absolutely, and so it's about tapping into the reality of why I'm making that choice. It's not that I'm never going to buy the twenty ounce Coke Zero again, it's that I need this mini can for this particular thing I'm doing, right? It's so funny, when I stock my bar, my cocktail bar at home, I stock it with mini cans, but when I'm going out we get the regular cans. So it was just so interesting to see it in real life.

Priscilla McKinney: She did say something interesting that they found out through this behavioral study also that they weren't expecting, which I thought was interesting, was that people really wanted more flavors in the mini can. So how often do you get some of these surprise elements when people are really coming to you for a different hypothesis?

Amishi (Shah) Takalkar: Yeah, one of my clients uses the sentence, it's a gift that keeps on giving, because we don't stop people from talking. And yes, we're looking to answer a specific question, but there's so much more we learn, not just about the question but just about people, about behaviors, about the category. So some of it we'll pull out in just the work that we did, but other times we will actually give them the videos and they find other things that they want to use. So I think that's where the value in just watching people is so much more than focusing on the four or five questions that you want to answer.

Priscilla McKinney: Okay, one thing that's being talked about tons is AI, and you and I have had a long history in this industry, we've talked about AI for many years, but tell me about how you're not using AI, and where you're not using it, what you feel absolutely has to remain human as you're looking at these behaviors.

Amishi (Shah) Takalkar: Yep, and that's where we say it's human first, right? Anything we do, we need these human videos, we want to watch them, we want to see them. We don't want them also sitting in front of a screen and answering moderated questions, because again, you're creating a way in which they'll know, they'll become professionals at it, and you just get what you asked. So that's where behaviors, watching people do what they do, don't make it very scripted, just learn from seeing, is where Nailbiter is going to be. So we are using AI to take those videos and get more insights out of them faster, because there are those benefits that of course we all take advantage of, but I think it is the fact that it has to be real people that is key to everything we do.

Priscilla McKinney: Yeah, and it's interesting whenever I watch the videos that your consumers produce, sometimes there are those awkward pause moments, and it's like, should I keep watching, because then we're so attention span oriented in this world. And it's interesting, sometimes there's a pause, and I'm like, no, but that's how people really are.

Amishi (Shah) Takalkar: Like they'll forget mid sentence what they were saying, they'll just skip over things, but that's the reality of it all. So when you do two hundred, three hundred, four hundred, you still get so much that if two people didn't answer a specific question, it's fine, they didn't care for it, move on, that's how people are.

Priscilla McKinney: Well, that's how I shop. But if you asked me later how I shop, it was very professional and I had my stuff together.

Amishi (Shah) Takalkar: Okay, which is so funny, because literally if you ask me right now how much Coke is, I have no idea. I buy what I want, I buy what I know we're going to consume, and I buy it for my particular reasons, and I think that was so clear.

Priscilla McKinney: Thank you so much for a great start to a conference that is about innovation and how we are using technology to really move brands forward.

Amishi (Shah) Takalkar: Yes, no, thank you. It's been amazing, the turnout, the people, and just in the first hour, it's been looking forward to the next, today and tomorrow.

Priscilla McKinney: Yeah, it's going to be fun.

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Priscilla McKinney: I have Summer Bell with Coca-Cola, and I have to say I've already talked with Amishi, she had such a great presentation this morning. Absolutely wonderful to hear how you're using this data, and thank you so much for the transparency. That's what people are really wanting at this conference. And this is my little confessional, how I talked to you about my mini can use, it's all cocktail driven, okay, we know that.

Summer Bell: We already know that, that's not a surprise.

Priscilla McKinney: I love it, I love it. So why were you willing to present with Nailbiter? What was it that you think was important or interesting that the industry really should hear about what you're doing with them?

Summer Bell: It's funny because you use the word transparency, and that's probably what this is really about. A lot of times we're all looking for that one little insight that's going to make it so much different, and it's very difficult in such a large category with very large competitors, where we all have the same products, the same flavors. So sometimes I'm always looking for that new way of thinking that can really push us over the edge. And the other piece is that it has to happen fast. Everyone's telling me I need to go faster, I'm asking, like, well, when do you need this, and it's always like today, tomorrow. So Nailbiter just allows me the ability to get this information quickly and to get the realness of it, and also not just assume that I know what they want, right? I do a lot of surveys every week, and this allows them to tell me what their answer is.

Priscilla McKinney: That is beautiful. Okay, tell me a little bit about your team there. So what are you guys curious about right now? What are the conversations sounding like, and what's getting you inspired or excited about your job?

Summer Bell: Yeah, you know, right now my team is focused on retail and food service, on premise, all the restaurants. The main question that I'm getting asked probably every day, I pull three people, three different departments in a room, because everyone's talking about affordability. They're trying to figure out what value means for the consumer, for the shopper, knowing that it's more than price, what does that mean, and it's very complicated. It's actually a great segmentation in understanding people's income and how trusted they feel, how scared they are. And so we're really starting to segment people to understand outside of price what else we can do to help them and offer them value. So right now that is touching every channel, gas prices are very high and people are making decisions. Their food stamps are being taken away in many instances, or in eleven states in the US they can no longer purchase soda with them. And so we're trying to figure out what they're doing because of that, so that we can try to help and get behind any resources and understanding what that means for our categories.

Priscilla McKinney: That's interesting, and I am a cultural anthropologist, so I might take this on a different tack. And I am interested in your take on this, because when people are pressed financially, what we've seen in really difficult times is they usually actually fall back to very trusted brands, and they're willing to spend more on something they know they are really going to like, as opposed to going further down the rung. And so they may consume less, but they want their particular treat. So what are you thinking around that?

Summer Bell: You're exactly right. I have a video that I think of right now, where it was a truck driver that works eighty hours in one week, and he said, I can barely pay my bills right now, and I'm exhausted, but no one's going to be able to take away my Coca-Cola at the end of the day. That is my treat to be able to get me through all that I'm having to work through. And so we understand that that's the role that we play in people's lives, and we take it very seriously. So we're trying to figure out the best way, and that's why sometimes offering the mini can at a lower price in a convenience store is a way that we can offer value. You can still get that small treat, it's less money, and it's more available to you. Those are the ways that we're thinking. So it is very fascinating because a lot of people thought that we were going to lose to private label, or people were going to stop drinking. Now there are people that stopped, drink less.

Priscilla McKinney: But we're also seeing where people are changing their channels on where they purchase because they want to save money, and they're going online and purchasing because they know they're going to just do thirty five dollars and that's it, and not be influenced by the impulse that's happening outside of the store.

Summer Bell: It's fascinating. Obviously I could talk to you forever about it. It is really interesting, and also people have so much more opportunity at their fingertips about where they're going to go, where they're going to buy, how they're going to do it, and also being able to see way more selection than they've ever been able to see at any given time.

Priscilla McKinney: I will tell you one more thing on full transparency, the entire time you were talking this morning I was thinking, now I'm thirsty for a Coke Zero.

Summer Bell: I know, we should have passed it out, oh my god, right? It's funny because we're doing a lot of work with a lot of our customers on agentic AI, and really trying to understand that, making that search function work harder, so that you are actually inspired by multiple categories and brands and flavors that are available. So there's a lot of work that's happening to understand how can we even get a twenty ounce, do you even want a twenty ounce, maybe it's a different flavor that you've never tried, that when you do get your delivery you have a special treat in there for you too. So it's going to be an interesting time, we're moving extremely fast.

Priscilla McKinney: All this sounds like Summer is that you need to come on my podcast, and we need to have a full episode, we have so much other stuff to talk about. So let's do it. So nice to see you here.

Summer Bell: Yes, thank you so much for having me.

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Priscilla McKinney: Got Michael Aragon, MD, here from Outset.ai. So tell me, day to day, what are the big questions, the challenges, the problems your customers are facing? What do those conversations sound like right now?

Michael Aragon, MD: Yeah, I think one of the biggest impacts on research now is every other team is leveraging AI in the space. We think of product, design, even customer experience lifecycles have all been shortened through leveraging AI. So human led traditional approaches to research just can't keep up with how quickly teams are now building. And those are the problems we're really helping solve, and I think that's what's been arising most, is research needs an AI driven tool that can keep up with the speed and scale in which teams are now building and designing new customer experiences.

Priscilla McKinney: Okay, well this is a short podcast, so I can't ask everything about what Outset.ai does, but you said speed and scale, let's talk about the scale thing. How do you guys think about scale?

Michael Aragon, MD: I think now what we're delivering really is qualitative scale. So we think of surveys as being easy to get in front of the masses, but not delivering a lot of depth. What we're able to do is distribute an AI moderated interview and get the depth of an in depth interview at the scale of hundreds, if not thousands, of participants.

Priscilla McKinney: Okay, how do they find you? Is it outset dot ai?

Michael Aragon, MD: It is outset dot ai. Come check us out.

Priscilla McKinney: Love it. Thank you.

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Priscilla McKinney: I'm here with Kate Mazourik at IIEX, and I'm just curious, Kate, help me understand what the conversations sound like when your clients are challenged, they're hard pressed, they're up on Sunday night worried about things. What are they worried about? What are they coming to you about?

Kate Mazourik: So a lot of our clients are already using AI quite actively, so they've learned how to automate, how to build structures. What they're really struggling with is actually getting insights to different departments. So it seems like insight departments and CX departments are quite internally able to implement AI, but then when it comes to actually sharing with product teams, with other stakeholders, there's a huge gap. So this is a huge topic that people talk about, being able to actually spread all the research and insights across the organization. And that's pretty much also what Caplena does. So really enabling anybody on the team to ask, okay, what are the trends for this product, or have people talked about X feature, and being able to quantify that. So not only just say yes, people have talked about it, but being able to say ten percent more people talked about it this year versus last year.

Priscilla McKinney: Yeah. So when I say the word feedback, what does that really mean to your team?

Kate Mazourik: About feedback?

Priscilla McKinney: Yeah, like customer feedback. Yeah, customer feedback. It sounds to me like that might mean something a little bit different than to other people in this industry.

Kate Mazourik: So customer feedback to us is really anything the customer shares directly or indirectly about the brand. So it could be survey responses, it could be product reviews, but it could also be social media data where people are talking about the brand, or even things like customer support conversations. So what you see is quite a lot of the time in customer support data, people are talking about their problems, they're saying how much it impacts them. And this type of data almost does not get analyzed in most companies.

Priscilla McKinney: I just recently had somebody on my podcast and we were talking about that, what a massive amount of data is in that, that just like when people are absolutely at their most frustrated moment, that's when you really can help people. And it sounds to me like you're able to cast a wider net in order to understand the challenges that consumers are facing in order to help brands go forward. Anything that you're looking forward to talking about with people here at this innovation conference?

Kate Mazourik: I'm really curious to see what people are doing with social media data. I feel like every year it's a more and more prominent topic. I've heard already from quite a lot of people that they struggle with actually finding quality social media data, so that's the first step to actually then analyzing it. But what I like about social media data is it's very unprompted, it's just like people who are sharing things that just come up organically. So I do feel like that's the next big data type that's going to be analyzed at large in the industry.

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Priscilla McKinney: Wilko here from Dynata, and I guess I'm kind of curious about the new kind of thing that's out, we're at an innovation conference, so that's super important. Can you tell me a little bit about Dynata Plus and what's going on with that launch?

Wilko Rozema: Yes, so Dynata Plus is our latest product launched in the market. From origin, we're a data company where we have people servicing customers, but in the current environment, all customers are asking for speed. So we're building our own DIY platform as well, and important to that is, you can have any DIY platform which looks very similar, but the important component behind this is the quality of the data, which we obviously are leading the market in. So nowadays customers can directly access our good quality data at any point in time, rather than waiting for the people to help them launch their project.

Priscilla McKinney: Okay, I love that, but I am going to, now don't kill me, but this is my podcast, I'm going to hit you with a pretty tough question. I look around this room and things are changing pretty fast, and there are some people out there to say, you know what, with synthetic data coming in there, is sample even going to exist anymore? What is happening in this industry? What is your answer from Dynata, and what do you think from your years of experience?

Wilko Rozema: Yeah, so I like that question, it's the question I most often get from customers when I'm in meetings, conversations with them as well. And while I do think there is room for synthetic to enter the market, I rather think it's complementary, and it could potentially in the long run solve even part of the problems we have. Synthetic itself can't replace data from real humans, because it needs to be fed from the data of real humans. So what I think is that the way we cooperate with agents, with brands, could change a little bit. Take for example that we have still a lot of difficulties reducing survey length. What if we just ask the main KPIs to real humans, to use that data to feed a model that can answer the secondary KPIs?

We all know that synthetic is not on point with the data of real humans in terms of accuracy, but is that important for those secondary KPIs? Where, if we compare that to survey data, we all know people lose attention after X minutes, typically seven or eight, so the quality of the data of real humans reduces as well. If you combine those efforts, I think we might find in the next years the solution to solve an issue that already exists for years. So from that sense I don't think we will disappear, I don't think we will replace, I do think part of the work we do might be fueling synthetic models to get to accurate insights.

Priscilla McKinney: I love that because it's not a yes or no. I think a lot of people try to be very provocative about that, as opposed to saying, what is this new technology, how can we use it, what do we know from our experience so that we can pull from it and truly understand how to get the very best out of it, so that we can still get good, high quality data to move forward.

Wilko Rozema: Yeah, exactly. And I think that what I see often is people come with product launches all the time, trying to push synthetic data as a new product to sell it. And while I hear that, because that is driving the business, I think there is a step before. And buyers need to be aware of the caveats when using synthetic versus human, understand the purpose of your research, understand the advantages and disadvantages. But also it's a complete black box for buyers, how this synthetic model is running, which data is fueled in, how is it structured. And if you don't know that, you will get an outcome, but you can't be sure that the outcome is representing the population either, and that is a big risk, in my opinion. And also why we don't think we should be there with a go to market product already, because it could lead into a lot of false positives, and that can result into reputational damage.

So we're experimenting a lot, we're working with customers on it, but we need to understand as well that not every answer that a synthetic model will give you will represent the truth. And take for example ChatGPT, it doesn't give me the truth either all the time, but if I'm unaware what the right answer should be, I will take it for granted, and that can be a big risk for our industry.

Priscilla McKinney: Okay, so that comes back to trust in the industry and transparency. How is your synthetic model created, and that's what the clients need to be asking and to be able to have those conversations with their sample provider. I love that.

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Priscilla McKinney: Martin Dewhurst here at IIEX, and of course this is an innovation conference. I'm kind of curious, what kind of conversation are you hoping to have here?

Martin Dewhurst: I'm hoping to discuss with clients and with other agency partners how they are leading the transformation with AI. I sort of feel that I would like to see the conversation and the narrative moving on from the hype to the reality of how we manage our way through the transformation we're all facing. I've just listened to a fantastic speech by a guy who was talking about how you should use AI relative to the decisions that you're making, the scale of those decisions, the reversibility of those decisions, and the impact of the decisions you're taking. So that's probably going to be the general gist of the conversation that we're having.

Priscilla McKinney: That is an interesting framework, and I have to say, I haven't heard anyone talk about the reversibility of the decision you're making. I think that's an interesting one, I'm going to think on that a little bit. But tell me about your role at Kantar. What are you thinking about day to day as you come in? How are you forging forward and looking through, what am I going to do the last half of this year, and what are you looking for in twenty twenty seven? What's on your mind?

Martin Dewhurst: So I'm the chief commercial officer of our region, and similar to what I've just highlighted, actually a lot of our clients themselves are grappling with the impact of AI. A lot of the business leaders think that AI now means that they need budget no more, and that things can happen yesterday at the speed of lightning, but we work across a whole range of clients' portfolio, and all clients are in a different stage of maturity really. I don't think anyone's arrived, people are scared, excited, a combination of things. And really what we're trying to do at Kantar is make sure that we partner with them through their own journey, to make sure that they're developing a roadmap of how they embrace all of the transformation and the things that they should do, in what order, and make sure they don't boil the ocean and end up in a sort of eternal paralysis because they don't know where to start.

Priscilla McKinney: Eternal paralysis, market researchers, what? It can happen, it has been known. Okay, well stay caffeinated and get out there and have those great conversations. Thank you.

Martin Dewhurst: Cheers.

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Priscilla McKinney: Keith Allen with Hotspex, nice to meet you. I've actually never met you before, so it's nice to meet the new face, a company I've definitely known for a long time. But tell me a little bit about what you're hearing right now. What's a good topic that you think is important to be discussing at this conference?

Keith Allen: So early days, but fantastic conference so far. I have to point out the discussion just now by Magnum on AI and feeling when you're confident enough to go with the answer that AI gives, and when you need to take a step back and think about validation. And that's at Hotspex, we're talking here about the red thread, and helping build that into AI networks, research processes, so that you can feel more confident that your brand building activities are part of that process, and you can train your AIs to some extent on that.

Priscilla McKinney: But learning lots here already, two hours into the conference. So I love it, we're here to learn, but give me the short version, what is Hotspex for people who have not heard of you?

Keith Allen: So if you've not heard of us, we really strongly believe in brand coherency. We have a brand singularity framework where you can measure your brand and your assets against that framework, and the idea is that by building a coherent, singular brand, you're stronger in the mind of consumers.

Priscilla McKinney: Love that, and also big thank you because you're sponsoring the coffee bar, and that's very important to us to keep us going and keep us innovating. Thanks, Keith.

Keith Allen: Thanks so much for that.

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Priscilla McKinney: I'm here with David Cousino at IIEX. Well, wearing these shoes was not a mistake. You know, it's all about marketing, and the shoes get attention. It got your attention at the coffee bar.

David Cousino: Right. Also the coffee.

Priscilla McKinney: Also the coffee. Yeah, so you have a really interesting career in insights, you were a Unilever guy, a lot of experience. But tell me about where you're at now and why you're where you're at now.

David Cousino: Okay, so when I was looking for my next gig, and I've only been at Convotrack for three weeks, but when I was looking around, I knew that I wanted to do something in AI, because that's where everything is going. And as I was sorting through all the different options, they were the only one that had something that I wish I had when I was on client side, which was the capability to analyze video, not just what's in the video, but to analyze frame by frame what's in the video and picking up the visuals. So for me, I felt like that was something I wished I had, and now I'm getting traction and selling it, and it's a great product.

Priscilla McKinney: I love that, solve for the problem that you had. There's a lot of challenges when you're sitting brand side that a lot of times people aren't thinking of, they get very fixated on their technology or their fancy bell or whistle or their platform, but it's really about your workflow and about the problems that you're trying to solve. So tell me one thing pretty specific, I'm going to get you really down in the nitty gritty. Tell me about how you think what you're doing right now solves for letting the researchers stay in their workflow. Because I do think a lot of technology comes in and forces people to learn something new and maybe get out of their flow. What do you think about that?

David Cousino: Well, one of the things that I really appreciate is the ability to search video, social media, in real time and get real insights immediately. So in the past we would do a piece of research to understand consumer behavior, like cooking, and you would set up a study, it would run for three or four weeks, and then you'd wait for the report. What I love about this platform is it's getting you those insights real time, and within about twenty minutes you've got a full deck, if you want, that you can take to your business partners with real insights.

The other thing that I love about it is, if you have a traditional piece of research around your consumer segments, like you do with consumer segmentation, we can pull that into this environment and create those personas within this ecosystem. So now you're able to test with your actual consumer segments real time, and whether it's low risk projects or higher opportunity projects, you're able to get some feedback within minutes, and that's what we're here for, that innovation.

Priscilla McKinney: Okay, we'll keep up the good work with the marketing on the shoes. Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure.