••• ad research
Research Now SSI adds to ADimension
Cross-Media Dashboard
Research Now SSI now offers the Cross-Media Dashboard, an advertising measurement tool. The latest feature of Research Now SSI’s ADimension Ad Effectiveness platform solution, the dashboard includes reporting on consumer engagement and exposure in channels such as linear TV, addressable TV, over-the-top content distribution, print, radio, in-app and out-of-home ads such as stadium screens. ADimension links impression data to individuals via Research Now SSI’s opted-in research panel. ADimension measures brand metrics – awareness, familiarity, favorability and purchase intent. It supports advertisers, media and advertising agencies, market research agencies and publishers from audience discovery to creative testing, ad implementation and optimization and evaluation.
••• shopper insights
Report profiles C-store shopper
Why they choose where they choose
Dallas loyalty marketing firm Excentus has released The C-Store Shopper Profile, a report on convenience store shoppers that examines the interests and behaviors of over 1,000 American consumers through data gathered from a recent Excentus-Ipsos survey. It provides convenience retailers with insights on: loyalty shopper demographics including gender, age, marital status, education, income and in-store spend; the top reasons why customers choose to shop at a specific convenience store; the factors that influence shopping behaviors and decisions on where customers shop; and incentives convenience retail operators should consider offering and the platforms through which they should offer them. The report is available for download at http://excentus.com/c-store-shopper-profile (registration required).
••• data analysis
Mixed-methods tool updated
New version of NVivo12
Data analysis software firm QSR International, Boston, has launched NVivo 12, the latest version of its mixed-methods research tool used by education, health care, marketing and nonprofit researchers. NVivo software supports qualitative and mixed-methods research and is designed to help researchers organize, evaluate and find insights in unstructured or qualitative data, including interviews, open-ended survey responses, articles, social media and Web content. The new version includes: more visualization options; more automated analysis options; more customizable options and user controls; integration with IBM SPSS quantitative data analysis software for an improved mixed-methods research experience;  support to work with and analyze a range of qualitative data – video, social media content, e-mail content, Web content and OneNote and Evernote files; improved loading response times when selecting project items on a new session and when loading list views on start-up of an NVivo project.
••• brand research
App delivers video responses
Gauges emotional reactions
Artificial intelligence (AI) company Truthify now offers an eponymous short-form video messaging app to help brands, marketers, media and advertising agencies and political campaigns gather at-scale audience feedback. Users upload their message or content to Truthify and the recipient watches the video message after enabling camera permissions and the app uses AI to identify the recipient’s subconscious emotional reactions to the sender’s message and shares the reactions with both the sender and recipient. Results within the app can be filtered by an aggregate or individual recipient comments, emotions and more. Users are also granted analytics that offer details about their content, such as recipient demographics, the specific point at which a recipient’s emotion changed and the device and operating system used to view the content.
••• ad research
Tool measures digital ad effectiveness
Incorporates online community
Westport, Conn., insights company Critical Mix has launched ADvance, a digital ad effectiveness measurement tool designed to help market researchers and digital marketers maximize ad campaign performance. The solution leverages Critical Mix’s global online survey community combined with customized technological methods to collect and analyze results of digital advertising campaigns in real-time. In addition to ADvance providing campaign and survey analytics, added behavioral insights on exposed and control panelists are available through the company’s partnership with InfoGroup. InfoGroup’s data set provides access to up to 900-plus data elements on panel members for further analysis on factors of campaign results.
••• Briefly
New York-based researcher Ipsos has launched a new Product Intelligence solution to enable marketers to evaluate products faster and more efficiently. Using online user ratings and reviews, the approach gathers consumer feedback on in-market products and uses a product testing lens to analyze the social data. The approach uses text analytics, augmented by human intelligence, to provide product performance insights based on unfiltered consumer feedback.
Copenhagen, Denmark, software firm OfficeReports ApS has released Version 8 of its OfficeReports Analytics, a data analysis and crosstab tool add-in for Microsoft Excel. The new version treats all tables created using OfficeReports as pivot tables. A pane on the side lets users change the variables and filters. Researchers can show both count and percent and the new version supports weighting, nets and T-tests and Z-tests for two significance levels at the same time. It can also show other statistics like medians.
U.K.-based video insight firm Voxpopme now offers VideoCX, a video-first customer experience platform. Customers can leave a short video along with their NPS, cSAT or CES score and videos collected are then processed by Voxpopme’s analytics engine with transcription, sentiment and theme-coding made available through a dashboard where showreels of key insights can be created and shared across the organization.
P\S\L Group has introduced Assure BrandPanels to address fraud in pharmaceutical market research, as highlighted by the German news organization Der Spiegel. During an investigation encompassing 600 market research studies, including those containing physicians, Der Spiegel uncovered manipulation in the industry leading to fraudulent data. Assure BrandPanels is designed to apply artificial intelligence and machine learning to uncover and prevent bad actors from infiltrating research samples.
Slovakia telecommunications firm Swan announced it is testing a new system for consumer surveys over its TV platform. The service was developed with the startup Prieskumy and will deploy computer-assisted TV interviewing technology. The system allows public authorities or consumer researchers to question people at home, over their TV interface. Swan counts over 24,000 TV subscribers in Slovakia.
Ipsos Healthcare, the health care business of Paris-based researcher Ipsos, has announced the launch of its syndicated multiple sclerosis patient community panel.
Maritz has established PeopleScience, a forum dedicated to advancing the conversation about applied behavioral science within business and industry. Its primary content engine, PeopleScience.com, will bring together thought leaders from academia, business, public policy, journalism and related spheres of influence. Among those supplying content will be Dan Ariely, author and professor of psychology and behavioral economics, Duke University; Om Marwah, global head of behavioral science, Walmart; and Matt Wallaert, chief behavioral officer, Clover Health.
New York-based Nielsen announced the commercial availability of its Enterprise Audience API, which is designed to help media clients and their solution providers accelerate their TV audience targeting initiatives. Through the new API, clients can transact on advertiser-defined audiences including but not limited to those based on credit card spending habits, in-store FMCG purchases and extended psychographic profiles. As additional data sets emerge, the platform allows for expansion to include new targeting capabilities. The API also supports standardized segments curated by industry groups such as the Advanced Target Standards Group.
Oslo, Norway-based Confirmit has launched Confirmit Employee Pulse, an employee research offering designed to help businesses run flexible employee listening programs using a tool that supports any type of feedback, from company-wide surveys to ad-hoc programs that identify and address specific local issues.
Gary King, founder and chair of the board of Boston firm Crimson Hexagon, has developed a model between independent academic researchers and Facebook to better understand the implications of social media and digital technologies in the world, starting with the impact of social media on elections and democracy. King’s model will enable trusted academics to gain access to privacy-protected Facebook data to understand Facebook’s impact on upcoming elections in Mexico, India and the U.S.
Ipsos Healthcare has expanded its syndicated Pan-Cancer Testing Monitor (PCTM) to the Australian market. The PCTM, which has been running in the U.S. since 2016, measures and tracks the usage of pan-cancer tests, which are designed to test for a wide range of cancer types to help doctors make more informed treatment decisions. The study gathers perceptions from medical oncologists and pathologists on topics such as awareness and current utilization of pan-cancer tests, perceived advantages and disadvantages and drivers and barriers to use.
Dallas-based sensory testing firm Curion has opened a new testing and sensory facility in Irving, Texas, featuring a kitchen area with a 20-foot commercial hood, both gas and electric ovens and burners, walk-in cooler and freezer, and a focus group room.
Mobile survey software firm OnePoint Global has launched a free market research toolkit combining several of its core products including its SMS Invitations product and a survey app. Separately, the firm has added optical character recognition to its My Surveys app. The new feature reads text within images and can trigger new surveys or question sets based on keywords within receipts or product labels. The text can be stored more efficiently than image files and can be extracted for further processing or analysis, delivering granular data about when, where and by whom products are being purchased.
MFour Mobile Research, Irvine, Calif., now offers the Path-2-Purchase Platform, a first-party data platform that enables brands to see where consumers are now and where they’ve gone in the past. Instead of receiving tracking data showing consumers’ whereabouts, Path-2-Purchase users can field real-time, location-based surveys to capture motivations and emotions at any point in the purchase cycle.
Chicago-based IRI has implemented artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning enhancements to its offerings to improve the analytics solutions it provides clients. IRI is applying AI and machine learning algorithms across its Liquid Data technology platform with a number of solutions, including IRI Demand Forecasting and IRI Revenue Management Solutions.
The NPD Group, Port Washington, N.Y., has launched U.S. Kids License Tracker, a service providing a holistic view of licensed purchases in the U.S. spanning 17 industries, from sporting goods to footwear, for kids ages 14 and under.
Los Angeles-based research platform Fuel Cycle has launched Fuel Cycle Exchange (FCX), which aggregates insights tools to help customers centralize their research activities on a single platform to support product development, shopper insights, customer experience, pricing, marketing and more.
Research firm MESH Experience has launched its first annual experience landscape report for the retail bank sector. For the last year, MESH has been building a new Real-time Experience Tracking subscription datastream for the retail banking sector. A number of U.K. banks have now signed up for 2018 tracking. The report covers all touchpoints – paid, owned and earned experiences, from TV to online to word of mouth – across major banking brands and includes qualitative diagnostics.
Atlanta-based ZAPTEST has launched Script-Less test automation technology, designed to help QA professionals automate test procedures with no use of programming language scripting. ZAPTEST offers the ability to automate any UI operation on Windows, iOS, Android, Mac and Linux to auto-generate test documentation and to execute the same test across multiple environments in parallel.
Northampton, Mass., software firm OriginLab has released Origin and OriginPro 2018b, adding new features, apps and improvements to enhance Origin’s graphing, analysis and programming capabilities.
The Fairfax, Va.-based Culture Marketing Council: The Voice of Hispanic Marketing is offering a free download of its 2018 Hispanic Market Guide at www.culturemarketingcouncil.org. The digital guide identifies companies with culture specialists along with their capabilities, client roster and key contacts.Â
Reston, Va.-based research firm comScore now offers new Advanced Audience segments to its digital audience measurement solution, Media Metrix Multi-Platform, including IAB, OTT and TV viewing segments to allow media buyers and sellers to understand multi-platform audiences beyond age and gender.
ZimGo Polling, South Korea-based BPU International’s new SaaS election analytics product, is now available. This is the first election analytics AI cloud-computing tool to utilize the patent-pending Artificial Emotional Intelligence (AEI) ZimGo engine. ZimGo Polling aims to reduce margin of error and lower human bias.
Research firm N-equals Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City, has unveiled a new focus group facility with seating for up to 12 adults and full recording and Internet streaming capabilities and also doubled the size of its CLT facilities.
London-based location data company Blis has upgraded its Smart Trends analytics tool, adding new capabilities to allow marketers to build intelligence from refined movement data analysis across various verticals.
Bend, Ore.-based consulting firm Luck Collective has launched a new offering called The Growth Collective, designed to help small groups of entrepreneurs, curated by growth stage and revenue goals, uncover opportunities and maximize growth. Participants are grouped with other founders in related but non-competitive businesses to help foster business success.
Vernon Research Group, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, now offers its Insightaneous research service, which is designed to provide focused data on a few questions with a fast turnaround. Companies or organizations can ask four questions and receive a report with the overall results plus three demographic data cuts of their choice within three to five business days. Guidance on survey methodology and question design is included. Users can also specify genders or age group quotas. The sample size is typically 500. Larger samples are available for regional and national projects.
Toronto data collection firm Delvinia has launched its new automated marketing research platform Methodify across North America. The platform employs research methods to test consumers’ feedback in a range of instances, from product concepts and pricing strategies to advertising campaigns and user experiences. Featured research partners include Kantar, element54 and Voxpopme.
Research software firm Confirmit has launched Confirmit Account Health, a new solution designed to help stakeholders in B2B organizations understand the health of their account portfolios and manage revenue risks from the frontline through to executive management.
U.K.-based cross-media measurement firm RealityMine has added RealLife Profiles to its data product offerings. The RealLife Profiles product provides a daily summary on panelists, of apps used and of top-level Web sites visited within a day, providing a snapshot of passively-metered data on each panelist. This allows panel owners to profile or improve targeting on sample and to complement survey responses. RealLife Profiles is tailored for panel integration and covers panelists using Android and iOS devices.