••• telephone research
Software addresses new dialing regulations
TCPA in the USA
Montreal survey software firm Voxco has released TCPA Connect, a manual-dialing software that helps U.S. phone survey centers better address the new Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) dialing regulations that prohibit the use of an autodialer when calling U.S. cellphones without express prior consent from the respondent. The TCPA Connect solution allows researchers to regain lost productivity by letting interviewers use the integrated Voxco software to manually dial calls directly from the survey platform. The solution offers four distinct manual-dialing deployment options that are variable based on each phone survey center’s situation, which can vary based on data storage needs and the variety of respondent situations. Voxco has a technical overview document available via the TCPA Connect page on its Web site that highlights the benefits of each of the four deployment scenarios and their advantages over detached-phone dialing.
www.voxco.com
••• new product research
NPD service measures a product feature’s value
How much is that new wrinkle worth?
The NPD Group, a Port Washington, N.Y., research firm, has introduced a new approach for identifying the value in dollars of individual product features, allowing manufacturers to make more informed product development and marketing decisions. The approach leverages NPD’s data assets, including point-of-sale information from more than 700 retailers nationwide. NPD data show what consumers purchased, the price they paid for those products and a variety of other attributes. Through analysis of the store-level data that is representative of the entire market, NPD can determine the value in dollars of the individual features of those products, allowing the firm to help address and answer the broad range of questions that arise as manufacturers develop and take to market new and enhanced products. Retailers can also use the service to identify must-have product features they need to carry, to support category-level decisions on how to price and assort products within stores and to understand people’s needs and preferences and how they evolve.
www.npd.com
••• IT research
Illuminas debuts IT exec community
Includes CIOs, CTOs and others
Austin, Texas, research firm Illuminas has launched the Illuminas Insight Exchange, a new research-oriented community of IT executives, including CIOs, CTOs and other senior technology officers from enterprises in the U.S. Every community member is specially recruited and vetted to guarantee their knowledge and expertise in the technology market. At launch, the community will include 100 members. The community is designed to increase a marketer’s or researcher’s ability to reach and understand IT decision makers. Built on icanmakeitbetter’s research platform, Illuminas can deploy a research activity and have insights available in a few days. It allows for a range of qualitative and quantitative research activities, including surveys, discussion boards, focus groups/chat sessions and diary activities, with real-time and custom reporting options.
www.illuminas.com
••• b2b research
Millward Brown offers B2B ad tool
Can benchmark ads against competitors
New York-based research consultancy Millward Brown has launched Link for Business, a version of its advertising copy-testing solution Link for B2B marketers. The solution allows B2B marketers to assess the performance of advertising in any medium, in any market against brand and sales objectives. The solution predicts the impact of advertising on a business’ brand and likely sales, providing clients with insights about their advertising that B2B marketers can use to optimize creative content and maximize return on marketing investment. Link for Business studies can be completed with any business-to-business audience and will benchmark ads against comparable or competitor creatives. The solution is available globally and is delivered by Millward Brown’s Corporate Practice, the company’s specialist business-to-business research practice.
www.millwardbrown.com
••• automated research
Research Now offers templated studies
Concept test, brand health, A&U
Plano, Texas, firm Research Now has launched Research Now Marketplace automated research, a family of templated studies addressing common research topics. The studies are targeted toward researchers looking for a tech-enabled solution to execute their routine studies while maintaining data collection standards. Research Now Marketplace automated research is launching with seven initial studies including concept test, brand health, attitude and usage, creative test, share-of-wallet, customer satisfaction and employee culture. Additional study types are in development and will be added at staged releases. The studies may be initiated through an online form and are generally completed within a few business days. Results are delivered in real-time via an online dashboard and users can filter and download the data. Every project is reviewed and monitored by a professional market researcher. Research Now Marketplace automated research is immediately available in the U.S., Canada and Europe and will be available in APAC later this year.
www.researchnow.com
••• telephone research
Survox xLOG tracks phone-dialing activity
Helps call centers defend against legal claims
San Francisco phone survey automation firm Survox has introduced Survox xLOG, a searchable archive of all phone-dialing activity and operational methods. Call centers can use xLOG to support inquiries and defend against legal claims of wrongful operations stemming from the 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which prohibits the use of automatic telephone dialing systems to call cell phones without the recipient’s prior express consent. Survox xLOG archives calling records, protects them from modification and makes the data easily accessible through a simplified search tool. It also enables call centers to produce a report documenting whether a specific number was ever called, when it was called and what dialing method was used.
www.survoxinc.com
••• Briefly
Wilton, Conn., researcher Toluna has fused its QuickSurveys DIY Survey and Analytics Platform with the Toluna.com survey community, allowing users to receive over 1,000 nationally-representative survey responses in 21 countries, including the U.S., Canada, Brazil, Mexico, the U.K., France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Russia, Australia, India, Singapore, Indonesia, China, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand and South Korea. All projects are completed within a few hours to less than a day.
us.toluna.com
Interactive Video Productions, a Morganville, N.J., mobile research labs provider, has launched MobiLAB ET Online, allowing marketing research respondents to participate in eye-tracking research from anywhere they have a Web cam and the Internet. Researchers can measure what people engage with, for how long they engage and the order in which they engage. It also comes with a Web portal, providing a platform for stimuli presentation, recording, visualization and analysis of the remote eye-tracking. Powered by Sticky, the platform includes visualizations with view gaze data over stimulus as static data or as moving data (over time).
www.interactivevideo.com
PTG, a Tenafly, N.J., firm that offers consumer engagement and non-conscious measurement techniques, has introduced a new research technology that passively and simultaneously measures consumer behavior, engagement and emotion in real-time. As a result, marketers can obtain shopper insights data that integrates the following four behavioral and emotional measurement approaches: Will shoppers stop to consider your product? How much time will consumers spend on your brand versus the competition? Are shoppers engaged with your packaging, display and/or POS? What is the emotional reaction to the shopping experience?
pretesting.com
The Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS), part of The National Retail Federation’s Technology Leadership Community, has released new resources to help retailers safeguard their data. The three new security programs designed by ARTS for retailers include: ARTS Cybersecurity Primer, a paper that provides an outline and guidance on what developers and architects should be wary of in areas of relevant risks, as well as topic areas for further research related to common best practices and management strategies; ARTS Data Privacy Primer, which provides a base for architects and product managers to recognize what data is classified as sensitive and what the risk is; and ARTS Data Classification Template, which provides a basis for retailers to begin developing their own data classification models without having to start from scratch. Both primers and the data classification template are now available for download on NRF.com.
Canada-based firm Cido Research has expanded its use of survey technologies provided by Montreal-based survey software provider Voxco to include Voxco Panel Manager and Voxco Online to meet its requirements for online survey data collection. This expands Cido’s existing Voxco usage into a multi-channel software platform.
www.cidoresearch.com
Palo Alto, Calif., online survey platform SurveyMonkey has launched SurveyMonkey Intelligence, a mobile app insights platform that expands the company’s existing data businesses, offering data and insights on mobile apps and the overall app economy to customers. The new platform will allow publishers to benchmark key metrics, track competitors, improve due diligence and discover emerging mobile trends. SurveyMonkey Intelligence was created through the acquisition and incubation of mobile start-up Renzu, co-founded by Abhinav Agrawal, Arjun Lall and Jason Tomlinson, all alumni of social game developer Zynga.
www.surveymonkey.com
U.K. research agency DJS Research Ltd has been appointed on to a new framework, the U.K. SBS BIS Research and Evaluation Framework. Following an invitation to tender, the firm submitted a proposal to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), which was ultimately successful. The BIS is a ministerial department for economic growth, which invests in education and skills to promote trade, boost innovation and help individuals start and grow a company. BIS also works to reduce the impact of regulation and protect its consumers. DJS Research has previously worked for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills on a market research project about consumer rights legislation.
www.djsresearch.co.uk
Nielsen, New York, has launched the Nielsen Marketing Cloud, which integrates consumer and media data with marketing activation and analytics applications into a single platform and allows clients to deliver relevant marketing to their customers across multiple platforms. The Marketing Cloud’s core set of applications include the Nielsen Data Management Platform and DaaS, Multi-Touch Attribution and In-Flight Analytics for Automotive, CPG and Retail, as well as integrations with over 150 third-party media and content activation and optimization applications. All applications enable cross-platform analysis and centralized data access. Additional Nielsen and third-party applications, including Nielsen Media Impact for cross-platform media planning, will be integrated in the coming months.
www.nielsen.com
Facebook, Menlo Park, Calif., will offer its publishing partners Digital Content Ratings – part of New York-based Nielsen’s Total Audience Measurement framework – for measurement of its Instant Articles. Facebook is opening the Instant Articles program to all publishers, including the collaboration with Nielsen for Instant Articles measurement. Digital Content Ratings provides daily measurement of audiences across all digital content types and platforms, with metrics fully comparable to television. The initial release currently in the market includes measurement of static and video content, spanning desktop, mobile phones and tablets. Measurement of audio content and audiences viewing on game consoles and over-the-top devices will be available in a future release. Publishers that participate in Facebook’s Instant Articles program will be eligible to have Digital Content Ratings measurement for the article contribute to their total audience, including industry metrics such as audience, page views and time spent. Nielsen will also offer measurement of Facebook’s Instant Articles to all Digital Content Ratings subscribers as part of its standard service. Currently, more than 25 Nielsen clients are evaluating their Digital Content Ratings data for video measurement, with another 15+ evaluating for measurement of static content. Many others are on the path toward implementation. The syndicated release of Digital Content Ratings will be introduced to the market in phases beginning in Q2 2016.
www.nielsen.com
Bridg, a Los Angeles marketing software company that provides marketing and business intelligence to restaurant brands, has launched Reveal, a free, marketing-focused customer analysis tool that provides select new and potential clients with customized customer data analysis. The intelligence available through Reveal allows restaurant companies to identify and segment customers and track key behaviors, such as visit frequency patterns and spend per visit, which can be used to create personalized marketing campaigns to drive transactions and frequency and improve consumer loyalty.
Irvine, Calif., firm MFour Mobile Research has introduced MFourDIY, an all-mobile, do-it-yourself survey platform. The features include: fast turnaround times; real-time data; instant editing functions to change specs and options and revise questions; GeoValidation, which verifies when a panelist enters a retail location, then pushes a relevant survey; multimedia capability allowing clients to prompt respondents to take pictures or make and send audio/video files; heat map imagery; a cost tracker; and a help center staffed by in-house MFour representatives.
mfour.com
Maritz Motivation Solutions, St. Louis, has launched Awards Aviator, a new interactive virtual reality game experience for reward and incentive programs. Developed by Maritz product and interactive creative designers, Awards Aviator uses Oculus Rift headsets, which were introduced to consumers in April. During the two-minute game, players earn award points by capturing gems while navigating their spaceship through a nocturnal planetary landscape. Wearing the Oculus glasses, players turn their heads left or right or tilt up or down to navigate the ship. The total score is tallied at the end of the game and includes a top 10 list of the best “aviators” in the galaxy. Maritz estimates that 15 people an hour can play the game, which is designed to appeal to a wide variety of audience demographics. Maritz provides the game hardware and software and a company operator assists companies to deploy it at their desired location.
www.maritzmotivation.com
New York-based researcher Millward Brown and Kantar Worldpanel, London, have formed a partnership in the U.K. to provide a new solution that allows brands to simultaneously evaluate both brand and sales performance delivered by their digital marketing campaigns. The partnership includes Millward Brown’s Brand Lift Insights solution and introduces Sales Insights, a new joint offer from the two organizations. Brand Lift Insights identifies differences in brand attitudes from awareness through to purchase intent that can be attributed solely to digital marketing campaigns. Sales Insights applies the same control-exposed methodological approach to Kantar Worldpanel’s continuous sales panel, allowing sales uplifts to be calculated. As a result, brands can take greater control of their digital spend and understand effectiveness across brand and sales metrics. The new service will be available via Millward Brown and will initially roll out in the U.K. In parallel, Kantar Worldpanel will continue to offer Consumer Mix Model, which evaluates how all elements of the marketing mix (digital and non-digital) work both together and individually by analyzing their impact on purchasing behavior before, during and after the campaign.
www.millwardbrown.com
www.kantarworldpanel.com/global
Chicago researcher IRI has launched E-Market Insights, its proprietary e-commerce measurement and tracking service and the fourth integrated component in the firm’s e-commerce solution suite. The service, along with IRI’s OmniChannel Shopper Behavior Insights, Digital Path-to-Purchase and E-ShopperLink consumer segmentation, provides components to improve understanding of online shopping and shopper trends for CPG manufacturers and retailers. E-Market Insights leverages an integrated e-commerce data set and an ecosystem of partners, such as comScore and Return Path. It also includes IRI methodologies and monitors brand performance in the e-commerce channel, providing visibility across sales, growth, share and trends.
www.iriworldwide.com
Alter Agents, a Los Angeles research firm, has released a new e-book called Dawn of the Promiscuous Shopper. The new publication uses data from the firm’s Shopper STAT technology and examines the changes in the way consumers interact with brands. Shopper STAT is a tool that draws data from continuous sampling of shoppers who bought groceries in the last 24 hours.
www.alteragents.com
Port Washington, N.Y., researcher The NPD Group has launched its new Diamond Tracker service, which provides the diamond industry with retail measurement of diamond sales in the fine jewelry market. The service also provides detailed diamond market data to help clients analyze key market trends at granular levels.
www.npd.com