News notes

Rochester, N.Y., research company Harris Interactive has taken action to realign its cost structure. It has reorganized its U.S. research business units into integrated vertical teams to concentrate more resources on client issues. The company also announced the formation of centers of excellence, which will develop and deliver products and solutions into the marketplace.

The MacArthur Foundation, a Chicago public interest and community development network, has created a new interdisciplinary research network designed to help America prepare for the challenges and opportuni-ties posed by our aging society. The MacArthur Research Network on an Aging Society will be supported by a three-year, $3.9 million MacArthur grant.
The Network will present new U.S. population and mortality projections and compare them to current gov-ernment forecasts. The projections will forecast mortality under scenarios that take into account advances in bio-gerontology and the effects of unhealthy life conditions.
The Network will examine the potential benefits of remodeling the distribution of key activities, including education, work and leisure, across the life course. Research and projects will focus on three themes: the positive and negative impact of key intergenerational issues on families and society; the development of meaningful roles for older people; and the potential effects that the various sources of diversity and inequali-ties may have on the structure, economy and overall health of an aging society.
The Network will be chaired by John Rowe, professor at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.

An operation that lured consumers with promises that they could earn big money as trained and certified “mystery shoppers” has agreed to pay $850,000 to settle charges of deceptive marketing and contempt, with larger payments suspended due to defendants’ inability to pay. In March 2007, the Federal Trade Commis-sion (FTC) charged eight defendants - the three companies Mystery Shop Link LLC, Ventura, Calif.; Tangent Group LLC, Denton, Texas; Harp Marketing Services Inc., Melbourne, Fla.; and five individuals - with violating the FTC Act in connection with a nationwide mystery shopping employment scam.
According to the FTC, the defendants claimed that mysteryshoplink.com was hiring mystery shoppers in local areas nationwide. The company ran help-wanted ads in newspapers and on radio and TV. Consumers who responded to the ads reached the defendants’ telemarketers, who represented that mysteryshoplink.com had large numbers of available jobs and not enough shoppers to fill them. In exchange for a $99 fee, con-sumers were promised enough work to earn a steady full-time or part-time income as mystery shoppers. In-stead, consumers received a worthless certification and access to postings for mystery shopping jobs con-trolled by other companies. Consumers had to apply for these mostly low-paying jobs and had no advantage over anyone else who found the postings elsewhere on the Internet for free. Most consumers got no jobs and earned no money.
As well as being accused of deceptive marketing, five of the eight defendants were also charged with contempt in connection with the alleged violation of an earlier telemarketing fraud judgment by one of them, Robin Larry Murphy, who was barred in 1997 from making material misrepresentations of fact while tele-marketing. The settlement means the FTC will collect the proceeds of a $100,000 bond that Murphy was required to file as part of the earlier judgment.

All 27 market research interviewers working the night of December 8, 2008, at the Surveytalk call center in Auckland, New Zealand, walked off the job, angry at their Australian bosses’ continued refusal to improve pay rates, health and safety and allow workers to take annual leave as other New Zealand research call center employees do.
The strike is the first of the Calling for Change campaign. The Unite Union represents around 400 research workers who are negotiating with research bosses to win union contracts with improved conditions, rates of pay and healthy workplaces at nine of New Zealand’s major market research companies.
Unite said the outsourced center was “an attempt by Surveytalk to avoid paying the good union-won rates of pay and safe working conditions that must be observed in Australia.”

Wilkerson & Associates, a Louisville, Ky., research company, has changed its name to Thoroughbred Research Group. Thoroughbred Opinion Research, the field service division of Wilkerson & Associates, will also go by the name Thoroughbred Research Group. Corporate headquarters for all Thoroughbred divisions will remain in Louisville, Ky., with regional offices in Chicago and Orem, Utah.

Acquisitions/transactions

WebVisible Inc., an Irvine, Calif., advertising company has acquired Adapt Technologies Inc. (Adapt SEM), a Pasadena, Calif., research company. For current Adapt SEM customers, there will be no interruption in ser-vices. The Adapt SEM Web site will remain active.

Paris research company Ipsos has acquired 60 percent of the Strategic Puls group, a research company in the Balkans.

The Knowland Group, a Salisbury, Md., hospitality marketing and sales company, has purchased Denver research and software company E-Z Reader. The Knowland Group hopes the acquisition will help provide to its clients a comprehensive database of potential new customers to the Denver hotel industry.

New York research company TNS has acquired the remaining 37 percent of the shares in the capital of TNS InterScience, a Sao Paolo, Brazil, custom market research business, to develop networks in faster growing markets and sectors. TNS has held a majority interest in TNS InterScience since 2005.

Alliances/strategic partnerships

Marketing Management Analytics (MMA), a Fairfield, Conn., research company, has joined Chicago researcher Synovate. Formerly part of Synovate’s sister company Aegis Media, during the last two years MMA has collaborated with Synovate on client projects, with MMA providing independent validation for Synovate clients’ marketing activities.

National Research Corporation, Lincoln, Neb., has merged with My InnerView Inc., a Wausau, Wis., research company, focused on senior care.

Nielsen Online, a division of New York researcher The Nielsen Company, has been selected to provide currency online research data for Switzerland through a partnership with the industry committee Net-Metrix. The service will see Nielsen’s NetView panel combined with the Net-Metrix tracking panel, bringing together around 4,000 panelists.

Overland Park, Kan., research company eVergance and Oslo, Norway, research software company Confirmit have partnered to deliver enterprise feedback management solutions.

1105 Media Education Group, an education research publication division of 1105 Media, Irvine Calif., has partnered with Project Tomorrow, an Irvine, Calif., education nonprofit group, to develop education technology products. The main focus will be to expand the reach and scope of the annual Speak Up survey, which collects and reports on the views of more than 1.2 million K-12 students, teachers, administrators and parents, representing 14,000+ schools in 50 states.

Vovici, a Dulles, Va., research software company, and Walker Information, an Indianapolis research company, have partnered to combine Walker Information’s database of employee loyalty information with Vovici’s enterprise feedback management solution. The collaboration is intended to deploy employee loyalty surveys and compare results against the employee loyalty benchmark database.

Association/organization news

ESOMAR has named its 2009-2010 council. Gunilla Broadbent of GB Global Positioning has been elected as the new ESOMAR president, and Sue Nosworthy of TNS will serve as vice president. The 2009-2010 ESOMAR Council will also include John Marinopoulos, representing Australia; Paulo Pinheiro de Andrade, representing Brazil; Laurent Florès, representing France; Dieter Korczak, representing Germany; Jasal Shah, representing India; Daniela Ostidich, representing Italy; Tatiana V. Barakshina, representing Russia; and Mike Cooke, representing the U.K. Frits Spangenberg will remain in an ex-officio capacity as past president for the next two-year term.

Awards/rankings

The Market Research Council, New York, has elected Kevin Clancy, author, business consultant and pro-fessor of marketing at Boston University, and Harold M. Spielman, chairman emeritus and founder of McCollum/Spielman Worldwide, to the Marketing Research Hall of Fame. The annual Hall of Fame Award recognizes outstanding members of the market research profession.

Roseanne Luth of Luth Research, San Diego, has been named most admired CEO in the private sector category by the San Diego Business Journal in conjunction with Vistage International, a San Diego business administration development company.

RFL Communications Inc., a Skokie, Ill., research information company, has selected Madison, N.J.-based Wyeth Pharmaceuticals’ customer and market insights department as the winner of the PMR2 Executive of the Year award. The honor is bestowed each year by RFL’s Pharma Market Research Report. RFL’s Research Conference Report has selected Trixie Cartwright, director of research-on-research at TNS Global, a London research company, as the winner of the Market Research Presentation of the Year award. Additionally, RFL’s Research Business Report has named San Francisco research company MarketTools Inc.’s survey management and analysis software SurveyScore the winner of the High Impact MR Project award. Finally, Research Business Report has selected San Francisco research company Socratic Technologies Inc.’s president Bill MacElroy as the winner of the Market Research Executive of the Year award.

Chicago research company Synovate has won the David Winton award for innovation in methodology from the Market Research Society, London. Sponsored by TNS, the award was presented to Synovate for its paper, “A new measure of brand attitudinal equity based on the Zipf Distribution.”

Vision Critical Inc., a Vancouver, B.C., research company, has been ranked 54th on Deloitte’s 2008 Technology Fast 500, a ranking of the 500 fastest-growing technology companies in North America. Rankings are based on percentage of fiscal year revenue growth over five years, from 2003-2007. Vision Critical grew 5,291 percent during this period.

Research magazine of London held the Research Awards 2008 in December 2008, and Nunwood, a Leeds, U.K., research company was named best agency. The Best New Agency award went to Truth, a London research company. The Central Office of Information, London, was named Best Place to Work, while Conquest Research, London, won the Research Breakthrough award for its Metaphorix online research tool.

New accounts/projects

MDLinx Inc., a Washington, D.C., research company has adopted East Islip, N.Y., research company Mktg Inc.’s Crop Duster de-duplication technology as its flagship de-duplication software.

The National Geographic Channel (NGC), Washington, D.C., has become the first network to adopt New York researcher The Nielsen Company’s DigitalPlus service, part of Nielsen’s set-top box analytics business. Under the agreement with Nielsen, NGC will gain access to granular data from 330,000+ set-top boxes within Charter Communications’ Los Angeles cable system. This set-top box information is designed to complement traditional people-meter ratings data from Nielsen’s samples and to allow National Geo-graphic Channel to develop new analyses in commercial and commercial pod ratings; in commercial creative retention; and in standard versus high-definition measurement.
Separately, The Nielsen Company has launched its Bases new product sales forecasting business in the Middle East. The service will be offered out of the firm’s existing office in Sharjah, the United Arab Emirates.

Microsoft Corp., Redmond, Wash., and Redlands, Calif., geographic mapping software company ESRI have undertaken a Homeland Security project to help protect citizens, prevent and solve crimes and enable counter-terrorism through software. The collaboration is designed to combine capabilities from both organizations in geospatial and collaborative technologies and to result in intelligence for state and local data fusion centers and emergency operations centers. FusionX Appliance, a baseline IT architecture for fusion centers, is expected to serve as a foundational project to provide users geospatial intelligence capabilities by combining ESRI’s ArcGIS Server Advanced Enterprise with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
Separately, The Registrar of Voters (ROV) of Alameda County, Calif., has adopted ESRI’s geographic information system (GIS) software to simplify precinct analysis and polling station siting processes. The ROV used ESRI’s GIS during the November 2008 elections.
Finally, two Brazilian electric distribution companies, AES Sul and AES Eletropaulo, signed an enterprise license agreement (ELA) with ESRI’s Brazilian distributor Imagem Geosistemas E Comércio Ltda. The ELA will provide deployments of current ESRI GIS software for the desktop and server as well as support, training and maintenance.

Ipsos Mori Scotland, a division of Paris research company Ipsos, has been awarded the contract to carry out the fourth-annual “Well? What do you think?” survey. The survey, run by the Scottish government, examines public attitudes to mental health-related issues. Around 1,200 people across Scotland will be surveyed in a series of door-to-door interviews.

Nielsen Online, a division of New York researcher The Nielsen Company, has switched to using online population estimates produced by the Joint Industry Committee for Internet Measurement Systems (Ji-cims) in place of its own global Internet trends survey. Nielsen will replace its own GNETT survey to provide audience numbers that are consistent with the U.K. online estimates provided by Jicims.
Additionally, Hallmark Channel, Studio City, Calif., has adopted The NielsenConnections Brand Target Audience products, which are designed to document the impact of Hallmark Channel’s programming against advertiser’s marketing targets and to help media buyers and planners better target their client’s spending. Hallmark Channel is also the first Nielsen client to include magazines and retail in its cross-platform mea-surement.

BBM Canada has commercialized and gone 100 percent electronic in Montreal with New York research company Arbitron Inc.’s portable people meter (PPM) radio ratings service. The Montreal market launch is the first phase of BBM Canada’s rollout plan, which will launch combined PPM radio and television panels in Toronto; Vancouver, B.C.; Calgary, A.B.; and Edmonton, A.B., in Fall 2009.
Separately, Arbitron has made plans to expand the introduction of cell-phone-only sampling to 151 diary markets in Spring 2009 and to all markets (except Puerto Rico) by Fall 2009. The new implementation sche-dule accelerates the company’s previously announced plan to introduce cell-phone-only sampling to 50 diary markets in Spring 2009 and to a total of 125 diary markets in Fall 2009. Arbitron plans to use an ad-dress-based sample frame as the foundation of its cell-phone-only sample, while maintaining the ran-dom-digit-dial sample frame for landline households.

New York research company TNS has been awarded a contract from the European Commission and the European Parliament to cover all the qualitative studies for the organizations, known as Eurobarometer stu-dies. The Eurobarometer qualitative studies will be managed within TNS’ political and social sector by TNS Opinion and will involve group discussions and in-depth interviews with the general public and specific target groups in 34 countries and territories, including all 27 European Union member states.

Diversity Media Services Ltd., Toronto, and Ipsos Reid, the Vancouver, B.C., division of Paris research company Ipsos, joined efforts to launch Canada’s first national multicultural research study to explore the buying behaviors and cultural intricacies of Canada’s 13 largest ethno-cultural groups in six census metropolitan areas, where nearly half the population of Canada resides.

Circle Research, London, has chosen Globalpark UK Ltd., a Cologne, Germany, research company, as its online-feedback software provider. Globalpark’s enterprise feedback suite will become Circle Research’s technological basis for its online research service business.

Minneapolis-based General Mills has adopted San Francisco research company MarketTools’ Tru-eSample as its technology solution for ensuring the validity of online survey respondents.
Additionally, Research Now, London, has joined the TrueSample Partner Program, a global network of sample providers that have their panels validated by MarketTools TrueSample technology.

MTV Networks, a division of New York media conglomerate Viacom, has selected Quantcast, a San Francisco research company, for its online solutions to quantify MTV audiences.

The Economic and Social Research Council, Swindon, U.K., has made available £1.1m to establish ESRC Survey Resources Network, a service intended to uphold five main objectives: fostering and promoting the development of new methods within survey methodology; providing high-quality online resources that can be used for training and research within the area of survey research; contributing to building capacity in high-quality survey practice; coordinating all of the above activities at a national and international level; and scoping out potential efficiencies in the processes of data collection (by questionnaires and other means), sample maintenance, data coding, cleaning and documentation. 

New companies/new divisions/relocations/expansions

CGC Consulting Services, a Cumming, Ga., research company, has expanded its market research division by adding two focus group rooms at its headquarters.

New York research firm Data Development Worldwide has opened new offices in Chicago and Indian-apolis. Matt Valle will serve as vice president, office director in Chicago, and Valory Myers will serve as vice president, office director in Indianapolis.

The Research Partnership, London, has opened a new regional headquarters in Toronto. Katrina Johnson, associate director, runs the office, which has been established to provide clients in North America support for Therapy KnowlEdge, the company’s online medical charting service, support to clients in North America.

Livonia, Mich., research firm Market Strategies International has opened an office in London, located at 15 Old Bailey.

Vision Critical Inc., a Vancouver, B.C., research firm, has opened a Chicago office with Matt Kleinschmit and LeAnn Helmrich heading up the operation, both as senior vice presidents. Vision Critical has also launched a new branch in Sydney, Australia.

Research company earnings/financial news

Confirmit, Oslo, Norway, has reported revenue up 51 percent in the first nine months of 2008, but financial details were not published as the survey software maker was taken into private hands. Alexander Vik, a Norwegian investor and member of the company’s board, acquired the 62 percent of Confirmit not already held by his investment firm Sebastian Holdings for $42.6 million. The deal was completed at the end of September 2008, and Vik is now chairman of the company.