Data Gurus Podcast | Insights on Business Strategy, Mergers and Acquisitions, Market Research & Data Collection

Sima sits down with Melanie Courtright, CEO of Insights Association, to discuss the rapidly changing scene and the diligent work that Melanie’s team is doing in providing additional resources and perspectives on how to deal with the fallout of the Corona Virus and its impact to the industry.

Melanie began serving as CEO of the Insights Association on January 1, 2020. Previously Melanie served as Executive Vice President, Research Science & Data Strategy at Dynata.

A respected, passionate voice on market research trends, standards and quality, Melanie has participated in many industry organizations, events and initiatives. She serves on the executive board of the University of Georgia’s MRII Education program and is an active member of Women in Research (WIRe). Previously Melanie served as President of IA’s Southwest Chapter and as a U.S. representative to ESOMAR.

Insights Association’s Call-to-Action

There are times when the industry goes through rapid change, of course, and that rapid change is usually due to technology disruption or a new methodology that enters the space, but this particular disruption is totally unplanned and one that we’re facing as a nation.

Melanie has observed that in normal times we would ordinarily see healthy competition all around us, but this crisis has pulled the industry together as a community. She has been seeing giveaways of all sorts of free services, software, and licenses.

Conversely, when attending some of Insights Association’s Town Halls, you’ll hear fears being expressed by people regarding the viability of their businesses, their jobs and the people that they support.

Insights Association’s primary purpose is twofold: to put as much information and resources into the hands of the industry and to advocate as hard as they can into the Administration and government on behalf of the industry.

Virtual Town Halls - Information and Resources

Each Friday, Insights Association holds a virtual Town Hall with speakers outside of the industry to talk to our industry to discuss topics such as crisis leadership, economics and economics forecasting, financial resources, and how consumer sentiment is shifting.

Although the webinars utilize speakers outside of the industry, speakers inside the industry take the time to leverage the meetings with their industry perspectives.

Insights Association is also generating as much content as possible into a written format. They’re doing research on research and measuring the impact through the industry. They are also measuring what the corporate buyers believe their future in research looks like and much, much more.

Advocation on Behalf of the Industry

Melanie explains that they are currently working on a letter to the Administration regarding the large number of small businesses, the large number of independent contractors and the industry’s self-employed sector. They’re reminding the Administration of the size of the research as pertains to the United States specifically, the importance of research as an industry to the government, to the voice of the population and to polling, and the tremendous value that we, as an industry, deliver.

Insights Association is encouraging the Administration to remember the insights industry and to not let the industry die out.

They will be copying the letter and giving it out to its members so they can sign it, as well.

Melanie provides an overview of additional matters for which they advocate.

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If you would like to get involved, please send Melanie an EMAIL!

Andrew Moffatt, Chief Strategy Officer and Partner of OpinionRoute joins Sima today in discussing technology products that help address some of the market research problems that are prevalent today.

The market leader in Insights Process Management, OpinionRoute is focused on helping clients succeed in the rapidly evolving market research industry. Headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, their “made for research” services and technology solutions power authentic insights and create efficiency in the research process.

OpinionRoute is dedicated to protecting the integrity and effectiveness of market research.

Creating Scalable Technology Products

About a year ago, Andrew and Terence McCarron, Founder and CEO of OpinionRoute, decided that their future would be in building technology and taking their experience and expertise and trying to apply that to scalable technology products to help solve some of the problems in market research that they had observed.

The resulting initial products that they have created have been on the supply side of the industry focused on fraud management, mitigation, identification, validating respondents for B2B research, and developing tools to enable faster healthcare research.

Although this is part of their overall vision, most of what they build in the future will be technology that tries to help both create a more efficient market research process but also a more effective one by creating better data through cleaning and filtering it better before it gets to the client survey.

Validating and Enhancing Your Data

From the panel point of view, OpinionRoute is seeing very interesting data that they can append to panelists on the B2B side without asking questions of the respondents and being able to create a validated silo of your panel that is validated for B2B surveys and has that data overlaid on top of that information so you can be more confident in selling that information as well as being cleaner in terms of information that you’re collecting from panelists. 

The supply side is as interested as the buying side because in that same scenario where 50% of completes are being removed, you have, as panel manager, decisions to make also. Many times these decisions are subjective, as well as the decision to remove that person to begin with.

Blockchain’s Role in Technology

Blockchain as a technology will be around for a long time, Andrew predicts, especially in the financial world. The opportunity that it provides from a data privacy point of view is vast but there are larger hurdles that it needs to get through to be more widely useable and accessible. Once it passes those hurdles, some of which Andrew delves into, he thinks everything will change. 

Evolving to a data economy where users get a larger portion of transaction or get to control their data or choose to sell their data at whatever point they want to is a world that Andrew supports. 

From OpinionRoute’s technology point of view, blockchain has some elements where they can store things that are necessary within the blockchain but it won’t run through their entire platform.

Designing the Fraud Prevention Technology Platform

ValidID and CleanID are OpinionRoute’s fraud prevention technologies and are created in such a way that gives the user a lot of control and transparency of what they’re getting.

Over time, OpinionRoute wants to enable everyone to have the same level of data and decision-making that some of the larger consolidated companies have. The platforms that they are creating are designed with this in mind. 

Sima and Andrew exchange thoughts on consolidation pro’s and con’s and wrap up their conversation with the company challenges that Andrew sees them overcoming.

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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 Andrew!

Andrew’s LinkedIn

Andrew’s Email

Opinion Route Website

On today’s episode, Sima chats with Patrick Comer, CEO of Lucid, LLC, to discuss how COVID-19 has forced everybody to stay at home and how consumer behaviors are changing in the face of this pandemic, as a result.

Listen in to hear more about this swiftly-changing scenario!

Lucid, LLC, unites buyers and sellers of survey samples in over 90 countries – bridging the divide between global questions and human answers. Every day, millions of questions are answered via Lucid’s programmatic marketplace – enabling anyone, in any industry, to get real answers. Lucid’s clients can ask questions of targeted audiences and measure the effectiveness of their digital advertising. This authentic, first-party data drives powerful insights, in real-time. 

Lucid is headquartered in New Orleans with offices in London, New York, Gurgaon, and Sydney.

A Surprising Duality

The month of March has been a rollercoaster ride for Lucid. Amidst the economic storm clouds that are brewing right now, there’s a lot of volume and strength on platforms and the number of interviews and the number of transactions have gone up.

This duality has been a challenge to navigate, so Lucid has been taking a closer look behind the scenes.

Not surprisingly, the surveys involving COVID-19 have increased. What they also found was that people were pushing to complete projects quickly, as companies started to invoice in order to get account payables secured while waiting for their next project.

Looking Forward Will Require a Look Backward

There are radical changes in behavior, purchasing, and opinion with everybody being at home right now, but analyzing this will require sorting out over time.

Lucid has seen that some companies are slowing, pausing, or canceling work; and in other areas, they are speeding up, accelerating, and moving work. More companies are doing fast general population surveys without much targeting to get a couple of quick hits and then moving on, versus longer, tailored, targeted-audience surveys, just to get a handle on how things are moving around so quickly.

Tough Decisions

The COVID-19 pandemic has produced at least two crises: a healthcare crisis and a financial crisis, and with this in mind, Lucid has had to make some difficult decisions.

Patrick addresses staffing changes and Lucid’s philosophy in assisting its terminated employees in finding other work in the market research space, as well as discussing how Lucid has been taking action regarding the impact of its remaining employees’ health and safety globally.

He quotes Michael Leavitt, Former Secretary of Health and Human Services: “Everything we do before a pandemic will seem alarmist. Everything we do after a pandemic will seem inadequate.”

In the face of the coming financial crisis, Patrick feels confident that his company has moved quickly and strategically to create capability, stability, and confidence in Lucid’s liquidity from a transaction-buying viewpoint.

A New Normal and Its Challenges

Sima and Patrick reflect on life and business post-COVID, and how the decisions we make now impact our future. There is no going back to “normal”, and many companies will suffer. 

Conversely, an economic downturn is an incredible time to start a company and to implement procedures that will help it endure through the toughest of times.

Patrick speaks to the various challenges that leaders face and how they should be part of the solution that needs to happen now versus using this time for company gain.

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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!

Connect with Patrick:

Patrick’s Linkedin

Lucid, LLC Linkedin

Lucid, LLC Website

Lucid, LLC Twitter

Lucid, LLC Facebook

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

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!

Connect with Steve:

His Linkedin

His Twitter

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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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.

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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!

Connect with Eileen:

Her Linkedin

Her Twitter

Her Website

Buy His Book HERE!

Brand Hacks: Fulfilling the Human Quest for Meaning by Dr. Emmanuel Probst

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”, how people are yearning for more authenticity, and how certain brands are suffering from projecting an image that is not reflective of our desire for the genuine.

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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!

Connect with Dr. Probst:

His Linkedin

His Instagram

His Website

Buy His Book HERE!

Brand Hacks: Fulfilling the Human Quest for Meaning by Dr. Emmanuel Probst

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, have enough data, and give them enough compute.

There are three components to the recipe of AI: algorithms, compute, and data.

Compute has scaled ridiculously in the last 50-60 years. There has basically been a two-year doubling time for the compute that was used in each of the results that came out. That doubling time of compute has gone from two years to 3.4 months.

Recognizing Good Quality Data

One of the recent big releases from OpenAI is the GB2, a model that they trained on a vast amount of web source data with the goal of predicting the next word that it was going to see.

The technique was simple. The implementation, though complex,  wasn’t algorithmic change that they made, but was mostly about making sure that the data that went into the system was extremely high quality and what they wanted the model to learn.   

The ensuing result was a model that completely blew out of the water anything that people thought was possible before, in that it was capable of generating realistic human-quality text in long-form.

This happened much sooner than anyone thought possible.

_______________________________

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. We are grateful for their support to bring you this important series.

Connect with Vedant Misra:

OpenAI Website

LinkedIn

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 accuracy.

In the offline space, there are many levels of data accuracy and hygiene.

The online space involves something called “identity resolution”, which attempts to correctly link an offline person to the correct online identity. There are different methodologies used on the back end to measure and analyze this.

Delivering the Data

In the case of email licensing or managed service email, that data is hygiene over the course of a month, relative to its linkage to offline identity and offline professional data. It is managed in almost real-time relative to the deliverability or the "hygiening" of that email data. 

Transparency in the Processes

A large volume of MedData Group’s business is in omnichannel digital and processes are quite complex. Although some of these processes they’ve developed are proprietary, they strive as a company to be transparent with clients in explaining to them how it all works and why they believe it’s superior and more accurate. 

They want the client to understand the processes and want the client to ask other providers about their own processes. This will provide the client with the knowledge to make an informed decision.

MedData Group was recently acquired and the company they’re now a part of is a great fit because they are also mindful of high-level premium data products. 

The data, the data quality, and the accuracy of its use from a data-stewardship and compliance perspective were micro-level discussion points in both the pre-agreement stage and in due diligence. 

_______________________________

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. We are grateful for their support to bring you this important series.

Connect with Bill Reinstein:

MedData Website

LinkedIn

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.).

There’s a whole host of much more complex metrics that, of necessity, need to be more about effectiveness than exact quality because that’s an increasingly difficult thing to measure in the digitally-dominated ecosystem that we live in.

Investment for Data Quality and What the Future Holds

The technologies, themselves, seem to escalate in levels every few years, as observed by V12. 

Their investments are in speed, processing power, and storage to deliver good quality data in a real-time manner.

As to the future, we have to look at the recent past.

There’s been a digital proliferation where the quantity of marketing data has increased, but the quality has decreased. 

V12 anticipates an increased focus on quality, and sees clients asking more non-technical questions, such as 1) Where is this data coming from? 2) What sort of fidelity does this data have? 3) How can you assure us that we’re not buying junk?

Ultimately we will evolve to some metrics around these new kinds of datasets that provide some sort of standard measure of quality. V12 believes that this will happen in the not-so-far future.

_______________________________

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. We are grateful for their support to bring you this important series.

Connect with Anders Ekman:

V12 Website

LinkedIn