Sima is joined today by Steve Wagner, a Senior Marketing Manager, to chat about email hygiene and enhancing data lists.

Steve Wagner leads the strategic marketing function for Webbula.  He has over 15 years of experience in demand generation, digital marketing, and account-based marketing programs.  He's previously led these efforts across several organizations, including Sales Performance International, ShowClix, and Ariba.

Isn't Email Dead?

Webbula assists with email list hygiene by driving the best marketing performance possible in such categories as deliverability and open rates and helps to enrich the organization’s data by finding missing parts of their information.

Year after year, email marketing proves to be one of the top revenue drivers for businesses, despite proclamations that email is dead.

Although there are certainly trends in digital these last couple of years, each year circles back to having a solid email address in order for people to validate their accounts or to drive certain messaging to.

What is Email Hygiene, Anyway?

When looking at an email list with a million names, most marketers tend to stop by wondering how many of those email addresses are valid, and how they might be identified. However, that is not enough. 

There are a lot of threats out there, and they do deliver. Webbula breaks these threats into four major categories: 1) reputation threats; 2) fraud threats; 3) delivery threats; and 4) conversion threats. Steve relates examples for each and how his company mitigates these risks.

Actual Data vs. Model Data

Webbula also has a data-enrichment side that will append additional information or missing gaps for people on their customer lists.

100% of Webbula data is self-reported, deterministic, and individually linked so each piece of data they collect can be traced back to the individual who self-reported it. This information often comes from publisher partners, transactional events, social media surveys, and other data providers that rely on that same level of data to apply to their third-party data.

Steve shares some benefits of using self-reported data.

Looking Ahead

Google is phasing out the third-party cookies over the next couple of years and this has really shaken a lot of marketers who have relied heavily on digital.

Thankfully, Google is aware of the potential fallout and have applied a grace period.

Steve discloses what he sees for the future of marketing and Webbula.

_______________________________

Sima loves to hear from her listeners with input, questions, suggestions and just to connect! You can find her at the links below!

Email: [email protected]

LinkedIn

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Sima is passionate about data and loves to share, learn and help others that share that passion. If you love data as much as her, subscribe on iTunes and don’t forget to leave a rating and review!

Connect with Steve:

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His Website

Sima brings you a special episode regarding the current Corona Virus outbreak and addresses questions she’s been receiving on a wide range of topics. She hopes you will find this information helpful!

Additionally, Sima would like to extend her sincerest gratitude to all of the healthcare workers and their families out there who are putting their lives on the line for all of us to help our friends and loved ones get better.

What Is The Likely Impact Of The Corona Virus For The Market Research Industry?

Qualitative research will certainly be impacted. Enterprise clients are dealing with the same uncertainty that we’re all dealing with, regarding the economy and our physical well-being, so we just can’t know what is going to take place. 

Clients will still need to make decisions around marketing spend, product development, and innovation.

The only way they can reduce that uncertainty around their decisions is due to market research.

Budgets will be tighter, but it would not be logical for a company to make a multi-million dollar decision without research.

As A Business Owner, Do You Have A Plan?

The stress we feel right now is because of the uncertainty.

If you have not already done so, take this time to start working on your contingency plans and incorporate multiple scenarios. 

Although it may not feel like it right now, we are not actually in the heat of the crisis yet. If we do hit that bigger, deeper crisis level, having a plan or plans of action will give you something to focus on and the confidence in knowing what you’re going to do.

Speaking of Contingency Plans, Is This The Right Time To Raise Capital? Or Should I Sell My Company?

If you think your company is going to lose value during this time period, it’s something to consider.

You need to understand your tolerance for risk, and that’s the gut-check of what you’re willing to do. It is a personal decision.

What’s Your Plan For Your Kids?

In talking to her family, Sima says it was agreed on that they would have to work harder than ever to ensure that they are doing their part in this crisis: managing a business, helping the industry, helping others in the community,  and solving tough problems for their partners and other clients.

This work will require many additional work hours and also require Sima’s kids to step up and do their part, such as doing their chores, managing their schedule, staying off of social media,  being engaged, and being responsible.

Email me your thoughts!

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infinity-2.com

Sima is passionate about data and loves to share, learn and help others that share that passion. If you love data as much as her, subscribe on iTunes and don’t forget to leave a rating and review!

Sima has a special treat for you today, and that’s a conversation from the archives with Eileen Campbell, Co-Founder and Executive Chair for The Reid Campbell Group. She and Sima discuss the insights industry, how her company brings authenticity to chat, and her hopes for the future of the insights.

An Exciting Startup

The Reid Campbell Group is a holding company. It owns two companies: Rival Technologies and Reach3 Insights. 

Rival Technologies is an insights tech company, an enterprise-grade platform that brings voice, video, and chat to the insights world. Rival is a SaaS business so there will be clients who use it on a DIY basis.

Reach3 is a full-service consulting business that uses Rival’s technology as the backbone of their operations.

Introducing new technology to the industry through skilled consultants who can teach you how to “drive” is a great way to integrate the technology. 

Authenticity In Brands

Frustrations that Eileen and her partner, Andrew Reid, have experienced over the years birthed the idea for The Reid Campbell Group.

Consumers want authenticity in brands, they want to have real conversations with brands. In the insights world, the way we talk to consumers is not the way anybody would talk to a typical consumer. 

So what The Reid Campbell Group strives to do is bring the authenticity of chat with the rigor of research. Their platform uses Facebook Messenger or phone SMS to carry on real conversations via chat with consumers but at scale and with the structure of a typical survey.

A Consumer’s Experience

From the consumer’s point of view, it’s a much more conversational experience. 

How The Reid Campbell Group designs the inquiry is really important and audience-specific. They use lots of emojis, real language, and ensure that whoever crafted the chat knows the target audience.

Although questions are served up one at a time, the questions are interspersed with dialogue. This feels much more like natural language.

Benefits Of Rival Technologies Platform

The Rival Technologies platform offers the benefit of real-life and real-time transcribing and translating of everything, and this is especially amazing for international needs.

What’s most compelling is that people engage differently with this platform as compared to traditional surveys. In a traditional survey, on average, you will get about 20 words from somebody in an open-ended question. With this one, however, you can get about 127 words.

You can do your open-ended questions in straight audio, so that you can hear people’s voices and inflections if you’re the client. On video, you can see the people.

There are additional capabilities on the front-end to design the tools, and the back-end capabilities assist in analyzing the data.

The bottom line is all of these factors contribute to a more natural-feeling conversation.

Sourcing the Consumers

Andrew Reid, Eileen’s partner, was the Founder of Vision Critical, which is probably the largest purveyor of customer communities. They are starting to do some communities where they recruit from a loyalty program or someone’s social media followings, for example. A lot of their sampling comes from building communities.

Eileen shares a variety of other ways that they are trying to bring in new voices and provides some experiences for context.

New Horizons

Eileen has always hated the self-flagellation of the insights industry because what they do contributes greatly to the success of their clients’ organizations.

Clients should be made stars within their own organization, and Eileen’s company works very hard on deliverables that are cool and feel modern, that are PowerPoint presentations that have the ability to go viral within their own organization: like shareable, mobile-based reports that are more like a blog, or 1-3 minutes shareable videos.

Eileen’s continuing crusade is to help the insights industry and the people who choose it get the recognition they deserve and feel really proud...

Dr. Emmanuel Probst joins Sima in this thought-provoking episode of Data Gurus.

Although the subject of today’s show is about marketing, it’s even more so about life and looking at consumers from an elemental level: looking at their needs, their perspectives, and what motivates them. It’s about pushing brands to think about these considerations first, over short-term metrics. This ultimately connects a respective brand to the consumer’s basic wants and needs.  

Listen in to this conversation where marketing and psychology intersect and prepare to have your thinking challenged.

Dr. Emmanuel Probst is the author of the widely-acclaimed book, Brand Hacks: Fulfilling the Human Quest for Meaning. He is also the Senior Vice President of Ipsos, focusing on Brand Health Tracking.

Consumer Curiosity

Understanding why people do what they do is the backbone of Dr. Probst’s career, and also what led him to brand health and writing his book.

He was intrigued about how we as a society decide what is good and what is not; what brands make sense and what brands don’t make sense; and why we purchase the products that we do.

Over six hundred billion dollars per year are spent on advertising to market to consumers, but half is wasted and brands are unclear on the impact of their own marketing dollars.

The reason for the waste is that the majority of advertising is targeted, tactical, and designed to push sales in the short term.  The intention may also be to create traffic, or support short-term goals for brands. This results in advertising that is often not sustainable, as it lacks depth or meaning to consumers.

Finding Meaning

Dr. Probst’s research suggests that people aren’t interested in buying more products or seeking more brands. They aren’t seeking more advertising. What they DO look for is engagement in activities that are meaningful to them. They want to find meaning. 

Once you understand what people find meaningful, then you can create brands that help fulfill these needs.

This is the mission of Dr. Probst’s book.

Connected, But Lonelier Than Ever

The more connected we are to technology, the more lonely consumers feel, Dr. Probst has discovered.

In a world of social media connectedness, this seems counter-intuitive. Technology can keep us in touch with our friends and family on the other side of the world, but conversely, that doesn’t necessarily help build community close to us. People are losing the ability to create connections in the real world. 

It is said that millennials have to educated on how to connect and socialize with people in real life, due to the early and constant exposure to technology that often can be a substitute for real-life relationships.

Social Media Influencers

A social media influencer is an individual who uses a variety of social media platforms to influence their audience by expressing their own opinions regarding specific brands, products, and celebrities.

They may be a blogger, product reviewer, industry expert, or a trusted source of information but their goal is to build relationships in order to impact others’ thinking.

The strength of a social media influencer is to reduce the social distance between them and the audience. Where celebrities are concerned, many of them have influencers to create content for them that make them seem more relatable and impactful but tend to engage with too many brands. 

The shortcoming is that you might like their work as a celebrity but you can’t closely relate to them due to alliances with brands that don’t align with your own personal values. In this sense, influencers can be misleading and deceptive to both their audience and their marketers, as they build the illusion that  they’re closer to their audience than they really are.

A Brand That "Gets" Consumers

Listen in as Dr. Probst expounds on one of the brands that understand what consumers want, and why!

He and Sima also chat about how “imperfect is perfect”,

On today’s episode, Charlie Allieri, CEO of Imperium, and the sponsor of this series on data quality, and Vedant Misra, an engineer who is managing the reasoning algorithm team at OpenAI, join Sima to deliberate on AI, looking at its evolution, breaking down some of the terminology, delving into the conceptual themes around AI and how it might impact or help improve data quality. 

OpenAI is a research laboratory based in San Francisco, California, whose mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—meaning highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity. OpenAI attempts to directly build safe and beneficial AGI, but will also consider their mission fulfilled if their work aids others to achieve this outcome.

OpenAI is governed by the board of OpenAI Nonprofit, which consists of both OpenAI LP employees and non-employees. Their investors include Microsoft, Reid Hoffman’s charitable foundation, and Khosla Ventures.

Safety in Artificial Intelligence

The dystopian, apocalyptic kill-a-robot-scenario is a bit farfetched in the realm of AI safety. The only way this situation would occur is if we built a system that is so amazing that we trust it implicitly for a long, long time. Engineered into our society, it could rise up against us because it decides it’s the right thing for “it” to do. So although it’s possible that we could end up in that kind of world, it seems like a concern that is so much further off than immediate safety concerns.

More immediate safety concerns involve the ways that a variety of agents are using artificial intelligence, even today. One example includes the application of machine vision and perception systems to surveillance, and is of utmost concern from a civil rights perspective. There are state actors and governments that are using this technology already in a broad-based and expansive way.

There are also concerns about the disruption of the labor market, which is also safe in a different way in terms of making sure that our society can adapt to this technology and that the way that we’re deploying it is not disruptive to what we all think should be happening. Massive unemployment where people could not support their families would not be desirable.

Another critical thought in safety in AI is the way we train the systems. They ultimately learn from data, which means the information that goes in is numbers, and what comes out is numbers. What they learn is ultimately represented in the space of math and it’s not always the case that the math these systems have learned maps onto the values and things that we want them to learn. It’s important to think about how we can get the math to align more closely with what we actually want these systems to learn.

AI's Evolution

Neural networks have been some of the most successful phenomenon over the last decade or so. 

This field kicked off sometime in the early 1950’s at a darkness conference focused on understanding artificial intelligence. This turned into a very long brainstorming session where some of the biggest thought-leaders in the field ended up making major and influential contributions. They laid the groundwork for much of the theory and advancements that came later. 

Since the 1950’s, excitement about artificial intelligence has blown up again, waned again, and now we’re in this resurgence for a third time. Whenever limitations in technology are discovered, interest has historically waned until progress is made.

Vedant covers the 1960’s through the 1980s, where serious advancement was seen, but it wasn’t until the 1990s that people started applying neural networks for real problems, such as image recognition, and in the early 2000s, for speech. 

In the past 10-15 years, is when we’ve seen a major resurgence of this technique, of deep learning, in particular. This paradigm of neural networks can work very well if you put them in the right setting,

In this continuation of a special series on data quality, you’ll hear different perspectives from other industries regarding market research and the analytics industry.

This episode, Sima chats with Charlie Allieri, CEO of Imperium, and the sponsor of this series on data quality, and Bill Reinstein, who is CEO and CTO of MedData Group.

Bill is a seasoned entrepreneur with over 20 years of expertise building interactive media and technology-enabled service organizations. Bill has built MedData Group into the leading provider of healthcare professional data for digital marketing

From Direct Email Marketer to Aggregator of HCP Data

MedData Group offers extensive demographics, firmographics, clinical behavior, and full contact data including email and digital IDs to support multi-channel marketing outreach. It also creates custom programs for vendors seeking program registrations, leads and/or web site traffic from its databases of over 4.2 million healthcare professionals.

Originally Bill’s company had a product that was focused on email direct marketing for the healthcare segment, specifically targeting healthcare professionals. As noted by Bill, HCP’s include physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and a wide range of allied health professionals, such as psychologists and chiropractors.

His company evolved into a data-licenser and data provider extending beyond the performance-based marketing business. 

A few years ago, MedData Group became one of the largest aggregators of healthcare professional data and they realized they had an opportunity in the digital marketing (also known as “omnichannel”) space, leveraging that very large scale of offline data. Through some of their proprietary processes, they were able to link that data to what are called online identities, in a privacy-safe way.

MedData Group’s customers are primarily pharmaceutical brands and their associated advertising agencies, and they are able to target digital advertising through different channels.

Public Domain Data

The large volume of MedData Group’s data is in the public domain, or what is better known as the “quasi-public domain”.

Healthcare differs from other professional segments because of the nature of the services that they provide. Every healthcare professional has to be licensed at both the state level and at the federal level, and they all have a common identifier (also known as a “key”), and that’s the National Provider Identifier or NPI. This identifier remains with them through the bulk of their career. 

Due to certain types of federal legislation such as the Sunshine Act, and in terms of transparency of what drugs the HCP’s provide and what diagnoses they’ve made when it’s related to federal reimbursement programs, for example, this information is out there. It’s not necessarily easy to find nor is it easy to aggregate, but that’s not what makes this data valuable.

Rather, it’s the value-add that the company provides that makes the aggregation of structure and normalization valuable.

Measuring Data Quality

It’s necessary to bifurcate and look at the data in different buckets, Bill explains.

At the top level, the dividing line is whether it’s offline data or online data. 

Starting in the offline space, there are around 100 input sources of data from every state-licensed database and multiple federal-level databases of information, as well as commercial data that MedData Group licenses that come from medical claims data. This medical claims data is at the patient level but is HIPAA protected in a non-identifying kind of way. 

On the front end, it starts with the various ETL (extract, transform, and load) processes that the data management team examines by automated scripting in the platforms that they use. The scripting looks for anomalies and then moves to more demographic data. In addition to automated review, there is a team of researchers that are responsible for quality checking some of this data for ac...

In this special series on data quality, you’ll hear different perspectives from other industries regarding market research and the analytics industry.

Today, Sima sits down with Charlie Allieri, CEO of Imperium, and the sponsor of this series on data quality, and Anders Ekman, President of V12.

Combining Data and Technology to Deliver Marketing Outcomes

V12 is a company that combines data and technology to deliver marketing outcomes for clients. 

V12 originally started life as a data quality software company and have grown as data has grown and customer engagement has become more complex, into what they are today: a company that uses much more data and many more technologies that, in part, solve the complex interactions that consumers have with businesses.

V12 provides a whole range of products and services that help clients manage their own client or customer relationships. One place that happens is in V12’s Velocity Customer Data Platform (“CDP”) where clients have an omnichannel customer-view around their customers and how they can best monetize the relationship while serving them well. 

And, since prospecting is as important as managing customer relationships, the CDP is evolving towards a more “Prospect Data Platform”. 

Not only does this enable V12’s clients to get that omnichannel view of their own customers as previously mentioned, but it provides them with a view of who their next best prospects are.

All of this is topped off by the V12 Signals, which is a data product that telegraphs consumer intent. V12 harnesses behavioral data from mobile location and online browsing and connects that to actual people with names and addresses. 

All of this puts a fine point on data quality.

The Changing Marketplace

Having started out as a data quality software company that sold mostly to technology professionals, V12 has experienced growth organically and via acquisition over the last 5 or 6 year period.

What is seen now is marketers continuing to take over the technology stack that is related to marketing. They are much more focused on data, the quality of that data, and how data and technology mesh to deliver the outcome. Not only have the sets of data changed and the technology has changed, but the clients have started to change, as well.

Anders points out that although IT is most definitely still involved, marketers have really stepped up and become much more technology-literate and keyed in to the issues of data quality and addressability over the last few years.

Evolving Platforms

In the behavioral data business, there are billions of interactions coming at you all at once. In order to keep up with this, platforms have had to evolve into a much more automated “read and react” kind of mode.

Read and react is “if we see a behavior like this, then the customer journey needs to be like that”. 

This has replaced the “batch and blast”, which identified a target audience and communicated with them en masse through direct channels.

Audiences are now getting down to the atomic level. It’s that one person you have to manage that experience for. 

How Clients Measure Data Quality

Less than ten years ago, the unit of measure was basic name and address and simple attribute-matching. Those kinds of measures were the indicators of initial quality and then you put it out on the market via mail. If you received a lot of return mail, then you knew you had a problem.

Now, with omnichannel and digital data, it’s really easy to lose the thread on quality. If you’re merging together digital datasets that are billions of records, especially given the opaque nature of the digital advertising eco-system and fraud, it’s often very hard to understand.

V12’s safe haven, as well as their clients’ safe haven, is marketing effectiveness and return on marketing investment, as well as the operational metrics (such as whether datasets matched, did emails bounce, did mail get returned, etc.).

In this special series on data quality, you’ll hear different perspectives from other industries regarding market research and the analytics industry.

Sima chats with Charlie Allieri, CEO of Imperium, and the sponsor of this series on data quality, and Matt Staudt, CEO of Venture Development Center.

Bringing Traditional and Alternative Assets to the Marketplace

Venture Development Center, started in 1996, is an organization that works in the big data market space, primarily with traditional data and alternative data. 

They have assembled 190 relationships with organizations that have the traditional and alternative assets and Venture DC looks to bring these assets to the marketplace that they’ve created where buyers of data can be traditional players themselves. 

They can be brands or professional service organizations, and Venture DC assists with helping them to understand these assets and how they might be used in particular use cases, thereby creating licensing events and making these matches.

Traditional and Alternative Data as Transformational

From the perspective of Venture DC, traditional data is the kind that has been around for 30 years. In other words, demographic dataset, which typically consists of a mailing address, business name, business sector, contact name, and email address.

Matt defines alternative data as the behavioral activities, such as signal data, geolocation, search, transactional, and crowdsource. 

The amount of data Venture DC represents in the marketplace is tremendous. They have access to transactional data files that cover the spectrum of all types of activities, and are terabytes in size.

The traditional models can be incredibly enhanced by looking at the alternative behavioral activities. 

Looking at models isn’t a question of accuracy but the timeliness of it. The behavioral and signal aspects is immediate and when you have access to it you can react quickly. There are privacy compliance concerns when you start using it but using it properly can be transformative.

Representative Criteria and Measuring Quality

In order for Venture DC to represent an organization, there are 3 factors at play: (1) Compliance. The organization needs to be in a position where the data they’re getting is being collected in a compliant fashion. (2) Historical data. Is it represented there? People may have great data that they’re collecting but if they don’t have some sort of history associated with it, then it’s hard to test. (3) The future. Are they going to be able to collect this data for the foreseeable future? They don’t want to represent any file where a potential buying entity within their portfolio utilizes the data and then all of a sudden, it’s no longer available. 

One of the biggest challenges is pricing, which depends on unique data points of value and what kind of use-cases it can be used in. How unique is it? Are there data points of value within the dataset that are compelling, and if they are, how unique are they? How do they measure up against other things that are represented in the marketplace? 

The Impact of Privacy Issues

Matt discusses how many companies have ignored privacy issues, the ensuing lawsuits, CCPA, and more.

Sima suggests that there’s a positive side to this, however, in that it makes everybody rise and clears the bad actors out of the system.

There needs to be a country-wide level of legislation because complying with all the nuances that exist state to state poses a challenge.

_______________________________

Sima loves to hear from her listeners with input, questions, suggestions and just to connect! You can find her at the links below!

Email: [email protected]

LinkedIn

Twitter

infinity-2.com

Sima is passionate about data and loves to share, learn and help others that share that passion. If you love data as much as her, subscribe on iTunes and don’t forget to leave a rating and review!

This 4 part series is sponsored by Imperium.

Sima joins some of her peers on a panel discussion as it relates to M&A trends, what’s going on in the industry, and some insights for founders, as they consider their alternatives for the future.

In light of the recent acquisitions for staggering amounts of money, such as SAP acquiring Qualtrics for $8B, Tableau being acquired by Salesforce for $17B, and Bain Capital acquiring 60% of Kantar, today’s show will focus on key drivers of investment and M&A activity in market research.

Listen in to this mashup, as they help to de-mystify the big questions and considerations that founders often have.

Global Market Report from Esomar Congress

The GMR is a wonderful market trend report that Esomar Congress publishes each year. It is free for members and can be purchased on their website for non-members. 

The first place Kristin Luck, Advisor at Oberon Securities and host of this panel, flips to is the helpful chart that shows where industry growth is coming from. This chart is always located around pages 32 or 33, and this year you can find it on page 33.

Kristin finds it especially interesting this year because, for the first time ever, traditionally-defined market research is in decline globally by .3% over the last year. 

The growth of the industry is coming from verticals like surveys software, social media monitoring, consulting firm research, IT telecom research, and syndicated research. 

Investments and incoming money are going more towards these tech-centric verticals.

What Does This Growth and Monetization Ability  Mean for Traditional, Full-Service Research Firms?

Panel Member Sima Vasa, Founder of Paradigm Sample and Advisor of M&A services at Oberon Securities, takes the lead on addressing the answer to this question.

It will be challenging for traditional market research companies because of new methodology. As a founder, you must know what you want. You can’t be reactive. It’s imperative to understand your goals and put together a plan for proactive implementation. 

Although it may be tough, Sima feels there are still opportunities to stay in the game and partner with other companies to specialize. She provides some examples of companies that are doing very well providing vertical specialization and suggests other options for traditional, full-service companies. 

Is There Space for Research Generalists?

Lisa Courtade, Executive Director and Global Consumer Insights  at Merck and new Chairperson for the Insights Association, tackles this question.

Lisa thinks that the answer lies in understanding the needs and the problems that you have today that you’re trying to solve.

Traditional research generalists are a shrinking pool. You’re looking for that full complement, that missing piece. Often that missing piece is a new start-up or an agency that specializes in an emerging area. 

Industry Trends and the Impact of M&A Activity

Sören Haefcke, Vice President of Bain Capital, addresses this topic.

What the traditional players need to do is to adopt some of the methodologies out there in order to be able to compete fully in the marketplace, which is his perspective.

One of the great things about technology is that it’s very accessible to anybody. Great customer access, great customer understanding, and a great understanding of what the data means are things that are very hard to replicate in many cases.

Sören predicts that bringing together a traditional approach with a more tech-driven approach is the way the industry will go in the long run.

Advice for Founders Around Positioning Your Firm for Funding

Kristof De Wulf, Co-Founder & CEO of InSites Consulting, provides direction on this matter.

First and foremost, it is important to make sure that you are ready.

As Kristof explains, “ready” involves many considerations: being mentally ready, making sure that everyone is aligned to do this, that it is the best model going forward, do you need private equity money,

Sima has a special treat in store for today’s show. As Chair of SampleCon, she and the other Board Members have been knee-deep in planning for the 2020 conference to ensure its continued success.

She will be chatting with some of the board for a peek as to what’s coming and the importance it holds for each member.

For Sima, she loves that there’s no other conference that focuses specifically on online data collection and sampling and she finds that refreshing. Additionally, the conference is a way to influence, shape and collaborate with other leaders to share best practices and network with other people. 

Representing the Buyer Community

Corey Julseth, Managing Director of Sample Strategy at J.D. Power weighs in with his opinion as the only buyer of sample on the board. 

Corey thinks sellers are very sophisticated in their approach, leveraging marketplaces and programmatic, but the buyers are somewhat lagging, and this is a great opportunity to represent the buyer community in the SampleCon arena.

At J.D. Powers, Corey finds it necessary to stitch together many suppliers to support a single syndicated study, so it becomes really challenging from a purchasing standpoint. They’re looking to evolve that landscape and SampleCon provides a venue and forum to collaborate with others who do that very well.

Corey appreciates that there’s going to be a healthy mix of familiar topics and a fresh line-up of innovative speakers. Another great aspect he’s looking forward to is the networking because SampleCon is a well-attended conference across a diverse audience of buyers and sellers.

He desires two takeaways for the attendees, and the first is an exposure and opportunity to participate with the latest and greatest around sampling innovation, as this conference is very unique in that it focuses on only sampling. Second, Corey wants people to have fun networking and collaborating with their peers in the industry.

Community of Like-Minded Folks

Sima hears from Nancy Brigham, SVP of Global Head of Sampling at Ipsos Interactive Services.

It is both Ipsos’s and her own personal belief that as an industry leader they need to help drive the industry forward and help shape the direction that it's going. SampleCon provides that platform to drive that change and gives them a community of like-minded folks who have the same passion and commitment to sample. Not only does it benefit their clients and company, but it also benefits the industry as a whole. 

One of the things Nancy likes about SampleCon is suggested in its name: sample conversation. With frank, transparent conversation about sample across many different climes and types of industry stakeholders, the bar is raised for all of them: buyers, sellers, and respondents.

Nancy shares that she is most excited about the focus on new, innovative approaches in sample and data collection as it relates to the respondent. A lot of what is happening now in automation benefits respondents directly in various ways. The more we can reduce the cognitive load on respondents the better data will be. 

Nancy encourages frank conversations with fellow attendees because if someone has an issue or question there’s a very good chance someone else does, too so this is one way that networking can be valuable. There’s a finite pool of respondents and they all draw from the same pool.

Content on Hispanic and Minority Sample

Mario Carrasco, Co-Founder and Principal of ThinkNow

shares the two main reasons he is attracted to SampleCon.

His entry into market research was in the sample space, and at the time there wasn’t any industry conference based on sample, which was something that he had become passionate about. 

Additionally, SampleCon since early on has been one of the few conferences in the market research industry that has really made a consistent effort each year to include content on Hispanic and minority sample reaching minority audiences in the US.