Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is an excerpt of a current article from the Joel Rubinson on Marketing Research Consulting blog.
For 10 years or more, big research providers have been forced to accept meager organic growth. Yet, growth is out there.
Companies like Marketing Evolution (media optimization, surveys linked to digital and ad serving data), Disqo (first party data access to online “walled garden” shopper, search and ad serving data) and Ace Metrix (automated and syndicated ratings of video commercials) are addressing emerging gaps. While retail moves to omnichannel, advertising is also transforming to people-based ad serving — personalized and selective — driven by data at scale.
The new media challenge is to find the right customer, whatever website or app they happen to be on, at exactly the right moment. Buying whole audiences is wasteful; that is why (addressable) digital advertising has now passed linear TV for ad revenues. Yet, walled gardens and GDPR prevent access to what marketers need to know, so serious gaps and challenges exist.
If you are in the research, marketing intelligence, insights and analytics business, here is your growth checklist. Do you offer:
Where are marketing research and marketing analytics falling short? I bet that 90 percent of sales of the large research houses fail to check off two or more items on this checklist. That is why they have little organic growth.
The acid test for no growth research is this: If your research could have been designed the same way 15 years ago, it is a no-growth business.
Market researchers on the provider or client side — you must align to a digital future and tell marketers something important they do not know. You must light a new path forward into the addressable age or risk becoming redundant.