Quirks Chicago Flyover

Priscilla McKinney: Hello and welcome to Ponderings from the Perch, the Little Bird Marketing Company podcast. I'm Priscilla McKinney, CEO and mama bird here at Little Bird Marketing. Well, a little birdie told me what happened at Quirks Chicago and lucky for you, that little birdie had a microphone. I hit the conference floor at Quirks Chicago and I did what I do best. I got the real conversations going.

Priscilla McKinney: This episode is a flyover of the ideas, tensions and candid moments that don't always make it into the keynotes. And if you were there, it gives you a broader picture of what was buzzing around the room. And if you weren't there, consider this your all access pass. Also, if you're smart about it, you'll have 11 new industry friends by the end of this episode. And all of the good stuff, including their URLs and LinkedIns are right in our show notes.

Priscilla McKinney: Here with Malina Simanowski and I was across the room looking at Brainsuite. Haven't seen you guys here before. Turns out you're a German company. This is your first time at Quirks here in Chicago. Tell me a little bit about why. Why cross the pond as we say and come to this particular event because you obviously work with very large blue chip companies and so you've been in the industry for quite a bit. But why this show?

Malina Simanowski: Exactly. So we're obviously trying to scale our company and we love our American clients and just love to meet them here and just get some insights into the US market, I would say, meet existing clients and then hopefully meet new prospects. Very exciting times. We love Quirks. Generally, we've been to Quirks in London, Amsterdam, and why not try Chicago?

Priscilla McKinney: I love the Amsterdam show. I'll be at the London and the Amsterdam show again, but I love that going to IIEX there is so, I just love that show so much. So I'll see you on both sides over there. But for people who haven't seen your brand, tell me a little bit about what's your differentiation.

Malina Simanowski: So in a nutshell what we do is we support companies to reduce budget waste by leveraging predictive AI to really systematically pre-test all their creative assets. Everything we do is grounded in neuroscience and it's very focused on that whole system one part, right? So the whole processing part. So basically is everything that is needed for a successful asset encoded in that asset.

Malina Simanowski: What I really like about Brainsuite, it's quite flexible. There's a high level of customization. Because not every client is alike, right? It's not a one size fits all, so it's completely tailorable to every client. And then what their overarching goal is, like for everyone these days, I feel like is to kind of move away from subjective decision making to a more objective decision making process. So I think we can all agree, data is today's gold. So why not use it?

Priscilla McKinney: I love that. You know AI obviously is helping you as soon as you say predictive I know that we're going there, but this is really a full-fledged platform. So you know people must have many of their products on there. Are they getting a more consistent look across their entire suite of products?

Malina Simanowski: Yes, so it's first of all, it ensures consistency across assets, right? Which is super important for brand building and brand equity. Again, what most clients do is they have an overarching goal to really systematically test everything so that nothing goes out untested and they can do all of that in Brainsuite. So it's really not a one size fits all but one platform fits all if that makes sense.

Malina Simanowski: And now we think in apps so everything we do is asset and channel specific because you cannot really compare shopper marketing to Instagram to every other channel, right? So everything is really specific and again grounded in neuroscience, which I find extremely important. And then basically to put it in very simple terms, put into AI.

Priscilla McKinney: Well, it's nice to see you on this side and then we'll see you in Amsterdam and in London. Looking forward to it.

Priscilla McKinney: Here with Jill Kushner Bishop. So some people might miss it, there's a lot of stuff going on, but also people are not here. So tell my audience a little bit about what you're sharing, what you did for dscout. I'd like it in kind of the story format.

Jill Kushner Bishop: Sure, absolutely. So we're sharing our 10-year partnership with dscout. Over these years we've translated four million words across Spanish, French, German, Korean, Japanese, and a number of other languages. We've done translation for their platform, for their screeners, their missions. We've done transcription of audio and video, back translations of their open ends. And what we wanted to highlight was the fact that language is research design.

Jill Kushner Bishop: So oftentimes, language is left for an afterthought. And when you do that, you run the risk of missing out on so many essential insights. And so we talk about some of the situations we've been in with them, some of the partnership and the way that we've approached things from the get-go to make sure that we're all aligned on tone and expectations and goals. We have the right linguist with the right regional and native language expertise, but also the industry expertise to ensure that those insights aren't lost.

Jill Kushner Bishop: And so we're excited to highlight this work that we've been doing and help people think about the importance of taking language into account from the very beginning, whether you're doing qual or quant, not leaving it for an afterthought at the end.

Priscilla McKinney: You know, it's a case of you don't know what you don't know because if you are monolingual, you don't really think about how steeped our language is, and every language is, in nuance, in localization, idioms. You can't swing a cat without hitting an idiom, you know. And God forbid you try to translate that into another language. So we're going to start with a game on movie titles and translation to show that the word for word translation is lost when you're trying to really connect with people in a way that resonates.

Jill Kushner Bishop: And incorporating the nuance and the humor. So we'll start with that and then we'll talk about some of the stories of the work we've done for dscout and then I share a personal experience of when I was living in Spain and I was taking classes in Spanish, I was writing essays in Spanish, and I was very fluent, but when I was with my Spanish friends, they didn't get me and I didn't feel like myself.

Jill Kushner Bishop: And so I talk about there was Jill and then there was this person named Jill, which is how my Spanish friends pronounced my name, and then I was trapped in this little kind of glass cell where I couldn't be myself. And so when you're trying to connect with people, especially in an interview or a focus group, and really get stories from people, if you're expecting them to do that in a language that's not their own, you're going to miss out on so much nuance, they're going to truncate themselves, they're going to be less forthcoming, and what you're going to get could still be valuable but not as valuable as if you allow people to communicate in a language, or oftentimes the languages, that are most relevant to them.

Priscilla McKinney: Well this is absolutely foundational to good market research because we're trying to make better business decisions. That's point number one. But you can only do that when you get real data from people. And data from people sounds very robotic but it's not. When people really give amazing answers, it's because something of that answer is emotional. It hits us in a certain place. And so we're never as emotional as in our own native language.

Priscilla McKinney: And I think that's something that maybe is hard for someone to understand if they don't speak another language. But just explaining a little bit, it's not like it's hard to understand, but a lot of people just haven't thought about it before. So I'm curious about when you start. I'll come to the session. I imagine you're going to start with things like, well, I can't give it away because it has to be a surprise.

Jill Kushner Bishop: But I was just thinking about your comment about people's native languages and like the language that you swear in when you stub your toe. Like that is what is in your heart and in your gut. And so you want to be able to make people feel comfortable that they can be their true self and that same in that same language in that same moment. And so creating that authentic connection with people and allowing them to be their full selves is what language is all about.

Priscilla McKinney: Yeah, really qualitative insights come from people digging a little deeper into their emotion and not just being a robot and telling you the answer to the survey. So I love that. I'm looking forward to that. And it's just really awesome to hear such a long decade partnership here in the industry where as translation partners, you really know market research. And I think that's really interesting.

Jill Kushner Bishop: Yeah, and it's about that relationship and that partnership. Oftentimes companies view translation as just a transaction, and you can do it in a transactional way, but you're missing out on efficiencies and workflow and relationships and trust and accountability. And so finding a partner that you feel good about and having all of your expectations set, they understand you, your tone, your voice, all of the way that you work and what you're trying to do, and then making sure that you're working through this together from the get-go.

Priscilla McKinney: Great. Multilingual Connections. Check them out.

Priscilla McKinney: Here with Hannibal Brooks with Olson Zaltman. So nice to see you here at Quirks. So if people are not familiar with what you all do, how would you differentiate yourself? Like what would be your byline?

Hannibal Brooks: I would say, well, our new branding is that we're the meaning company, and I think that really is core to who we are. If I want to talk about it from a personal level, you can look at what someone does in a store. They pick up a bottle, they pick up a food item, they consider it. We're all about understanding what are all the emotional undercurrents, the stories, the memories that take place beneath what you see on the surface. So we love that there's so many companies here that can study what people are doing in more detail than ever. We're just focused on going a little bit deeper into that why.

Priscilla McKinney: For me, I want my favorite place to be. I walk somewhere like a movie theater and I'm like that carpet takes me somewhere even before I get to the movie. So that's how I describe it. Hopefully that carpet takes you to a good place because I've been in a few that maybe not so much but I love that idea, like you even allude to that. You walk into something you're having an experience with the brand and all of a sudden emotions are coming up right. So it's not me reporting to you. Yes I like this movie theater. There's something deeper there.

Priscilla McKinney: So what does it all mean? What are brands saying to you? Why are they coming for this? What are those conversations sound like with you and your clients?

Hannibal Brooks: Yeah, I would say they really are coming from two directions. One side is brands that are saying people love us, but they have a totally different perception of us than we do of ourselves. So what's actually going on because we need to be able to steer this ship. The other one is people are saying they love what we're doing, but their behavior is totally shifting away from that. So are they lying to us or is there something else going on.

Hannibal Brooks: So we're like, okay, what are they actually thinking, not just what they're doing, because the behavior change can seem really sudden, but it's because the meaning is changing faster than you can measure it.

Priscilla McKinney: You know what? Humans are complicated, Hannibal. I agree with that. I love it. It's so good to see you.

Hannibal Brooks: Likewise, great seeing you, as always.

Priscilla McKinney: Here with Genevieve Becker and this is a brand I haven't seen. I do a lot of competitive landscape work in this industry. So when I see a brand and also I just have to say hats off to great marketing. I love seeing that and like wearing a hat. So I love it, pun intended. But if people have not heard of Strella, tell us a little bit about what, give us the quick view on it. And then I'd like to know a little bit more about why being here at Quirks.

Genevieve Becker: Yeah, absolutely. First of all, thanks for having me. So Strella is an end-to-end AI moderated user research platform. We've been in the market for about 18 months at this point. We're female co-founded, and we were first to market with a continuous voice-to-voice interview experience from an AI moderator. And we're at Quirks because we serve very clearly into the insight space, and what we have found is that people really want qual at scale, but without the timeline that's traditionally associated with traditional qual methodologies and we feel that our AI moderated solution is really rising to the occasion to solve for that use case.

Priscilla McKinney: Now what have you heard from people, maybe pleasantly surprised with how easy it is then to use AI moderation because I think now, you know, that ship has sailed, people know this is where we're going but what have the reactions been, what have you heard from clients who maybe were skeptical at the beginning?

Genevieve Becker: Yeah I'll give you kind of a two part answer, one is on the client side and the other is on the participant, so the end user side. So on the client side I would say the skepticism that we hear often is, is this really going to save me time? Can I put enough trust in the quality of the AI that's involved in everything from guide creation to screener set up, obviously the moderation and then the analysis. And I think what we find is that yeah, we get them just to the point where they have to do kind of the best practice checks that they would ordinarily do in traditional methodologies, but they really are able to save the bulk of the time on guide creation, screener setup, obviously the moderation component and on the analysis piece.

Genevieve Becker: And it's really spot checks here and there because we have so many fraud prevention and hallucination prevention methods built into our AI that they have been able to trust it more than they initially expected. So that's on the client side.

Priscilla McKinney: It does strike me that this is one of those things you just have to see it. So is that your first step usually with people, a demo?

Genevieve Becker: Yeah, yeah. And it's funny because we break the demo into two parts. So the first part is always like kind of a little sheepish. We ask them like, you ever seen an AI moderator? Have you ever talked to an AI moderator? And more and more people are like, yeah, maybe once or twice. But that's new even within the past couple of months. So the first thing we show them is just what it sounds like. What is it? What is the user experience look like? And then the second part is more of what does the researcher side look like.

Priscilla McKinney: I love it. Strella, we'll put it in our show notes. Thank you, Genevieve.

Genevieve Becker: Thank you. Thank you so much. Very nice to meet you.

Priscilla McKinney: Here with Clemens Johnson from Dynata. You guys are sponsoring a big party tonight so he's all the fun, all the rage, so if you miss Quirks you're going to miss the dueling pianos but I wanted to catch up with him in here. Why are you here? What are you hoping to hear today? What did you come expecting to learn?

Clemens Johnson: Thanks, Priscilla. I'm really interested to hear what challenges and problems brands and insights leaders are solving with AI and synthetic data. That's a big topic that I'm keen to learn more about.

Priscilla McKinney: Let me ask you this, just off the cuff, do you think that when people use the word synthetic data or say they're using AI, do you think we're even on the same page? Are we talking about the same thing? That's a little bit of what you're listening for?

Clemens Johnson: Yeah, that's a good question. I think there are a lot of pages and people are on a lot of different pages. You see every single banner here has AI powered, AI strengthened, led by AI. I think it all depends on where you're coming from and where you want to go, but I think that's a really good point.

Priscilla McKinney: What do you think is the strength right now for Dynata? Sitting, if you kind of look out on this whole expo, like the trade show floor, and you see what's going on and some changes in this market, what is exciting to you about Dynata and what you all are offering there?

Clemens Johnson: When it comes to Dynata, I think what's most exciting is just how we have a laser focus on quality and a real reliance on putting the human into that research process. Additionally, when it comes to AI, the key is what is that AI trained on? And it has to be trained on really good quality data and ideally human-based data to get the best results from it.

Priscilla McKinney: You're working with blue chip companies, they are demanding, I'm assuming. And they're trying to make decisions so much faster. Is that really the challenges you hear, or am I wrong, and is there something else that clients are saying to you more often coming to you?

Clemens Johnson: Yeah, I mean, that's a great point. Speed has always been an issue in market research and insights. I don't think that's changed or will ever change. I think that's an issue that AI is well handled to solve, especially when it comes to early stage ideation, experimentation, things like that. I think there's always going to be a place for human-centered research, though, at the end of the day, because all the brands I work with, when it comes down to it, they're selling something to a person.

Priscilla McKinney: Here with Bobbi Barkley with Listen Labs, or just Listen. I don't know, now it's getting hip and now we're just saying Listen. But I see you guys all over the world at the different conferences. We had so much fun in Mexico City. But one thing I love about the presentations you do no matter what client you're presenting with is you go, okay, just one second, we're going to give you the quickest demo in the world. And then you go, see the whole way your platform works and it's hilarious. And I just wish people in this room would do a much quicker demo on their platform. So I just want to say thank you, first of all.

Bobbi Barkley: Well, thank you, Priscilla. It's great to be hanging out with you again here in Chicago. And yes, so with this demo, a lot of people are kind of starting to try to achieve this qualitative research at scale. But when all you say is qualitative research at scale, there's not too much color behind that. And then secondly, if you just put a really long demo on the screen, you might start to lose the audience. So we perfected this really rapid, quick demo that really illustrates all of our offerings.

Bobbi Barkley: It'll really quickly show you how we build a discussion guide using AI, which brings more color to how strong it is. It will show you how we recruit through our panel network by showing the example filters we can do. It gives you an example of what the AI moderator actually looks like, where you can see people talking with voice and video on screen. It will show analysis like charts and reports. And then lastly, it does a really good job of showing our presentation. When we say we use AI to build a presentation, people might think that it's slop. But when you actually see it on screen in the video, you can see that it's quite good and has images and charts. So it's very helpful. So thank you for noticing.

Priscilla McKinney: Oh my gosh. The visualization was a big surprise at the end of this one. But I have to tell you, you said all of those things and literally this happened in like a minute, 20 seconds or something like that. And I was like, inspiration, inspiration. I could see how this works. I love it. I love it. So Alfred presented yesterday with Chubby's. And one of the things that was interesting I hadn't heard in a different presentation was how you were able to work with parents in order to get children into the moderation and into the quality. So tell me a little bit about that and how that's been working.

Bobbi Barkley: Yeah, that's a fantastic question. Children are a very hard to reach audience. They don't have a very high attention span to sit down through a long interview. They're in school and after school sports. So it's really hard to find 30 minutes with them, right? And so the benefit of Listen is that we can conduct these asynchronous, in-depth, one-to-one interviews. And since it's asynchronous, we're actually able to do it at a time that works best for them, which is really able to increase our participation rates. In terms of sourcing these children, we were able to partner with their parents and get parental approval and actually have them join the sessions with their children. We work with different panel partners as well as our custom recruitment operations team to find these children. It was just a really good process being able to have them take it on their own time asynchronously.

Priscilla McKinney: Yeah, in the presentation it was cool we got to see what a couple of the kids said and honestly kids are brutally honest. So it was very cool to see not only that but then the connection that Chubby's made with a comment that a kid made in an interview and they were able to innovate directly from that comment so we'll leave that for someone else to go checking out your demo. But one thing I wanted to point out that also I hadn't seen before was it makes sense to me that this awesome technology that you're bringing into the industry is of course going to work with young people and gen pop and whatnot. But I saw proof the other day that you were also finding some other hard to reach audiences like CEOs, enterprise buyers, people who are looking at not buying a $20 item or a $40 pair of shorts, but someone who's looking at a $40,000 or $400,000 enterprise software. So tell me a little bit about that B2B experience and asynchronous qual.

Bobbi Barkley: Yeah, yeah, that's such a great question. It is very common that people come to us and assume that we just do B2C. But at the end of the day, our platform can really design studies and interview experiences around whatever objective or research question. So it can certainly tailor to B2B audiences. The only part that people don't expect is that we can actually find B2B participants. And so we have a handful of partner panel networks that we work with to source B2B participants. I would say around 30 to 35 percent of the volume of the studies in our platform are for B2B audiences. The only catch is that since they are very senior B2B people and they're harder to find, they just cost more per interview. But in terms of the functionality of the product or how you design a study, nothing else really works any differently than B2C. It's just finding them. And examples that we've done work with, we work extensively with like Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic on interviewing B2B decision makers. Specifically with Microsoft, we run studies on fielding IT decision makers when evaluating purchasing different cloud solution networks.

Priscilla McKinney: See, as a CEO myself, and I'm not trying to be a jerk here, like I'm busy. And even when someone offers me pretty good money, I'm not going to do it. It's not on my own time. It's the interface is clunky. The person calls me back six times. Like I want to be able to do it the way I want to do it. And yeah, I would like to participate or I would like to give my opinion. But in general, the traditional approach has just been like not worth it for me as a CEO. So I find that interesting because your UX just feels different than what's out there. So kudos to you.

Priscilla McKinney: I mentioned to you a kind of a funny thing when I saw you guys present in IIEX down in Mexico City. There was just one moment that I had that I went, this is genius. These guys are thinking about it. And it was the dotted line in the little dialogue box where someone would come on the screen, like the little camera screen, it dot dot dot where they should put their head and shoulders. And it made sense to me all of a thought, this is why other companies are not getting very good clips from online asynchronous qual and those videos, because people aren't standing in the right place. And so I was like, these guys are thinking the UX through. So that was really cool. So kind of who's on your team or what's the background, why you think this technology just has a better interface?

Bobbi Barkley: Yeah, yeah, great questions. As it pertains to the dotted lines and making sure people are front and center during the clips, this is really important for us because a big part of our platform is the analysis portion, where the AI is going to go through all the interviews and extract key findings. And one of those things is being able to capture people on video. We can use AI to instruct the AI to collect a two-minute highlight clip on a certain topic, right? And so what that really means is we want people front and center, so we're able to really capture those nuanced videos and you can get more color behind just a textual insight, which doesn't mean as much unless you can see the person talking. We will extract and propose key findings from the study and it will always link out to an exact video clip so you can get more color behind the insight.

Priscilla McKinney: Let me put that into terms like just real plain English for someone. Let's say, let's take Chubby's for example. So it's shorts, right? And so if I were going into the stakeholders and saying, let me tell you a little bit about what people said about fit or about color or something like that. I could quickly query and say, hey, give me four really good quick video clips specifically about what someone said about the color, right?

Bobbi Barkley: Exactly. You could say, you know, create me a two minute clip on the kids talking about the purple color versus the yellow color, and it will go across hours of transcripts and only extract clips related to that specific prompt on purple versus yellow. So great way to frame it.

Priscilla McKinney: I love it. Well, thanks, you guys, for just having actually an intriguing and interesting more of a conversation instead of a presentation. I really appreciated that.

Bobbi Barkley: Thank you so much, Priscilla. Thank you for your time.

Priscilla McKinney: Here with Anna O'Brien with Curion. Now if you don't know them, first of all I don't know where you've been living in this industry, but you guys are known for in-market research, you have the Curion score, so when brands are looking to figure out what's going on at shelf or what's going on in that moment of purchase, that's what everybody thinks about when they think about Curion.

Priscilla McKinney: But I'm really intrigued by this new conversation you all have started up, especially at the show, about what's going on with the new GLP-1 shopper. So tell me a little bit about why the curiosity there and what you all are thinking about and talking about internally.

Anna O'Brien: Yes, it's so important for brands to understand what's happening with their consumers because that's ultimately going to impact their products and their new innovation. So we're able to help them connect with those consumers, the GLP-1 users, to really understand how that's impacting their food occasions, what they're eating. And we actually uncovered that consumers are drinking more beverages in terms of instead of having those meals that in the middle of the day, they would have a snack or a cookie. Now they're using beverages to kind of fill that gap. So it's just so important to really understand the impact that's going to have down the line, not just for GLP-1 users, but then the overall landscape to understand the better for you category.

Priscilla McKinney: Yeah, that better for you. The other thing that that brings up for me is you might have a GLP-1 user, but they happen to be the shopper for the family. And so are you finding that that's also a conversation of how that alters the whole basket for the whole family?

Anna O'Brien: Yes, it's absolutely so important to be able to capture the shopping experience. And that's where we can help and understand where that consumer, what they're picking at shelf and we can get in their face. We can go with them. We can talk to them at shelf and really understand that purchase occasion for their entire family.

Priscilla McKinney: I can see like protein and all those key words popping up. So it's really important to learn that stuff so they're not missing these trends. I think it's interesting what's going on, what's going to be the next trend, what's going to stick with us. And also that shopper is now maybe looking at packaging differently and saying some claims are now standing out that maybe meant nothing before. I always laugh about, I remember when Twizzler started putting on gluten-free and I'm like, it's always been gluten-free. It is loaded with sugar, but it's funny what claims stood out because of what's happening and trending in the market.

Priscilla McKinney: I will say I'm really glad I was just talking with you guys here at the booth about an upcoming webinar. So I'll link that in my show notes if anybody wants to take a look at what you guys have found. It's a UK and a US study as you mentioned. So what's going on globally with this shopper?

Anna O'Brien: I think it's so important like you said for brands to understand what is changing for the consumer. Yes, exactly.

Priscilla McKinney: Well great meeting with you Anna. Thanks for your time.

Priscilla McKinney: Here at the Bolt booth and you've got something on your shoulder. Have you noticed?

Andrew Seinfeld: I did, I did. His name is Bolty. He's our company mascot.

Priscilla McKinney: Okay. I love it when you are just traveling all around the world with Bolty and I'm serious. You crack me up online. I mean, very good job on LinkedIn. I love that you keep it a little bit lighter in this industry, but let's talk about the important things too. What's different about Bolt? Why should people come talk with you?

Andrew Seinfeld: So it's not why they should come talk to Bolt, but what they want out of coming to these events, like in general, right? We're not talking about like online and whatnot, but at these events, it's like, why are you coming to an event? And it's generally because you want to do research faster, better, less expensive, or a new methodology to drive more impact with stakeholders. So with Bolt, we're focused on the human element. So the human in the loop, AI is always going to keep evolving. There's going to be new technology every new week, and you can't keep up. You need to find people that you trust that are a partner that you know are actually putting in the effort and time to have the best technology, but are doing it specifically to help the researchers get the research at a more in-depth level, and Bolt is focusing on that.

Priscilla McKinney: Okay, this is all I talk about in marketing, is it doesn't matter who you are, what matters is what matters to the client. So you have completely brought us back there right away, and I really love that. So what does the conversation sound like? Let's say someone does come to you, what are some of the uncertainties right now or the concerns that you're hearing that you're thinking, okay, let's start this conversation. You may not have all the answers, but you're willing to start that conversation and hear people.

Andrew Seinfeld: Yeah, so I think like you, you understand that you need to start with the why, like why they're coming to these events or why they need that extra help and just understanding their specific use case. And so most people are trying to look to how to improve completely, but in the end, the goal is to thrive at their job, keep their job, and know that they're on a trajectory to have a seat at the table, drive impact or make sure that they're the ones on the cutting edge. So when I understand what their needs are whether it be from a tracking perspective, whether it be a job-to-be-done framework or a customer journey, it really just depends on the best way to solve their individual problems and then creating the bespoke opportunity for them to actually do that with you or provide them with the solutions. So for Bolt we look at the entire framework, not just the execution of a single project.

Priscilla McKinney: Okay, I love it and we'll put in the show notes just where to find you online but I like that you're talking about human in the loop but we also want to point out there's also a squirrel in this loop.

Andrew Seinfeld: Yeah so Bolty is our mascot because we're nuts about insights. I told you there was a dad joke in there somewhere right?

Priscilla McKinney: I love it. It's interesting as well. Squirrels are naturally curious. They're always observing the world around them and they have a deeper sense, or we can assume, depending on how we want to take the story, but have a deeper awareness of the world around them and kind of like seeds, nuts in general have the possibility to grow into a giant tree, create a forest. So insights are seeds that can blossom if nurtured. So just because you have the insight, unless you're able to plant it, water it and let it grow within an organization, you're really not driving the success that you want. So you can look at the squirrel as a way to support you in trying to grow those trees.

Andrew Seinfeld: Okay, I'm going to tag you on LinkedIn next time because we also have an albino squirrel in our yard.

Priscilla McKinney: Yes please. You need to come visit? We're going to need to put a squirrel in the tree for you so he has a buddy. Okay, let's get a squirrel cam at my house.

Andrew Seinfeld: Yeah, let's do it. I'm into it. Thank you Priscilla.

Priscilla McKinney: Well, I'm here with Pete Maginn and I found someone else who's come from across the pond, but I did reach out to you on LinkedIn before this event. That's one of the things I always advise people to do in order to really make the most of these events. But I was excited to see a brand that I didn't know a lot about, so I wanted to reach out. And I would love to give you an opportunity to talk to my whole audience about what is so different about Beano Brain.

Pete Maginn: Yeah, thanks very much Priscilla. Yeah, essentially we're a kids and teens and families specialist agency. We've been around about six years old, although I've been in the kids space for over 20 years now. And we believe, and just being here already this morning in Chicago has reiterated that, it's quite a unique space for the US market, despite the US being a huge market, insight market, there's not many kids specialist agencies. And we believe that we offer something very different and really importantly with the necessary skills and set up to be able to research kids effectively but also responsibly as well. And also to be able to do that both in the US and globally as well. And that's kind of why we're here and that's why we're keen to meet as many people as we can today.

Priscilla McKinney: I love it. You said it is one of those audiences that is hard to find. They don't come on their own recognizance. Someone's got to bring them into the fold. And then there's a lot of ethics that are involved there. But it's really a specialty. So is there something when you first got going in this business that you found really surprising, what was either so hard or you know?

Pete Maginn: I think surprising is just how brutally honest kids can be. And that's partly, now wait, do you have kids of your own? I have kids. Okay, that shouldn't surprise you. No, no, they're 17 now. But even before I was in the industry way before then. And just how honest and also funny and fun it was to do compared to some of the adult stuff, consumer research that I was doing. But also just how perceptive they can be as well. If something's not right, they won't sugarcoat it and they'll tell you.

Pete Maginn: Actually, I think in terms of adults, sometimes they're a bit concerned to say something, actually, that's not very good. They'll kind of make it vanilla, whereas kids are like, they'll love it or they'll hate it and they'll tell you why. And our job is to try and work out how to explore that why, which is not always verbally, because they're kids and depending on the age we speak to, and we work with kids quite young, five, six plus. A lot of that time is non-verbal and it's about body language, it's about the wider context, what we know, it's getting a parent's perspective as well. And I think that's why that's unique as well, you need the right skills and setup to do it properly.

Priscilla McKinney: Here with Margie Strickland with Luth Research and we've been talking a lot about what we've been hearing here at this conference at Quirks Chicago and we wanted to talk a little bit about AI because of course there's been so many conversations. But tell me what has surprised you about the conversation here about AI.

Margie Strickland: Yeah, it's not so much that there's a lot of conversations obviously about AI as a research tool. But we're talking about something beyond that, which is AI within a consumer's journey. So if you think about the path to purchase and how a consumer has had this evolution of the path to purchase for so long, with AI being now part of that layer, there's this gap in measurement. So we know that brands are really still capturing things like search, like clicks, like impressions, even conversion, but with AI now coming into play, they're missing that layer of measurement within that. So they're struggling at trying to understand where is my brand showing up? How is it showing up? And then what are my consumers actually doing next after they see my brand within AI.

Margie Strickland: So it's definitely a disruption that's happening and we're really focusing on how can we as marketers and as researchers really answer the key questions in terms of things like generative engine optimization so that we really can uplift brands so that they understand where their consumers are going next.

Priscilla McKinney: Okay, so this is work you are doing at Luth Research, and obviously you guys are known for path to purchase work. You do shop alongs digitally, so how is this coming up in conversations between you and your peers at Luth, how you know how to answer these questions for your end clients?

Margie Strickland: So because clients are constantly looking for how they will evolve in the purchase journey, they're coming to us to understand that behavioral journey that's happening on digital devices because it's all over computers and websites and mobile apps. How AI is now changing the landscape of how they go through a process of actually thinking about purchasing a product, but it's even beyond that because CPG is one layer but think about how people are utilizing areas in healthcare for GLP-1 discovery or if you're thinking about how they're planning a trip or a home loan or going to purchase a car. These are things that are actually long-term journeys, if you think about the consumers, and AI is actually coming into play a lot more in those areas. And that's ultimately going to lead to the next big thing that we're hearing at the Quirks Conference, which is agentic commerce.

Priscilla McKinney: Yeah, I like what you're saying that people talk about it easily about CPG, and we know Rufus, Sparky, there's other things besides ChatGPT, but there's a lot of faces and brands of generative AI that are accompanying people on the shopping process, on the path to purchase. But there's also pre-shopping, people are kind of evaluating things, and I got to say, when was the last time I did my taxes? It's way too complicated, right? But yesterday, I had to file taxes for one of my teens, and I had a question. Should I use this particular app? Should I use this? What do I know? But an immediate reaction for me was, well, let me just go check generative AI and let me see what it thinks, because I was in the middle of three other things. And it's interesting, it's just invading so much of our lives, almost unconsciously, it's just all happening.

Priscilla McKinney: Let me ask you this about your perspective from Luth Research. What do you think people need to know that they're not asking you? Like, do they get surprised when they work with you and they're like, we didn't see that coming or we didn't even know we needed to see that data? What are you experiencing?

Margie Strickland: What we're experiencing is the conversion gap. This notion of this invisible layer that they never really thought of existing and where their category is in terms of the disruption of AI. In other words, is my category of grocery really affected by AI in the consumer journey or is my category of travel really affected by AI? So they're coming to us not only to try and understand where they fit, but ultimately what do they learn within AI that tells me where my customers go next. It's this real invisible layer of measurement that they just don't have a handle on and they need that to understand that full consumer journey just to optimize their processes going forward.

Priscilla McKinney: Are you saying that nobody really thought that I would be looking at TurboTax in the back of an Uber during a conference? I didn't see that coming.

Margie Strickland: Honestly, I don't think a lot of us saw exactly what AI was going to do for us. In a lot of ways, and I'm dating myself a little bit here, but in the beginning of Google, we all thought Google was going to answer a lot of those questions for us. And then we learned that okay, Google actually does give us a lot of search information, and Google's not going away anytime soon, search is still going to be here, but AI is this inspirational layer. It's another level of communication that people need and they want and they desire because it puts everything in a very central, neutralized fashion for them to review products and look at recommendations and then decide, okay, now I'm going to go next because now I have the right levers and I'll go back to search and look for that next step.

Priscilla McKinney: It is absolutely changing our consideration set and saying, well, if I go to Google, I'm going to consider this, this and this. But if I go to generative AI, here's a very different consideration set that happens. So I can see if brands really do research about one, but ignore the other, you're going to have a problem. Again, if brands are missing out on that understanding of where they show up inside AI and what consumers are doing next because they showed up or because they didn't show up, what are they going to do to optimize that generative layer?

Margie Strickland: Love it. Thanks Priscilla.

Priscilla McKinney: Yeah, thank you so much Margie.

Priscilla McKinney: I don't think it would be a complete conference unless I talked with Tim Lawton over here at SightX because we're buddies. But can we have a drum roll please? Tell us the big news.

Tim Lawton: Well, the news is out, cat's out of the bag. SightX is now officially part of Repdata, merging their sampling data quality, which is obviously best in class, with our software platform, to really be able to be the first really fully integrated research platform, total platform if you will, from data capture, data integration, data quality, reporting, insights, and everything in between.

Tim Lawton: The exciting thing for us as SightX merging with them was one, first and foremost, the people and the culture was a fit and it's amazing, and we're excited about what we can do together. But the synergies, for lack of a better word, really between our clients and their clients, our technology and their technology, it's not a we're going to join and just blend into another team. We're actually coming together in really exciting ways thinking about what more can we do. Our teams are additive to each other, our technologies are complementary, and the combined go-to-market effort I think is going to be really exciting for what we can offer.

Tim Lawton: Both of our respective business models are evolving and adapting by the nature of us coming together, which I think is awesome for all of our clients that we service, because it can be subscription or single project, it can be our platform, and I'm going to have to get used to saying this, if you use another platform if you really want to, if you use our data, fine. But ideally, we'll kind of continue to convert people over to this platform and even add them to our technology roadmap and what we're going to lean into this year. Bigger team, more resources. So from everything from our customer success to the research team to the technology, it really more perfectly embodies that idea of you can go faster alone or further together. It really is that in a corporate sense, even though we're bigger but still scrappy.

Priscilla McKinney: You know where they've been growing in a few acquisitions but it's an exciting time to really come together and the industry has been evolving so much in the last few years. I feel like this is the right time for the right reasons and you're the right people. Well it's been really fun watching all this so this is great. We're friends I can take it but talk about the right people because it's just nice people, what's up with this, where you really can say how can we collaborate. And you know I know a few things about collaboration, but it is really nice to see that openness and also saying you know what, this is just better for the end user.

Tim Lawton: Yeah, I think nothing is an end user but for us obviously we're considering this, it was the kind of party line of it, and that ultimately is what makes our business better. It makes our customers better. But as founders and CEOs of SightX, we're like, if we're not working for ourselves anymore, who do we want to work with and for? And I think that was the kind of step one through our process that started, feels like in dog years, like 100 years ago, you know, last year. But going through our process to figure this out, what was the next stage and phase of our company life cycle? And we knew coming into last year that whether we raise more money or look for something else, there was something that we needed to do in good ways to take our business and vision to the next level. And then meeting Pat Stokes, founder and CEO of Repdata, and his team and everyone else, looking back, it was kind of a no-brainer.

Tim Lawton: Again, our process was busy and a million and one conversations and we always kind of came back to what does it feel like and what is the team and culture fit, and it was always that, and then the very close second was also the technology and the kind of stuff. But it has seemed like a long time and I have to say you and I have been doing this together at conferences before COVID. So that was a lifetime ago officially.

Priscilla McKinney: Yeah. So happy for you. That's really great news. And it is about just a really interesting amplification, a really interesting acceleration of what you and I have been absolutely focused on. So congrats and you heard it here, hopefully first on Ponderings from the Perch, but maybe you heard it from SightX. Awesome.

Tim Lawton: Thanks, Priscilla.

Priscilla McKinney: I hope you enjoyed this episode of Ponderings from the Perch. If your company is interested in sponsoring a flyover like this, please get in touch with us. You can always find me at Priscilla at littlebirdmarketing.com. Thanks, and from all the peeps here at Little Bird Marketing, have a great day and happy marketing.