MFour has added two new team members in its Engineering and Operations departments, as it continues to ramp up staffing to meet growing demand for its mobile research solutions, without sacrificing the quality and consistent service its clients deserve.

Gennadiy Kofman, Senior Software Engineer, brings more than ten years’ experience as a developer to responsibilities that include building new features and enhancing content management systems. He has a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from California State University, Northridge.

Alice Lu will focus on Survey Programming and Data delivery, helping clients achieve successful research projects. She got her first consumer survey experience in research projects at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, where she graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology.

Welcome aboard, Gennadiy and Alice!

In any profession or trade, it’s easy to get lost in the weeds of day-to-day demands and lose track of the basic facts and objectives that are your foundations for success. With that in mind, here’s what insights professionals and marketers need to remember about consumer panels. The overarching insight here is that panel fraud and cutting corners to fill quotas will turn survey data into a corrosive force instead of an illuminating one when it comes to business decision-making. Let’s start with…

Fundamentals of the Supplier/Client Relationship

• Panel providers are in business to make money.

• They earn their money by delivering the requisite number of completes from the requisite demographics.

• Fighting fraud, delivering quality data, meeting deadlines and keeping clients fully informed is hard, exacting and costly work for the panel provider. There's always an incentive to cut corners.

• Clients need to demand quality; they won’t get it if they're willing to sacrifice quality to achieve initial cost savings. 

• Sacrificing quality to save research costs is penny wise and pound foolish. What good is cheap data when it's going to mislead decision-makers? They need the highest-quality research inputs to inform the smartest business moves.

• There’s a categorical difference in the quality, methodology and value propositions between  in-app mobile survey technology that allows smartphone users to respond offline, and last-generation online research (which includes “mobile optimized” online surveys). Online research is easy prey to  repeat, multi-panel respondents and survey bots that play havoc with data quality; in-app mobile is immune to repeats and lives in a bot-free space. 

It's easy to learn more about these important differences and better understand your full range of options for achieving data quality and research efficiency. Just take a few minutes to have a productive conversation about in-app mobile research by getting in touch at solutions@mfour.com.

Related:

Mobile 101: Fight Panel Fraud with In-App Mobile (Part Two)

Continuing its ongoing growth surge, mobile market research leader MFour has completed its second major office expansion in less than two years. It now has taken over the entire 7th floor of the South tower of the Newport Gateway complex near John Wayne International Airport, increasing its floor space from 14,000 to 22,000 square feet.

The home office accommodates a team that has grown from 36 employees to 86 over the past year. Another expansion is coming very soon: in September, MFour will open its first satellite branch, an office in Scottsdale, Arizona, where 25 additional employees will focus on software development.

Signifying MFour’s innovative thinking, fighting spirit, commitment to excellence, and sense of humor, visitors to its new wing will quickly spot murals of Albert Einstein (depicted delivering a tongue-not-in-cheek lecture on consumer research), Thomas Edison and Muhammad Ali, along with soccer great Diego Maradona and a thoroughbred race horse and rider in full stride.

The murals and big projection screens in the new wing complement a striking electronic landmark that greets visitors as they arrive on MFour’s floor – a large, real-time motion map of the United States that shows blinking dots and flashing vectors of colored light shooting rapidly across the country in all directions. The vectors are activated by each actual survey going out, and each response coming in. The dots blink whenever one of the more than 1.3 million active panelists who use the definitive Surveys on the Go® research app crosses a geofence MFour has created to enable clients to conduct unique in-location and after-visit shopper surveys anywhere in the United States.

“If you’re in consumer insights, marketing or advertising, we’d love to have you come by and see what we’re doing,” MFour CEO Chris St. Hilaire said. “Otherwise, we’ll see you on the conference circuit or pay you a visit. Whatever it takes so you’ll understand that in-app mobile research isn’t just better than what you have now, but uniquely and categorically different.”

At this stage in its development, MFour is a mature startup that’s poised to fulfill the aim it has been driving toward since its founding in 2011: leading the consumer insights industry into a new era by harnessing the unprecedented data-generating power, accuracy and reach of smartphones, the dominant information and communications technology of the 21st century.

The company’s growing client base includes 88 new accounts established in 2016 alone – with more than 20 Fortune 500 companies among the new arrivals. A recent $5 million investment by Kayne NewRoad Ventures Fund has helped underwrite the growth in staffing and facilities, along with ongoing innovation and advancement of mobile survey technology and fielding processes. MFour is committed to achieving its rapid growth without compromising the data quality it delivers and the hands-on, every-step-of-the-way consultation and communication its clients deserve.

Behind this rapid growth is the insights industry’s increasing awareness that the in-app survey technology and all-mobile research panel MFour pioneers are not just the gold standard for quality data that’s demographically representative and fraud-free, but the only way for the industry to evolve and prosper in the Smartphone Era. Consumer research is nearing the inflection point at which in-app mobile data and insights will completely supersede last-generation online research methods designed for desktop computers. “Mobile optimized” half-measures that marry smartphones to outdated online survey platforms simply perpetuate the unsustainable status quo.

Rapid and sweeping change is hardly unprecedented in the consumer insights industry. The shift to in-app mobile echoes the evolution of a generation ago, when irreversible changes in technology and consumers’ habits made telephone surveys economically prohibitive, ushering in the era of online research. Now comes the next great step forward.

For a productive conversation about where market research is heading and what it means for your specific needs, just get in touch at solutions@mfour.com.

Click here for a video greeting from MFour. And take it from a genius....

Forrest Gump’s mom taught him that “life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’ll get.”

Email is showing its own capacity for surprises – unpleasant ones that make headlines. Bear with us, and we’ll tell you in a moment why it’s no surprise that email is bad for recruiting panelists to take consumer surveys. First, some examples of emails gone wrong in the world of politics and government.

You’ve heard how email troubles disrupted the 2016 Democratic presidential campaign, and how the shoe landed on the other foot with the release of email exchanges involving Donald Trump, Jr. And so the beat goes on, with CNN now reporting on the email mishaps of others in the White House and on Wall Street who’ve fallen victim to imposters who posed as powerful figures in the recipients' organizations.

“A self-described ‘email prankster’ in the UK fooled a number of White House officials into thinking he was other officials,” CNN’s article begins, “including an episode where he convinced the White House official tasked with cyber security that he was Jared Kushner and received that official's private email address unsolicited.”

The point here isn’t to dwell on the embarrassment (or worse) that emails have caused for some prominent people. It’s to illustrate why email is falling increasingly out of favor. Please understand that we’re not saying email isn’t a fine thing for many kinds of personal or business interactions. It’s an effective and efficient way of communicating when both parties are willing, above-board, and have a good reason for sending and replying.

But email no longer has a place as the linchpin of the consumer survey process – as it has been for the past generation dominated by online surveys that rely on panel recruitment via email. It's far too inefficient. 

With online surveys, respondents are expected to connect by clicking on a link embedded in an email. Before they can start answering questions, they must go through a gamut that only a small percentage will complete:

• Check their email

• Click to open the survey notification

• Click a link that takes them to the website where the survey is housed

• Begin answering the questions 

Multi-step processes are so last-decade. It’s no wonder, then, that here in 2017 online surveys are having a tough time generating enough completes from the right consumers.

Cutting email completely from the equation is one of the defining innovations of in-app mobile research. In the case of Surveys on the Go® from MFour, targeted respondents who’ve downloaded the app aren’t pestered with emails; they receive eagerly awaited push notifications sent through the app itself. Answering the push by tapping their app icon brings them instantly into the survey. From notification to completion, the process engages panelists because it's tailored to their expectation that whatever they do on their phones should be wait-free, smooth-flowing and fun -- not to mention an interesting and rewarding way to express their thoughts, actions and feelings concerning products, services, shopping experiences and advertising.

The proof of the in-app mobile panel-recruitment process is in the pudding – and MFour clients can expect response rates of 50% for most projects, with all required completes often obtained in a day or two. For a productive conversation about how in-app mobile aligns with your specific needs, just get in touch at solutions@mfour.com.

Here's your Friday roundup of 3 items from the MFour blog to keep you up to speed on mobile.

Don't Let Bot Fraud Win - Read This.

What You Should Learn From Retail's Disruption

Train Your Ads To Go Viral on Facebook

And here's a Friday music video of hungry bots on the march.

What’s in store for stores? Different major retail chains are coming up with markedly different answers as they try to plan and strategize in the face of a landscape that’s been forever changed by e-commerce. Some of their shoppers now click to buy instead of coming to the store, and those who do shop in-store are arriving with smartphones in hand, giving them an unprecedented edge in product and price comparisons.

A report on the Top 100 retailers of 2016 from Stores, the magazine of the National Retail Federation, gives a solid overview of how operators of bricks-and-mortar stores are trying to find their bearings in the Smartphone Era. The insights industry itself is no stranger to changes wrought by the fact that phones are the combination tool and toy that U.S. consumers turn to whenever they need information or want to access useful or enjoyable content.

The Stores magazine article duly notes the strategic retreat that’s going on in retail, but it focuses mainly on how retailers are imagining the future and what to do about it. Here are some of its most interesting insights. We'll leave it to you to draw any parallel insights about market research.

• “The country is `grossly overstored’ and...a third of the weakest retail locations should be shut down,’” one expert told the magazine. “This very painful process will surely take more than five years.”

• However, the same observer says, strategic scaling back “will also create enormous opportunity for those with the capital and management platforms” to adjust smartly.

• “Companies should be in the business of creating the future and not simply responding to what pundits and polls think their customers are looking for,” advises another expert who urges taking new initiatives even as retail contracts.

• The report note’s Target’s three-year, $7 billion initiative to position itself for growth by building or remodeling stores, upgrading its supply chain, and developing more private-label merchandise. Meanwhile, it's willing to incur extra current costs and forgo some current profits by budgeting $1 billion in discounts to drive more e-commerce sales.

• Costco, on the other hand, isn’t planning a special emphasis on e-commerce, which one expert says now accounts for about 4% of its sales. The priority, according to Costco’s chief financial officer, is “in-store, getting members coming in and buying when they can see everything that we have.”

• Smartphones are the new, transformative fact that all retailers have to reckon with. The product knowledge in-store shoppers bring through the door has “changed dramatically,” says an expert from shopping center owner Starwood Capital Group.

• But, he adds, that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. “The important thing to remember with e-commerce is that it is a tool to help shoppers do things more conveniently in more places than before” -- and that bricks and mortar stores will remain important to mobile shoppers.

One thing that’s certain is that quality consumer data is essential for decision-makers to chart their companies' paths successfully as they face tech-driven turbulence in their markets. And insights professionals need to adapt to the same big changes in technology, or risk being seen as irrelevant or even counterproductive to the decision-making process. The dominance of mobile communications is driving these changes, so researchers need to become mobile-savvy if they're going to adapt. You probably already know this. But how should you start?

The first thing you need is a clear understanding that mobile research is not a commodity -- and that there are radical distinctions between the two main approaches. One approach is in-app mobile research, which fully embraces the new realities and opportunities smartphones present. The other is  a “mobile optimized” approach that remains wedded to last-generation online panels and methodology. If online data is giving you trouble, so will "mobile optimized" data. That's why you're looking for something else, something that works in our mobile-saturated consumer landscape. Let’s have a productive conversation about it. Just get  in touch at solutions@mfour.com.

Are smartphones a threat to pro athletes’ earnings, their leagues’ profits, and the future of legacy national and local TV outlets that traditionally have paid top dollar for sports’ ability to deliver real-time viewership?

The question is gaining urgency from the locker room to the owner’s skybox, not to mention the executive suites of broadcast, cable and satellite TV providers. Their struggle is captured in the title of a new report from Business Insider, “The Digital Disruption of Live Sports: A Deep Dive into the Fall of TV’s Most Lucrative Programming.”

Business Insider’s report summary says that live sports have been “traditional TV’s flagship bulwark against digital disruption.” But now that defense “appears to be in trouble” because “new media platforms” are taking audiences elsewhere.

Televised sports is hardly the only business that must master the sudden arrival and pervasive appeal of mobile devices as the public’s favored interface with the world of information and communications. Online market research is at a similar point of inflection. To borrow Business Insider’s phraseology, online surveys are also  “in trouble” because “new media platforms” are messing with their ability to attract and engage a responsive audience.

In sports, Business Insider’s key takeaways sound like inescapable challenges to the status quo:

• “The increasing cost of sports broadcast rights and, accordingly, the higher advertising rates for brands, is making the current live sports business model unsustainable."

• "With the legacy live sports model in decline, social and digital video platforms are making large strides to acquire sports programming."

• "Broadcasters will likely be forced to relinquish a slice of the lucrative revenue pie generated by live sports content.”

The parallel in mobile market research’s challenge to online research is clear. The audience (that is, consumers willing to take surveys) has moved to another platform – the smartphone.  U.S. adults now spend  an average of 2 ¼ hours per day accessing mobile media, rising to more than 3 hours among Millennials.

Clearly, businesses that need to know what consumers think, feel, want and do will have to commit their market research to mobile – just as their marketing departments  intuitively are committing marketing dollars to mobile. It’s also clear that market research will have to make the same transition in order to inform business decisions with the most reliable, representative, fraud-resistant and easily obtainable data. So the question concerning mobile research is no longer “will you?” but “will you get it right?”

And the answer is that of course you will -- as soon as you start learning about mobile research's best practices, and how they fit your particular needs. The first step is understanding that so-called “mobile optimized” approaches are really cosmetic half-measures the don't get you the data you need. Mobile best practices begin with in-app, offline mobile studies that will move you forward instead of bogging you down in a futile fight to maintain a status quo that's collapsing fast. To learn more, just contact us at solutions@mfour.com.

You may know more about R2D2 and C3PO, the robot stars of “Star Wars,” than you do about the robots that suck the lifeblood out of online market research by fraudulently impersonating real, flesh-and-blood survey respondents.

Fraudsters create bots to feed on the rewards offered to online survey-takers. The more a bot goes undetected, the more it deceives research providers and clients into believing they are getting real completes from real people. The consequence is the very definition of a double whammy: not only do clients waste money on the reward payments that go to the botmeisters for each fraudulent response, but they incur the potentially much higher cost of basing analysis and business decisions on the bogus data the bots have left behind.

On a more encouraging note, insights professionals are starting to discuss the bot epidemic publicly, and open discussion is the first step toward prevention and cure. It's understandable that the main focus so far has been online research, because bots do their hunting online. But in-app mobile research also needs to be part of the conversation, because it moves the survey-taking process offline, where bots can’t follow.

Joe Hopper, founder of Versta Research, has made a strong contribution to the discussion in an article on his company’s blog entitled “How Many Bots Took Your Survey?” The answer, he writes, is “Almost certainly more than you think….if you are purchasing access to survey respondents from panel providers, or from survey software providers…you are probably getting fraudulent data from automated bots or from survey-taker farms.”

Hopper sees this as a severe challenge to data reliability and a real danger to survey-based market research. “For our most recent survey” he wrote, “we sourced sample from the top, most expensive provider in the U.S. market, with all the usual assurances of double opt-in, identity verification, etc. We found fraud (the provider was horrified, as they should be).”

Hopper emphasizes the need for perpetual vigilance in monitoring individual survey responses for signs of fraud. He also recommends tracing the IP address and Internet Service Provider from which suspected bots have been launched, then permanently blocking them.

But the best and simplest bot-fighter is a trustworthy, validated all-mobile panel that’s united in taking surveys on a native mobile app. In-app research takes place offline, in a safety zone that stands apart from the online realm where bots can freely roam. In a properly designed mobile survey, the entire questionnaire loads instantly into respondents’ smartphones. They proceed to answer in the app instead of online, which means there's no need to stay connected to the bot-infested internet. Bots can take surveys, but they don't have smartphones and they can't download a legitimate survey app. MFour’s process begins with each panelist downloading the Surveys on the Go® app, which has been defining and advancing in-app mobile research since its debut in 2011.

To sum up, prospective research clients should always ask panel providers about how they’re sourcing panelists, and inquire about what they’re doing to guard against bots and other types of panel fraud. And when your due-diligence turns to the subject of bots, don’t forget to ask how the seller’s approach to panel integrity and data quality stacks up against offline, in-app mobile. To have a productive conversation on this important subject, just contact us at solutions@mfour.com.

How much faith should advertisers have in Facebook and other social media platforms?

Its huge audience, mostly arriving on mobile, allows Facebook to command a 25% share of the U.S. mobile advertising market, according to eMarketer. Two-thirds of all advertisers place bets with the social media giant, with no real idea of how well those bets will pay off. A new process called Emotional Brand Connections Social Media Ad Testing brings fresh clarity. But first, more on the foggy attempts at metrics EBC Social Media Ad Testing is designed to supersede.

The problem of how to assess a social media ad’s effectiveness isn’t specific to Facebook, although its clout puts Facebook in the spotlight. Last year, a series of discrepancies in some of the performance data Facebook had provided to advertisers drew lots of attention and highlighted how hard it is to obtain reliable metrics along the new frontier of mobile social advertising. In response, Facebook increased opportunities for outside auditing of ad performance.

But just what is the proper standard for judging whether a mobile ad is working? A recent article from Digiday says that third-party tests have shown that video ads on Facebook often don’t achieve the minimum standard for "viewability" set by the Media Rating Council (MRC). The MRC has determined that video ads should be seen for at least two seconds to be considered “viewable,” with at least half the player screen in view.

Responding to the article, Facebook argued that people absorb content more quickly on mobile than on desktop, and that the threshold for mobile ads’ effectiveness is in fact markedly lower than the MRC’s standard. “We believe that the value of an ad…is generated the moment an ad comes on screen,” said a statement Facebook gave to Digiday, adding that independent studies have shown that  “people can recall mobile news feed content at a statistically significant rate after only 0.25 seconds of exposure.”

So what’s a marketer to make of these conflicting assertions about ad metrics? It wouldn’t hurt to take a hint from Ronald Reagan, who famously said "trust, but verify." Trust that social media is where ads need to be. But arm yourself with a trustworthy way to verify that an ad can be seen well enough to achieve the intended responses from the consumers it’s targeted reach.

And that’s where Emotional Brand Connections Social Media Ad Testing comes in. Developed by MFour in connection with Kantar AddedValue, it allows an advertiser to test an ad’s chances of success with the target audience before the ad goes live on social media. Here are the key features:

• Test recipients are drawn from an all-mobile active panel of more than 1.3 million U.S. consumers. Its representative demographic makeup lets you target  any key consumer audience -- including Millennials, Hispanics and African Americans.

• The process injects an ad into targeted consumers’ social news feeds. It shows up naturally, with no discernible difference from regular ads the audience gets. That means test recipients don't know, at first, that they're part of a test.

• In its initial stage, the test captures natural passive behavioral metrics: How long did recipients view the ad? Did they turn on a video ad's sound? Did they respond by clicking, liking or sharing? 

• The process then adds a unique human dimension by allowing marketers to double back and survey the same recipients of the test ad for deeper qualitative insights.

• In this stage you'll first get natural, unaided responses to measure awareness and recall of the ad and brand. Then you'll seek aided responses in which you identify your ad to respondents and ask them about it in detail.

• If respondents give the ad high marks for concept, content and recall, the advertiser can proceed confidently, knowing the ad is going to achieve its objectives.

• If survey respondents don’t respond well to an ad, they’ll give the feedback needed to revise it. Then it can be retested until it’s clear the ad is well-primed to achieve its goals.

The confusion that so far has permeated discussions of how effective mobile social ads really is no surprise, given how quickly the platform has become dominant. Clearly, the current standard that calls for  clocking seconds of "viewability" and measuring how many pixels appear is inappropriate for the age of social media. It's like using stopwatches and rulers. You need something geared specifically to the nature of social media -- something that gives you data and evaluations straight from real mobile consumers who are, after all, the real judges of mobile advertising. For more information, just contact us at solutions@mfour.com.

MFour is excited to attend the ANA Masters of Marketing conference September 13 in Florida. Lots to learn!