Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Award winner Research Defender 

Editor’s note: Research Defender is the winner of the 2022 Technology Impact Award, which is a category in the Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Awards. This award is for an innovative technology or use of technology in an innovative way that made an outstanding contribution to a project or organization. To find out more about the awards click here.

Over the past three-plus years, Research Defender has developed a set of complementary, customizable software tools that dramatically reduce fraud and elevate survey data quality. Recent research-on-research has quantifiably shown the impact the tools have – both on respondent engagement and data quality, leading to more accurate real-world research outcomes.

What long-term benefits do you expect your tech to have?

In the long term, we'd like our technology to be embedded and make all the research transactions consistent. While no system can be perfect, our goal is to maximize the consistency as much as possible. In this way, buyers, sellers and exchanges can all have a general and equivalent setting for fraud thresholds. 

In addition to investing in new features and products, we also hope to ensure that there is general knowledge about fraud. It is evident our industry is a goldmine of and for information - every single company, business, enterprise, organization and government entity would want to have data and research at its fingertips.

Can you give a brief overview of what the software tool does? 

Our software is defined across a few different features:

  • Search - Bot and duplicate detection. Also tracks proxies, international fraud, fraud from other industries (e.g., ad-tech), etc.
  • Activity - Tracks professional survey respondents - not bots or duplicates. 
  • Review - Text analytics for garbage/engagement/profanity/copy paste.
  • Verify - E-mail validation.
  • Predupe - Ability for suppliers to increase conversion on transactions.