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Mike Stevens, Founder and Editor of Insights Platforms, discusses what’s happening in the research space, how to select a research platform, what a good agency partnership looks like, and the challenge of future-proofing.
Welcome to Dig In, the podcast brought to you by the minds at Dig Insights. We're interviewing some of the most inspiring brand professionals in marketing, innovation, and insights to discover the story behind the story of their most exciting innovations.
00;00;06;23 - 00;00;32;28
Speaker 1
Hi. Welcome to Dig in the podcast brought to you by Digg Insights. Every week we interview founders, marketers and researchers from innovative brands to learn how they're approaching their role and their category in a clever way. Welcome back to another episode of Digg and we've got a recurring guest back with us, Mike Stevens, who is the founder of Insight Platforms.
00;00;33;10 - 00;00;34;17
Speaker 1
Mike, how are you doing?
00;00;35;09 - 00;00;46;21
Speaker 2
I'm doing well. Thanks for having me back. I thought I'd describe myself after the last episode, so it's nice to know that I'm still not excluded. Good. Today?
00;00;46;25 - 00;01;12;10
Speaker 1
No, no. It's great to have you back on. This time, I think last time you were chatting to Paul, one of our founders, that today you get to chat to me and we actually have known each other for a while. I spent eight years in the UK and obviously, Mike, you don't hide the accent. Well, it's very clear, very clear that you're from the UK and so you got to talk to me quite a few times in the past.
00;01;13;28 - 00;01;14;07
Speaker 2
Yeah.
00;01;15;25 - 00;01;49;16
Speaker 1
Yeah. And so I think today we're going to chat a little bit about what I mean. The word red tech is being thrown around a lot, but kind of what that what that optimum mix serves as technology and manage services and strategic work like what that might look like in 2023. You obviously have a very unique position in the market given you founded Insight Platforms, do you mind just explaining to the listener kind of what is inside platforms?
00;01;49;29 - 00;02;20;01
Speaker 2
Sure. Yeah, no problem. Yeah, it's a website that I founded about three or four years ago, and it's right now it's a directory of research providers. So technology service providers, data companies across the full spectrum of what I think of as the research industry. So it includes UX and customer experience as well as is market research. So there's a directory, we host online events, we have virtual events and demos and we have lots of online video content you can access for free.
00;02;20;17 - 00;02;37;24
Speaker 2
And we're building an e-learning platform as well. We have a lot of online courses. We're just relaunching that in Q4 this year. So yeah, those three legs of it, it's a directory events and e-learning site for what I think it was modern digital research. You know, it's not so much of the old school stuff.
00;02;38;18 - 00;02;48;16
Speaker 1
Yeah. I think you said something interesting there. You said what? I kind of define as the insights category. How would you define that?
00;02;49;23 - 00;03;16;05
Speaker 2
Yeah, that's a tricky, tricky one. Yeah. I mean, I, I worked with research for about five, six years at the start of my career before I'd ever worked for a proper research company or even actually worked for a research buyer. All of the work that I did in my early stage was doing, you know, B2B market strategy work for marketing people, for business leaders, for heads of strategy.
00;03;16;16 - 00;03;39;23
Speaker 2
But it's all kind of research. And I think, you know, if you're working in a niche, you often think the boundaries of the industry are your niche, but they're really not. And we've got so many creative things happening around adjacent spaces to market research. You know, we've got in the product management space, we've got in the UX research, we've got customer experience analytics, social listening.
00;03;39;24 - 00;03;56;24
Speaker 2
There's so much happening, but it's happening often in different areas of organizations, by different people with different skill sets. So for me that, that bigger, broader extended category is what I define as the, you know, the research industry these days.
00;03;56;25 - 00;04;23;08
Speaker 1
Yeah, I, I think it's it's funny because I've spent so much time in SAS, DIY research in my career and I definitely did exactly what you just said. I kind of defined the space quite narrowly around that and actually it's changing so much. Just even a lot of the platforms that you have on inside platforms, you know, it's like about user testing and UX testing.
00;04;23;08 - 00;04;28;05
Speaker 1
Like it's not even about understanding your target audience anymore and that's really cool to see.
00;04;28;19 - 00;04;30;00
Speaker 2
Yeah, I mean.
00;04;30;14 - 00;04;31;23
Speaker 1
I mean, in terms of. I'm sorry. Go ahead.
00;04;32;08 - 00;04;51;07
Speaker 2
I was going to say some of the you know, I mean, you you talked about user testing as a category, but some of the companies in that space have attracted enormous amounts of funding and investment. So, you know, the the company user testing, you know, is a is now, you know, multibillion dollar business is, you know, was funded to the tune of several hundred million over several rounds.
00;04;51;18 - 00;05;02;29
Speaker 2
Now, there's a lot of of money and interest going into these adjacencies places. And I think if you're if you work in the market research area, it's well worth just, you know, looking into these other areas because there's a lot of.
00;05;03;01 - 00;05;10;00
Speaker 1
Yeah. Taking your head out from your little narrow needs. So why did you create Insurtech ads?
00;05;10;26 - 00;05;40;18
Speaker 2
Uh, because I left. I had a proper job, I left it, and I started doing some consulting for myself and which was, you know, hard work because you're either chasing business or drowning in business. And I needed some. I wanted to build something that was, you know, was what was going to work with my lifestyle. But also there's a big gap around people's knowledge and understanding in these spaces.
00;05;40;18 - 00;05;58;00
Speaker 2
So it was a kind of happy area. The consulting and a lot of the consultancy I was doing was helping people navigate these new areas. And, you know, I launched the site initially to, you know, to help people with a directory of these new research tools. But it's grown into much more of the kind of content and learning hub since then.
00;05;58;00 - 00;06;05;18
Speaker 2
So very much from a consulting background into more of a, you know, more of a platform business tool.
00;06;06;08 - 00;06;18;01
Speaker 1
And it's constantly growing, right? Like how many new platforms get added to the insight platforms kind of dashboard or website on a on a weekly basis?
00;06;18;12 - 00;06;36;25
Speaker 2
I mean, when I, when I launched this, I think there were about 200 when we when we first went live and there are now about 1300 companies in the directory. And there are more you know, every week new companies add themselves, sometimes you get random ones. And I have to say to people, you're really not a very good fit.
00;06;36;25 - 00;06;58;10
Speaker 2
But yeah, it is a very this is a very creative category right now. Lots of people are starting things up. I came across companies on when I'm when I'm browsing across the Internet and I think, wow, this is you know, this is clearly an established business, but it's actually just a very good piece of web design from someone who's a, you know, who's who's got it as a side project.
00;06;58;10 - 00;07;10;12
Speaker 2
So it's not always easy to tell, you know, without a little digging as to, you know, just how much substance is there behind some of these new startups. But there's there's certainly a lot of activity going on, a lot of new companies being formed.
00;07;10;12 - 00;07;30;19
Speaker 1
Yeah. And I guess that that's quite important. I didn't even think about that sort of things like kind of managing that is super important for you just in terms of the integrity of what your site offers, you would want to make sure that these businesses and these startups are actually worthwhile for the people that are using the sites.
00;07;31;04 - 00;07;51;20
Speaker 2
Yeah, it's you know, it's it's a it's a fine line because, you know, I don't want to host anything that's clearly dodgy or, you know, isn't what it appears to be. But at the same time, you know, we're effectively a marketplace for companies to, you know, to showcase themselves and connect with potential buyers. You know, there's nearly every month is about that.
00;07;51;20 - 00;08;06;10
Speaker 2
There's about 20,000 people on the site looking for either for learning or for companies. So, you know, there's a limit to how much you can realistically bless every new company that comes themselves. But it's yeah, definitely a fast growing area for sure.
00;08;07;11 - 00;08;28;22
Speaker 1
I come out okay, I'm going to transition a little bit to kind of the reason we wanted to have you on here. Obviously, we've got a lot of people in research and marketing and innovation that listen. We also have business founders who want to get their finger on the pulse of kind of what's happening in the research space.
00;08;30;10 - 00;08;40;25
Speaker 1
So huge question to to ask you. But what is happening right now in the research space? And I don't just mean in this space, you know, what are some trends that you're seeing?
00;08;42;10 - 00;09;08;08
Speaker 2
Yeah, there's I mean, there is a lot of change. I think people are, uh, is spinning given how quickly things are evolving in some areas. In some ways things, things change very fast and then they don't change at all, you know, it's an interesting sort of contradiction because we saw, I think three or four years ago a huge rush of SaaS platforms in the space.
00;09;08;08 - 00;09;25;29
Speaker 2
So, you know, very much software only DIY, you know, the agency is dead, who needs those guys anymore? And there was a bit of a trend in in-house teams and clients on teams to think, well, look, you know, I can do all this. I can do some of this stuff myself. I can do my own testing, the concept testing in-house.
00;09;25;29 - 00;09;49;01
Speaker 2
I don't need an agency. I've got this bit of kit. It's actually not that easy. And what people recognize, I think, is the skills gap, the behavior gap, the just the sheer unseen workload that agencies have been doing means that it's it's just not enough to turn off that support and expect an existing team to go and, you know, to go and work with software.
00;09;49;01 - 00;10;15;14
Speaker 2
So I think what we're seeing is a is a kind of face to maturing of the software companies, recognizing that they either need partnerships or they need in-house service teams to be able to meet client needs. And then we've got agencies who are recognizing that either for, you know, efficiency, for cost competitiveness or for value add, that they need to have a technology component to that offer.
00;10;15;14 - 00;10;40;19
Speaker 2
So, you know, very hierarchically for me, the directory that I host is no longer really a pure software directory. There's an awful lot of hybrid businesses in the agencies. You have tech products. The definition between what's a professional service company and what's a software company is definitely eroding a lot. And I think that is not just the research tech industry.
00;10;40;19 - 00;11;03;01
Speaker 2
The the marketing tech space is seeing a similar sort of trend. You look at Salesforce and the number of professional services consultants they have. You look at the, you know, the £800 gorilla of the research tech space and Qualtrics, you're talking 25 to 30% of their revenues are professional services. So in-house. And that's, you know, that doesn't include their partners.
00;11;03;01 - 00;11;27;02
Speaker 2
So there's a lot more nuance. When I worked for a SaaS company and the research takes place, the almost that kind of religious dogma was people are margin destroyers. You need you know, you don't need staff you need to be pure play SaaS. You need to be running a kind of 20 times multiple of revenue on your valuation because you basically got this lean model.
00;11;27;16 - 00;11;49;25
Speaker 2
I think that's changing a lot, and I think there's a maturing and a recognition that it's complex. Some of the research methods and tools, they need human curation. They need experts to be able to work in tandem with the technology. And that's yeah, that may sound like a truism, but I think we're seeing that play out and the way that companies restructuring and hiring in skills or partnering together.
00;11;51;03 - 00;11;55;28
Speaker 2
So it's yeah, so that's that's one picture. And I've always forgotten the question because I, I wonder if all.
00;11;56;08 - 00;12;24;05
Speaker 1
This is I've almost forgotten the question. It's so interesting. Like I agree I agree with you on that though. Having been in this space for a while, I'd worked for a few SaaS providers and you know, there was this idea that everyone wants to get self service working from research, SAS or SAS research perspective. And that's really challenging because research is an art as well as a science, right.
00;12;24;05 - 00;13;01;04
Speaker 1
And I think that's what people are seeing play out is how can you scale expertize that's really hard to do. So no, that's definitely one trend that I mean, not to toot our own horn, but it's great that I work for a company like DEG because we have the consulting side and we have the technology and that's kind of the predator wrestling with now is like how do you scale some, not all, but some of the expertize of the consultants and the minds that created the technology in a way that's actually useful for people if they did want to use self-serve.
00;13;02;02 - 00;13;03;07
Speaker 1
Yeah. So it's.
00;13;03;07 - 00;13;33;11
Speaker 2
It's the management had a lot to say. It can be a management headache because they're very different beasts of businesses. You know, you've got a tech business that needs capital, it needs development on it needs, you know, a very specific set of growth and product skills. You've got two professional services, which is effectively selling expertize by the hour, and you've got much more individual, let's say, you know, much more importance attached to the knowledge and expertize of individuals.
00;13;33;11 - 00;13;43;10
Speaker 2
And that needs a different set of management skills. So it's hard, you know, and I know your founders, you know, it kind of stretched across those to those two big challenges is difficult and they recognize that.
00;13;44;14 - 00;14;06;29
Speaker 1
Yeah. So the initial question was what's happening in the space? So I think we've isolated this one sort of the tension between or maybe not tension, maybe it's, it's, it's maybe not tension. It's, it's difficult to, to make it work. But the need for there to be less separation between sort of the human focused and the tech focused research.
00;14;07;10 - 00;14;09;00
Speaker 1
Anything else you wanted to call out?
00;14;09;16 - 00;14;45;13
Speaker 2
Yeah, I think the I mean, at a macro level, there's just this huge growth in hunger for insights about people. And it's it's not really that visible in the numbers. So the some of the there's not a lot of data in the industry because the industry is so diverse and fragmented. But the the way that asthma counts, the the growth in the industry, you can see something, you know, some incredible pockets of very high growth, particularly on the on the digital DIY side of things and on the strategy consulting side of things.
00;14;45;24 - 00;15;12;06
Speaker 2
So we're talking about, you know, the industry likely to be a $100 billion industry in a couple of years time up from, you know, sort of 70 to 80 in 2020. So it's now there's very strong growth. But actually I would say the total volume of research and understanding of people is far, far bigger than that because you've got lots of measurement activity, you've got lots of user research happening that's just not reflected in those numbers.
00;15;12;06 - 00;15;34;17
Speaker 2
You've got product managers who are going and, you know, actually just call in customers. You've got people who are in roles that are just not reflected in the research industry. So what you have is this massive growth in whether you call it kind of customer centric, user centric, evidence based decision making, you've got massive fragmentation of the people who are doing that.
00;15;34;17 - 00;15;57;07
Speaker 2
So you've got you know, you've got people in product roles, design roles, you got designers who can create a mockup, send it to some, you know, some users to get testing feedback and have that back. That's not captured in any of the industry data at all. So big, big growth people at C-suite level preaching about customer experience, about the importance of, you know, focusing on users.
00;15;57;28 - 00;16;28;06
Speaker 2
And what that means is people who do research on them much, much more. There's a much bigger spectrum from the very expert to the completely novice. And at the completely novice end of things, you've got people who are using tools that have been, you know, massively simplified, big focus on the user experience, ease of use. And that philosophy is is actually going up into the more complex products as well.
00;16;28;06 - 00;16;58;14
Speaker 2
So you can do now, you know, not quite at the touch of a button, but you can do phenomenally complex research methods that have been coded into into software even two or three years ago when it needed expert teams and lots of time to do that has big implications, I think, for how you structure a research team on research teams role is, you know, how those people who don't have the expertize can avoid making terrible mistakes and recommending, you know, reading data wrong, that type of thing.
00;16;58;14 - 00;17;14;20
Speaker 2
So to me, there's, there's, there's this enormous growth in demand, fragmentation of research use and then implications all across the industry for how we develop tools, how we coach and train people and, you know, what agencies and what research teams are up to. Therefore now.
00;17;15;27 - 00;17;45;16
Speaker 1
Yeah, I hadn't looked at it from that perspective of like the momentum kind of coming from the non-experts or the novices and then moving upwards. But that's so interesting. I don't I don't know if you were there. We do you remember when there was that app that I don't think anyone uses anymore where it was like you could host discussions that people had to get up on anyways?
00;17;45;26 - 00;18;28;19
Speaker 1
I don't remember what it was about. Sorry, I couldn't even remember what it was. But yeah, we had a few people from the client side join us and Michelle Kingsley, I think she was at McDonald's at the time. I'm not sure that. Yeah, it doesn't matter because she was talking about how there's no there's no benefit to gatekeeping your research like as a researcher being able to give technology to the rest of the marketing team and the product team and the innovation team like category teams, that's, that's helpful for you because you get to do more of your strategic work as long as the training is there.
00;18;28;28 - 00;18;54;09
Speaker 1
And so what I hear you saying is that training is the gap. And I guess that's why Inside Conference has been so successful. But yeah, it's just very interesting. Like I've never thought about it from from the perspective of why this was happening or like where it started. Because I'm always talking to the clients who are trying to grapple with like, how do we train people to use these tools?
00;18;54;17 - 00;19;26;13
Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah. Super interesting. I wonder like if you put your consulting hat back on that from years previous and you were consulting with, let's say the head of global research for McDonald's, you know, what would you say to them about how to select a research platform, about how many platforms, how they might want to structure things moving forwards that they're not gatekeeping, technology.
00;19;26;13 - 00;19;28;06
Speaker 1
Yeah. Any any thoughts on that?
00;19;29;05 - 00;20;00;09
Speaker 2
Well, less of it when I don't actually know the McDonald's research team. So I'm let's say I'm advising a fictional company called Burger Co or something like that, rather than because I have no idea whether McDonald's would pay any attention to me or would would need this kind of advice. But I think, you know, it's not easy choosing technology is it's a it's a discipline in itself, you know, so selecting making sure that you're going through the process.
00;20;00;27 - 00;20;21;28
Speaker 2
I've actually recently won a workshop with with a big group of clients on bias in the UK, you know, walking them through some of the basic principles. And I think there are some, there are some very specific things that you need to look for and take off in a checklist capacity. So, you know, obviously compliance, privacy, all of those kind of nitty gritty things that are going to work, that's a kind of given.
00;20;22;24 - 00;20;50;10
Speaker 2
Then you've got some broad principles about what to look for that go across. Doesn't matter whether you're buying a knowledge management tool or concept screening platform, whatever it is. And I think those are big principles are consistent. And they, you know, they really relate to, you know, usability. And usability is often seen as, you know, making things pretty or, you know, it really isn't.
00;20;50;16 - 00;21;15;02
Speaker 2
You know, it's such a sophisticated the whole user experience space, giving people the right on boarding education, giving them the right language, making sure that things are, you know, designed in a way that is intuitive that they can understand. So driving adoption, it's like the Canva principle of, you know, anyone can be a designer. So templates on boarding, you know, making things visually straightforward.
00;21;15;02 - 00;21;38;15
Speaker 2
So a lot of that don't underplay the importance of that because adoption and kind of behavioral barriers are where these things fall down. You can have the best off in the world, but if you haven't got the right kind of UX to get people using it, it will be used. So that's one I think increasingly integrations and platform ecosystems are a huge part.
00;21;38;16 - 00;21;58;27
Speaker 2
You know, don't go buying something that lives in its own little bubble off to the side. You know, you need to be able to have at the very least, you know, strong ways of interchanging data with other tools. Ideally, you want it to integrate with your systems of record, like, you know, your salesforce or your kind of snowflake or redshift environments, you know, your data environments.
00;21;59;22 - 00;22;23;26
Speaker 2
And interestingly, today, there's a new there's an initiative that that a bunch of people have been working on for a common interchange format between survey platforms. So it's called test API. It's a single API that allows you to take survey data that was collected in, for example, you know, the force, the platform and then move it into the Qualtrics platform or vice versa.
00;22;23;26 - 00;22;47;02
Speaker 2
And that is sounds simple, but it's an enormous amount of work and actually should just for the kind of survey type side of things that unlock a lot of value. So those are you know, those are some of the big the big principles, integrations, UX, and then there's a whole lot of other stuff to look out for. But I think, you know, generally body be serious about evaluating and selecting technology.
00;22;47;02 - 00;23;06;05
Speaker 2
Don't assume that it's just something you can do in your spare time. I think you need to dedicate as a as a research team, you either have somebody who's responsible for it or have, you know, a portion of somebody's job. And given the tools and skills to to know how to buy tech because it's you know, it's not like buying agency services.
00;23;06;17 - 00;23;42;09
Speaker 2
Don't just assume that because you like working with a great agency, that the tech that they use or that they introduce to you is necessarily going to be the best thing. So, you know, you do need to keep an eye open because, you know, there's so many great resources for finding out about technology. You know, we host now things like 70 or 80 on demand, demos of of research tools that you can just go watch and, you know, so it's easier and easier to do your homework beforehand, but it takes time and it's not something that you can just approach as a certainly if you're, you know, a large enterprise team like Berger Co, you
00;23;42;09 - 00;23;47;18
Speaker 2
know, you need to you need to do it seriously. You know, that's my advice.
00;23;48;15 - 00;24;05;18
Speaker 1
That's really helpful. I think you kind of got into what the watch ads might be. So I'm not assuming that just because the agency you work with uses a piece of technology that you'll like it or that it will be fit for purpose. Any other watch out from people?
00;24;06;00 - 00;24;32;00
Speaker 2
Yeah, I think there's two big things that are common to technology generally. It's not just research technology and the kind of revolve around the related twin twin concepts of deflation and replication because you know, if you if you look at the pricing impact that technology has had on the research industry over the last ten years, it's been phenomenal.
00;24;32;00 - 00;25;01;26
Speaker 2
It's it's had a sort of precipitous decline in the average cost for a typical project, something like three, you know, a cost to an a standard online research study is now less than 30% of what it would have been ten years ago. And that is not about moving from offline to online. It's about technology related deflation right across the board because, you know, once you build some software, technically your marginal costs, you know, a zero when you come to replicate that.
00;25;01;26 - 00;25;30;28
Speaker 2
So once you've actually built it, you've done that work, you can you can sell it at a much lower cost. And there are some great examples here of, you know what, at the time, even six, eight years ago was really innovative, leading edge AI technology. So for video analytics, so Living Lens was one of the kind of early startups acquired by, by Medallia and, you know, it was an enterprise play.
00;25;30;28 - 00;25;54;05
Speaker 2
It's a big ticket item. And when it first launched, the capacity really is about the the feature set is about transcribing the spoken word through video and making video searchable. And you can clip some sense. I just bought a lifetime deal for a platform that kind of does that for about $200. Unlimited video, unlimited transcription. And you know, so I'll be recording online.
00;25;54;06 - 00;26;13;19
Speaker 2
Yeah. Consulting engagements there. I assume I'll be record doing a lot my webinars and then you know, you transcribe your code, you can clip and you can search the video. So that's, you know, that's an example of precipitous kind of, you know, deflation and replication. You know, that the app for eyeball is one of dozens and dozens that do largely the same things.
00;26;14;11 - 00;26;37;07
Speaker 2
You know, and you'll see if you look in some of the type marketplaces like Zapier, which is the kind of automations marketplace, you'll find kind of two or 300 tools that are listed as survey or formal feedback tools. You know, just the sheer proliferation of these these tools means it's just very, very easy to do a meta copy.
00;26;37;07 - 00;27;00;25
Speaker 2
So those are the two thing is I would say, in addition to not just taking the first thing you're offered or, you know, not not investing enough time in appraising technology, be very aware that future proofing is hard because of these kind of deflation and replication effects of technology. And that's that's really a fact of life. You just have to be prepared for.
00;27;00;25 - 00;27;25;13
Speaker 1
Yeah, I think what I hear when you say, you know, you could have gone including one or that that exists, but the price is probably higher when you were able to get something for much cheaper. It makes me think you're you know, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, but are you kind of saying like you don't have to pay for the don't pay for brand in a sense?
00;27;25;13 - 00;27;55;23
Speaker 2
Like because I think I think I wouldn't want to be doing the service that the living and the team I think are great. You know, I know the founder and you know, Medallia is a is a is a great business as well. But I think now the issue here is that if you if you get in at the start of something when the price is very high and you're effectively a trial customer for something that's, you know, that's in development, you can end up being locked into something that is quite rapidly either superseded or replicates at a much lower cost.
00;27;55;23 - 00;28;14;15
Speaker 2
So just be careful about long term commitments. Yeah, careful about things that are very leading edge about overcommitting to stuff, you know, at that stage, you know, you will see a fairly quick kind of reductions in prices. Things become more standardized and more widely available.
00;28;14;15 - 00;28;36;23
Speaker 1
Yeah, that makes sense. Sorry. Living. Living ones. You seem to use it. Great. That was not a not a dig at them. So switching gears a little bit before, I think we've only got a little bit of time left, but I did want to ask you about working with agencies. So obviously we've focused a lot on the technology piece.
00;28;37;20 - 00;28;57;29
Speaker 1
But from your perspective, if we're thinking about, let's say, research agencies in the loosest term because obviously they're going to be lots of different types of research agency or consultancy, like what does a really good partner look like for, you know, a marketing or insights leader but a consumer brand?
00;28;58;17 - 00;29;32;29
Speaker 2
Yeah, I think I mean, I would kind of already talk about the need to have services wrapped around technology. So I think there is, you know, agencies now have to understand how to work with have to, you know, potentially have offers that are combined technology and professional services, products propositions. Yeah, I think that's really, really important. It's, you know, other than in very nation areas, you know, so if you've got, you know, an independent freelance semiotics expert, you know, who's not that great with computer, different story.
00;29;32;29 - 00;29;57;27
Speaker 2
But generally agencies really need to understand technology we it to harness it potentially, you know, create combined products. So that's one thing. But I think at a high level, I think there's this we're starting to see a bit of a separation between, you know, do you want an agency that is a doer or do you want an agency that's a thinker?
00;29;58;13 - 00;30;23;19
Speaker 2
You know, so you've got a bit of a, you know, agencies that are effectively going to collect the data, run the project, deliver, you know, here's the here's the output. You know, we've done it for you. It's effectively a, you know, outsourcing of effort type model. Or do you want an agency that's really going to bring you strategic advise consulting grade, you know, insights?
00;30;24;02 - 00;30;49;25
Speaker 2
And I think we're starting to see that separation a little bit more now in the industry between, you know, kind of premium advisory and delivery of data. But I think there's a there's a there's a thing you know, I can say this because I don't depend on clients side teams for revenue. But I think the way that clients contract with agencies, they're really got to get their house in order.
00;30;49;25 - 00;31;12;02
Speaker 2
This thing hasn't changed since the eighties. You know, it's putting out three, four, five K projects to six agencies. It's spending ages, making people change the titles, the commercial model, the client research teams now for Engaging Research Partners is busted and they really need to exit. So, you know, we can sit inside. Agencies need to do X, Y and Z.
00;31;12;02 - 00;31;34;23
Speaker 2
This is what clients need from agencies. It's like you also need to do your piece of this, which is fix the commercial models for engaging in serious partners. Don't treat them, you know, like they've got endless capacity just to respond to them on lost briefs, you know, bring them inside, make them effective partners in your business. Do the due diligence, you know, to create long term partnerships.
00;31;34;23 - 00;31;50;12
Speaker 2
Don't just keep this in a model that I think doesn't serve anybody very well. Ultimately drains agencies and margin that you want them to reinvest in the product will people and increase prices to the customer. So if I was to say that's my one big beef, sorry for gunning for a runs, but I think.
00;31;51;00 - 00;31;51;07
Speaker 1
That.
00;31;51;09 - 00;31;56;28
Speaker 2
That is a that is a broken part of the process. Still, it staggers me how this is how this still happens.
00;31;57;19 - 00;32;23;00
Speaker 1
But yeah, and it's not just research buyers to it's people. I mean, I've only really engaged with the agencies from like a rebrand perspective or we have a paid search agency, but that's a, you know, they don't even really need to manage our it's just this this other person who's almost like a freelancer who helps us with paid search.
00;32;23;17 - 00;32;47;21
Speaker 1
But even then I think I spoke to four different agencies. And you just think of the number when I was getting the rebrand. Sorry. And you just think of the number of hours that go into prepping for, you know, showing us their capabilities and then showing us their process and then taking our specific need and coming up with like what they would do to help us.
00;32;47;21 - 00;33;06;18
Speaker 1
I mean, and then three of those four I didn't end up working with. So you see it in so many different ways. I mean, in your mind, how could you see the commercial model being better when what you're really buying is someone's expertize? Do you know what I mean? Like, how how can we fix it? The big question.
00;33;06;25 - 00;33;32;12
Speaker 2
I think I think more use of effective retainers. I think having longer term relationships with agencies and not having not thinking in a project mindset so much. So you think, you know, we're going to brief this project, we're going to get a brief and, you know, done and dusted. You think about building a knowledge asset for your organization and you think about working with partners who can help you build that over the long term.
00;33;32;26 - 00;33;53;20
Speaker 2
So you have, you know, long term engagements, multi-year contracts. You have, you know, a good read KPI as a metrics, making sure that the right kind of individuals are on the team over the long term and multiple projects. What happens inevitably is agencies stick their best in shiny people on a pitch, and then the junior people end up doing the project because there's no money left after spending so much pitching.
00;33;53;20 - 00;34;07;15
Speaker 2
So that really, really needs fixing it. You know, it's broken and advertising as well. I'm not saying that, you know, a retainer model, as you know, is the panacea, but it needs to change if if people want to get the best out of agencies.
00;34;07;15 - 00;34;33;18
Speaker 1
Yeah, it's a really good point and I'm conscious of time and in terms of wrapping things up, I did want to ask a little bit about future proofing, which we talked about really challenging that if someone is looking to plan for the next few years down the road, what should they expect to see more of, less of within the research space?
00;34;34;18 - 00;34;57;13
Speaker 2
Yeah, I think there are three big things, all of which are kind of nonspecific. You know, it's it's a luxury of people like me that we can, you know, we can make these predictions and nobody comes back and calls us when we're wrong a couple of years down the line. So, you know, I will make them the three big areas that I think people should be learning about and planning for.
00;34;57;13 - 00;35;40;18
Speaker 2
I think one is, you know, the growth in machine learning, deep learning, you know, those labels are not actually all that helpful, but specific use cases, language, huge language models. So there was an article recently in The Economist by actually the boss of the guy who got fired from Google for saying that the AI was sentient. It's it's a very compelling read because the lambda model is, you know, it's not sentient, but it's getting very, very clever understanding, emotional nuance, the kind of suppositions that we all make about what's going on in somebody else's head, well worth a read.
00;35;41;01 - 00;35;59;18
Speaker 2
And the big implication for me is if you think the quality of research is too hard of a problem for these language models to really get to grips with compared to humans, you need to think again. Because I think in 2 to 3 years time, we're going to see some very intelligent stuff happening around call using these AI tools.
00;36;00;06 - 00;36;27;28
Speaker 2
There's a recently launched user research product software product called Ball Park, and you can find a ball park HQ dot com I think is is that, you know they're using one of these big language models. JP 23 So effectively to synthesize the content of lots of qualitative interviews and automatically generate a summary to say this is what all this stuff means that you'll see a lot more of and you'll see some really creative applications.
00;36;27;28 - 00;36;47;16
Speaker 2
So for me, one is, you know, huge language models and related stuff. Second one is one we've talked about a little bit already, which is platform ecosystems and integrations. You know, you can't exist in a vacuum anymore. You need to have, at the very least, an API that's going to connect what you do into a client's data environment.
00;36;47;27 - 00;37;14;06
Speaker 2
But increasingly, I think, you know, we see big systems of record in the kind of marketing taxpayers you've got the HubSpot suite at the salesforce is there's not really anything equivalent in research taken. I think there will you know there will be much more of a kind of platform ecosystem model develop over the next couple of years. And the third thing is, in spite of all this tech, honestly, like the human curation is still going to be really important.
00;37;14;06 - 00;37;48;16
Speaker 2
The storytelling, the drawing in random threads. You know, even though I've said these, these big language models can start to do some really impressive things, people are the ones who are going to make these surprising inferences across different types of datasets and different types of inputs, you know. So I think the, the storytelling, the empathy skills, the lateral thinking, all of that stuff I think brings research skills up into more of a kind of premium advisory space than they necessarily have been, and certainly not evenly distributed in the past.
00;37;48;16 - 00;38;00;12
Speaker 2
I think that will become much more important. So for those, you know, integrations and human curation, I think big, big things that that will become more important.
00;38;00;12 - 00;38;23;21
Speaker 1
Fascinating. Thank you, Mike. Honestly, if this is this has been really interesting, not only I'm sure for the listeners, but for me as well, when I think about where my head needs to be as someone who is marketing research company. So yeah, massively where can people find you or what your what you're up to?
00;38;24;03 - 00;38;41;17
Speaker 2
Yeah. I mean, you can find a link to an I am a terrible social media user and I'll get very busy and noisy for a short period of time and then have weeks of silence. So don't expect it to be regular but you know check out insight platforms dot com. There's tons and tons of video content, blog articles, demos.
00;38;41;17 - 00;38;52;29
Speaker 2
There's lots and lots of companies on there. And in the next few weeks, we'll be relaunching the Insight Platforms Academy that'll have a tons of self-paced training courses for different parts of the research skill set.
00;38;54;11 - 00;39;00;18
Speaker 1
Awesome. Thank you so much. And I'll see you actually. I'll see you in person in a few weeks. Yeah, that's great.
00;39;01;10 - 00;39;02;21
Speaker 2
I think I'm looking forward to.
00;39;03;18 - 00;39;06;25
Speaker 1
Yeah. Bye bye.
00;39;07;07 - 00;39;11;08
Speaker 2
Thanks, Mike, and thanks for having me.
00;39;11;08 - 00;39;18;05
Speaker 1
Thanks for tuning in this week. Find us on LinkedIn at Digg Insights and don't forget to hit subscribe for a weekly dose of fresh content.