The future of insights: A conversation with industry trailblazers at Comcast, New York Mets and Sesame Workshop
Editor's note: This article is an automated speech-to-text transcription, edited lightly for clarity. To view the full session recording click here.
Cindy Bean of Comcast, Aaron Bisman of Sesame Workshop, Craig Swaisgood of the New York Mets and Elizabeth Roberts and Justin Pincus of The Harris Poll discuss the impact insights teams have on their organizations at the Quirk’s Event – Virtual Global.
Session transcript
Joseph Rydholm
Hi everybody and welcome to our session, “The future of insights: A conversation with industry trailblazers at Comcast, New York Mets and Sesame Workshop.” I'm Quirk’s Editor Joe Rydholm. Thanks so much for joining us. Just a quick housekeeping reminder that you can use the chat tab if you'd like to interact with other attendees during the presentation. Our session today is presented by The Harris Poll. Elizabeth, take it away.
Elizabeth Roberts
Thank you, Joe. Let's do a round of introductions. Panelists, please tell us about your role and what you're responsible for. Aaron, why don't you go first?
Aaron Bisman
Sure. Hi, I’m Aaron Bisman. I'm the senior vice president of marketing at Sesame Workshop, which is the nonprofit that makes Sesame Street and so much more. My responsibilities include brand marketing, brand creative, audience development and our digital products group.
Elizabeth Roberts
Cindy, why don't you go next?
Cindy Bean
Sure. Hi, I'm Cindy Bean. I head up insights for Comcast, specifically for the suite of Xfinity products and some long-range planning as well. I've been here for, gosh, almost 10 years, which I can't believe I'm almost knocking on double digits door and it’s kind of like dog years, especially here at Comcast, which is constantly going through change. We joke the C stands for change.
I am responsible for insights for our growth organization, which includes product, marketing, sales, as well as pricing and packaging, as well as customer experience. So, anything channel related, whether that’s our retail and human channels, or assisted, which is all .com and app, and just ensuring journeys are smooth and just understanding what's causing our customers or even prospects friction. So never a dull moment, but I'm thrilled to be here. Thank you.
Elizabeth Roberts
Thanks, Cindy.
Craig Swaisgood
Hi, I’m Craig Swaisgood, I'm at the New York Mets. I've been in baseball for six years, the most recent three at the Mets, specifically. I've been in the private sector, the public sector, been around the world. My charge is data science, data analysis, consumer insights and so we've got a lot of information on our fans and what they do and when they do it. So by bringing in consumer insights, we start to understand the why they do it and how we can give them more of what they're looking for and less of what they're not looking for. Outside of obviously like, just win more. So, we're trying to figure out how we can make the experience as good as possible and make them happy, Mets fans, even when times aren't as great as other times.
Elizabeth Roberts
Thanks Craig . Justin?
Justin Pincus
I'm Justin Pincus and I lead QuestBrand, which is The Harris Polls AI-powered SaaS platform for real time brand intelligence across the globe. And I'll kick it over to you, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Roberts
Hi everyone, I'm Elizabeth Roberts, excited to be here. I lead QuestIC, focused on insights communities and we've got a great group of panelists. Our first question is about strategic influence and we'd love to learn about your hero stories.
How are your teams guiding the organization with insight? Cindy, tell us about insight at Comcast and how your team is guiding.
Cindy Bean
Great, thank you. So, I'm hoping I'm probably in a, I don't want to say good company with this group, but probably comfortable company in that, if anyone's looking at the stock price for Comcast lately, you'll be wondering, does consumer insights exist at Comcast? Because we're kind of hitting a bit of a, I don't know, I would say a bit of a lull, as you can imagine.
I think that goes with the life cycle of many of these big organizations depending on leadership. And again, I've been here long enough to see what great looks like when leaders are really leaning in to understanding an outside in perspective, when they're looking to incorporate the consumer perspective or even trying to solve for pain points in an upfront strategic way, and then how that follows through for operations.
I've also been here long enough, which is probably even the last five years, where leadership changes have been more of a, let's focus on today and kind of learn from yesterday kind of point of view. That has led to many, I would say, more internal-focused decisions of pricing and packaging or even, I would say, quick Band-Aids to help get even stakeholders aligned, as well as the street focused on how do we just end the quarter.
As you can imagine, given the competitive environment we're in, especially for internet as well as streaming, it feels like, because we’ve been internal focused, we lost a bit of what’s happening outside and of course the category has gone on without us. So here we are, we have a new COO who was just recently announced as our new CEO and he’s really been taking a dramatic, I would say 180 from his COO hat into: How do we bring more of the outside in? And he's been asking those provocative questions of, what's going on with our customer experience, how did we get to, I would say, less of a trustworthy brand and why are we having so many issues with pricing and packaging?
So if anything, with those questions, as you can imagine, my team has pretty much had a spotlight on it and it's kind of a great time to be in insights or analytics at Comcast because they are asking all the right questions and my gosh, we've been tracking this forever. The good thing is we've got tons of answers. So, with this new, I would say, leadership, it’s also been bringing in a lot of fresh perspectives and fresh leaders, which has changed the dynamic of our leadership team and also the questions that we’ve been asked.
So, it's been fun to package up learnings in a way that's really a tight story to our executives and here's what's been happening, but also they're looking at us to provide a point of view and we're set, in I guess how we're structured, to bring this kind of unbiased point of view. It's not anchored in a brand team or another business that is kind of packaging a perspective of their own. It's more, here's the voice of the customer and here's what's happening.
A specific example of this is we've recently launched price lock, which is like a five-year or a one-year price guarantee. So, I think people have been telling this for a long time. Finally, leaders are like, let's do it. And so far we've also started seeing retention start to solidify a little bit more and our brand trust starting to build slowly, as you can tell, it's kind of like a lag metric, but I call it like a drip on a rock. My team has been coming to the table with, here's the words that work, here's how we need to clean up our website, here's how our sales folks maybe need a little bit more training in saying these things. The momentum is just building and it's just building trust in our team and they're just looking for more of it. So, I don't know, I'm excited for the next couple of months and hopefully the trajectory of the next couple of years here.
Elizabeth Roberts
Thanks Cindy. Exciting time to be in insights. I love how you're packaging up and guiding the organization with your point of view.
Craig, would love to hear from you, how you're guiding the organization, the Mets.
Craig Swaisgood
Yeah, so Cindy just stole all of my talking points. I mean, it's a lot of the same stuff that she mentioned.
Cindy Bean
That's what we do as Phillies fans over here, Craig.
Craig Swaisgood
Touché. We've also had some organizational shifts at the leadership level since Steve Cohen bought the team a few years ago. And one of the things that we do, similar to Cindy, is we just keep showing up. When people say, what can we do to get more fans in here? What can we do to have the current fans come more frequently to the stadium? We have to go and find those answers. My team is very good at coming up with a statistical model, but again, kind of, I mentioned in the intro, we have to understand why. Why is somebody going to a Phillies game, or something.
And so, whether it's concessions, whether it's our staffing, whether it's the ticket purchase flow, we want to understand what people’s points are. Queens isn't exactly downtown Manhattan, so with that we look at transportation. There's a lot of different people with a lot of different skillsets that work on the business side of the baseball team. Some of them are very statistically oriented, but most of them aren't, right? Some of them just want to make sure that the people that come into Citi Field are having a good time, getting their concessions in a timely manner, they’re getting the right things at the retail store.
Similar to what Cindy said, we have to show up to all of these meetings prepared. We have to understand why, we have to then say, we can answer seven of your questions, we can't answer the other 30, let me go and figure that out. And so, one of the things that we did with The Harris Poll is that we created this megaphone for a small group of super fans. We didn't intend for it to be super fans, but people who are willing to give us their opinion five or six times a week or a month tend to be biased towards super fans. And so, it's just an opportunity for us to have an ongoing conversation and supplement that with, like I said, the behavioral data that we have in our data warehouse and we supplement that with Qualtrics surveys or just general surveys that go out to a full fan base to get that full understanding.
But it's been a huge unlock. And one of the reasons we know it's been an unlock is one, departments, we no longer have to be overly proactive to them, they're being proactive in coming to us and they're saying, hey, that was really good, but I have more questions. And so just knowing that they want us at the table as opposed to being scared that we're going to come to the table and blow up their spot is kind of an indication that what we're doing is helping them move the business forward.
Concessions is a perfect example where the more your stadium is full, the longer the lines can get. And so, it's easy to say, and I've been guilty of this, to say just open up more concession stands. Well, we have a physical footprint and opening up an additional concession stand might not be the easiest thing. So, what can we do that would allow people to still enjoy their beer or their hot dog, their Shake Shack burger? And our fans told us that's one of the reasons that they don't always love coming to the stadium. And so, there are a lot of very small things we can do to get those lines moving faster. And we've been very proud that Major League Baseball does a ranking based on fan surveys of how well you're doing in your fans' eyes and concessions is something that you actually increase from bottom of the league to the top of the past year. And part of that was because we realized exactly where their pain points were. That’s one use case, but we can talk about concessions, we can talk about the ticket purchase mode, we can talk about how they're engaging with us online. And the reason we can talk about that is because our consumer insights group has done research on every single one of those components.
Elizabeth Roberts
Love it. Thank you, Craig. Exciting to hear your stakeholders lean in and want to ask more and have you all dig in to understand the why’s to help really accentuate and build that fandom experience.
Aaron, over to you, we'd love to hear how you are helping guide the organization forward.
Aaron Bisman
Sure. So, Sesame Workshop was founded as a children’s television workshop in 1969 and research and insights were baked into our model from day one. So, how did we even come up with the idea of Sesame Street? It was researchers and academics at a table with television producers and creatives. And that's continued in the model of our show for 56 years.
That said, the ways we market and promote, think about bringing people to the show, promoting the various expressions we have off show and we are a nonprofit, so we also have to raise money from partners, funders and individuals. Insights has not always fueled in the same way all of those activities. And so, we've been doing a lot of work over the past years to ensure that audience wants and needs, the audience perspective, leads all of our marketing efforts. It's really been a transformation into an audience-first operation on the marketing side.
So, research and insights is a peer team to marketing. I would say we are definitely power users. We like to ask the questions, we want to know as much as possible without losing any of the magic and creativity of Muppets and the joy of all of our furry friends, but we want to bring that into conversation with as much data and information as possible. I'm a really big believer that I don't want the tree falling in the woods with no one hearing it. There's no value there. So we're power users of insights and we really want to be communicators internally around our teams to make sure that this information gets shared.
So, a concrete example, as we think about how we just launched last week, season 56 on both Netflix and PBS kids, really excited about this launch. We've also built some ancillary experiences on Roblox. Really thinking about a multi-platform experience. How do we reach preschool children and their parents today? One of our answers is in the content. We are aware through our research and insights of the kinds of topics that parents struggle with today. Some they always have, literacy and numeracy, getting kids ready for school, others, really around kindness and social emotional learning as well as digital well-being, helping kids and families learn how to be in our digital world today.
All that said, one of our insights is actually that what parents need most and first and foremost is a show they feel comfortable with their child watching alone. So, what do we do with an insight like that that says it's not about the content or it's not about the content first. We know both things can be true, but when I think about how do I get a parent to our show first and foremost, I need to be aware of that kind of concrete insight. What drives that immediate quick decision-making.
So that's one small example, but we are a team that leads from curiosity and it's something we really encourage and support and our curiosity constantly leads us to audience insights and really helping to inform this work. And we want to make sure it's constantly iterative, right? We are believers in the idea that what worked yesterday is not guaranteed to work tomorrow, we shouldn't even assume it will work tomorrow. And so, it's insights that really drive our constant innovation as we want to make sure that we're serving today's children and families.
Justin Pincus
Thank you, Aaron . We would be remiss to not address the hot button topic that is now addressed at most conferences, which is artificial intelligence. And this is a perception-meets-reality sort of a question. You're at these conferences and COOs, C-suite, the board, the street, they're all really interested in how, in the business world, we're integrating artificial intelligence into our daily lives. However, this technology is still incredibly nascent. So, I don't want to take the fully positive spin to this question. So, I'm going to start it with an agree or disagree statement.
That agree or disagree statement is this, AI still hasn't fundamentally changed the way we work in insights, at least not in the way many expected back in 2024. If we believed LinkedIn, AI already runs every insights team. What's the truth inside your organization? What's real and what's rhetoric?
I think a lot of folks in the audience are going to be incredibly curious to hear your feedback on this, especially when they scroll their LinkedIn feeds every day, and there might be misnomers about how this new technology is being integrated and if we're all the way there yet. So, I'm going to pass this over to Craig first, followed by Aaron and then Cindy to tackle this big question, but with just a little bit of a different twist.
Craig Swaisgood
Yeah, I mean the simple answer is I agree, it has not fundamentally changed it. I think you're right, everybody talks about it. I was working in emerging tech when Sam Altman changed the world and promised everybody that everything was going to be available within the problems. There are problems, there's problems in application implementation. It has certainly enabled certain components in my estimation of consumer insights. I think it's a good brainstorming partner. I think it can summarize open text. There's certain value in that. I don't know when the Word Cloud was created, but it's kind of like a Word Cloud on steroids.
So, there is value in there, but the idea that it's fundamentally changed it or that people like us are no longer necessary or won't be necessary in the near-term future. It's just not new. And I've mentioned previous studies like MIT said that 95% of AI pilots don't work. HBR is talking about this. So, a lot of executives are afraid that they're going to be missing out, they got that little FOMO. Oh, we're the only company, not wholly realized when it comes to AI. They're not the only company. Most companies have not fully realized AI because AI has not fully realized.
And so, it's a long-winded way of saying it's a supplement. People who can use it well can probably be better at their jobs. They do have that kind of brainstorming partner. They do have the ability to edit some of their work or come up with summaries a little bit quicker and they prepare some type of analysis for a department a little bit faster. But has it fundamentally changed the game? Has it even changed it in what we would all agree to as a meaningful way? No, not close. Doesn't mean that it's not going to get there in 18 to 24 months. I don't have my crystal ball handy, but I certainly don't think that LinkedIn and the feeds that we see are being fully transparent and honest about what is the current state.
Justin Pincus
Yeah, there is a little gap between perception and reality. We all know how incredible the technology is going to be in the future, but I especially think as we move from Aaron and then to Cindy, talking about iterating and experimenting with this technology and not necessarily seeing it as something that's accelerating the ability for our teams, at least in the insights world, to move forward.
And then for each of you too, I'd be in just to understand the pressure coming down from the top in terms of how you need to start adopting and integrating this technology. But we'll kick it over to the Aaron at Sesame Workshop to tackle this one.
Aaron Bisman
Yeah, well first I just echo everything Craig said. It's not a meaningful part of our insights work. I think we are using it in some ways really around aggregating, summarizing and organizing data. And I think we have, with five generations of fans and a variety of data streams, some that are product and conversion related and some that are behavioral around our educational efficacy, we feel the need to unite and merge multiple data sets in ways that we haven't before.
So, we're curious I think how AI might help us with that. I don't think we have the answers yet. In terms of pressure from above, I would say there is pressure to experiment, not pressure to do something necessarily, but yeah, a fear of being left behind. Frankly, that's a pressure I appreciate. So, for us, that is not just about insights, that is thinking in every stream.
And again, we are a nonprofit. The only street we think about is our own in that framing. And we think about our ethical responsibilities as a very particular type of brand and what we represent for so much of the U.S. as well as around the world. The moves we make in this space will be seen and judged and we want to move really carefully. So, we want to find efficiencies that make sense. We want to learn faster, grow where we can through these tools. And it's really early days, we're really just at that initial experimentation. We're building out frameworks for ourselves. So, it's new. It's not doing nearly as much as some have promised, but we also, it's not like therefore it won't be meaningful, right? We're aware it could still be coming and we want to be prepared.
Justin Pincus
And I think back in 2024, maybe some of us were expecting that growth curve to be more exponential and what we could do with the sheer amount we’ve accelerated. But yeah, totally agree with that. And a really interesting comment too is someone, given everyone here is in the insights world, they're interested in insights doing some debunking of AI hype. So that might be a little bit funny.
But, Cindy, over to you, Comcast, absolutely massive organization. Obviously AI is super important part of your remit, especially down from seniors leadership to yourself. How do you feel about that? Agree, disagree statement?
Cindy Bean
Yeah, I think, I agree with Craig and Aaron, everything you said, we're feeling it probably at the same level. My team is inside of the enterprise business intelligence team, which has modeling and there's a whole team just focused on AI, which is really building out models that help us predict next-best action for a lot of our customers or even prospects if they call or even go on a website.
So, there's a lot of really, really interesting future state ideas but we're just not there yet with even some of the inputs and even some of the stability of the input. So, I think the vision's there, which is great and we need to keep working towards that vision, but from specifically a day-to-day insight standpoint, from my end, we have, I would say at any given point, I've actually dedicated a few folks on my team to vet some of these AI tools alongside some of the more human aspects of research. So, we've got some message testing that we're doing with humans and target audiences, but then trying to replicate that on the AI side, some of these tools just to see, is it actually looking as if you couldn't tell who did the output? And so far there's been a lot of head scratcher moments of like, let's dig into what happened here that took this AI on a completely different path.
So, you probably heard there's these synthetic twins and we just refreshed our consumer segmentation attitudinally. So, our technology team is anxious to build their own, we call it digital twins, which again, the idea is fantastic to be able to see some messaging or even product ideas that we'd be able to go online and get some feedback on what's working and what's not. But the reality is, the upkeep to that and the constantly having defeated with not only our own up-to-date research, but everything else that's impacting our consumers, customers from even a non-category standpoint that changing perceptions is just something we're just not there yet.
So, I think the idea's there, and I think it's safe to say especially to our teams that you're not getting replaced by bots, yet. But I think there are definitely ways that we've incorporated some quick synthesis or even, we were involved in a workshop last week that had some more farther out ideas and we used some AI to just quickly assess. OK, do we have evidence for just macro trends that could help shape the starting point of these ideas? So, I think that's working great, but so far not the promise of the LinkedIn mothership, if you will.
Justin Pincus
I think that's a helpful perception versus reality check, especially when it sits with insights teams that vet these things so well and push data all the way to the highest levels of an organization. So, to understand that you're not fully adopting these tools, taking them at face value, testing, iterating, making sure that this is going to work for your teams, that's the point that we seem to be at, at least within these major enterprise marketing departments that you're all within.
And so, the next question, we'll try to go lightning round. We have four questions. We're on question three, five minutes left, so maybe lightning round. It's going to start with Erin, then go to Cindy and Craig. Just the future of tracking, the world of technology that we live in today kind of allows us to gather and ascertain data and information a lot faster.
So, as you're bringing in this data in real time or weekly or monthly, how are you quantifying for your organizations, which are all quite different from one another, the metrics that really matter? For the New York Mets, it might be engagement, fandom, et cetera. Some of these examples could be loyalty, reputation, emotional pull. As you look into the future, what's the next frontier in measuring these things? How do you determine the right KPIs to focus on for your organization? Is that similar kind of an ever-evolving workflow? Let's start with Aaron in terms of how are you at Sesame Workshop quantifying what really matters for your organization?
Aaron Bisman
Sure. Well, first I'll say it is definitely always evolving with five generations of fans, but actually a very narrow target for our core content of two- to five-year-olds, right? Brand equity is important, but it is not the only metric we have to look at. So, we think about the engagement metrics. We can see particularly through online platforms, we think about formative research that goes into the content and the testing around engagement and educational efficacy. And we think the future is going to be some kind of custom metric because we need to really be able to mix a variety between equity and engagement.
Again, coming from how people talk. Anyone we ask says they know Sesame Street, we have 99% brand awareness in the U.S., makes us feel really, really great. It's a very different question when you ask, when's the last time you watched the show or purchased a product or engaged with us? So, relevance is really, really important, but then getting from relevance to engagement is also different. So, I would say we have a lot of pieces of that puzzle and the future is tying 'em together.
Cindy Bean
That's great. I think relevance is kind of a theme just in general when it comes to, I would say, tracking, we are constantly keeping a pulse on what's most important in delivering services and experiences to our customers. And we know that there are three key, I would say, umbrella drivers that we need to really focus on and one's reliability. And ironically, reliability means a lot of things. It's our connectivity services, but then it's also being dependable, following through on your word, saying and delivering what you say you're going to deliver, which then flows into price value. Is my price rising all the time? Are there hidden fees? Is there confusion in my bill, which is a big one for us. And then as you can imagine, that also ladders into trust. Are you a brand I trust and ultimately one that I want to be a part of?
So, it's like underneath each of those are, I would say, a lot of ways you could pull it back and track. We have of course our RNPS and our NPS system, which we're actively kind of unpacking to understand is that the right system to continue with or do we simplify it? And then there's brand health, which there's a correlation there. But ultimately, as we're making sure that we're getting feedback from all of our customers to make sure that that's a representative customer base, it's thinking about those big rocks, but then also are we meeting customers where they are in the channels that they are. So, it's constant evolution, but always trying to focus on the big important things.
Justin Pincus
And we will kick it to Craig. A fascinating question could have been, how do you determine the metrics that don't matter? But Craig, really quickly over to you before we pop off here.
Craig Swaisgood
Yeah, so the Mets are interesting. Similar to what Aaron said, we don't have an awareness problem. People kind of know there's only 30 MLB teams. And so, awareness isn't really our issue. One of our issues though, in terms of brand, is that we let our fans down, we break their heart a lot. And so, some of our harshest critics are our 20-year season ticket members, and so they love us, but they also get really frustrated and angry at us.
So, what we do in terms of measuring our brand is we treat it like a balance scorecard. We have all of the survey and market research and we look at that, and that's about 40% of our brand tracker and then the remaining from foot traffic on sites or at Citi Field and a lot of other indicators. So, we kind of roll up about 12 different metrics into a brand health tracker to understand how people are thinking about us, whether they're into us, whether they want to come to a game this year. Because if we just ask our harshest critics, I mean as Phillies fans, you guys know sometimes your fans don't always treat your team as well as maybe you should, given your love for them. Same thing is true of a lot of teams, right? Sometimes they hate on us, but it's like a sibling rivalry. They can talk bad about us, but no Phillies fan can talk bad about us. And so, brand is little tough, which is why we use that balance scorecard method.
Elizabeth Roberts
Thanks everyone. It was wonderful having your perspective on what's the truth, what's the future of insights. Great to have you here and thanks everyone for showing up and listening.