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

Marketing's Job One Is Getting Social Media Right

Is Edgy, Highly-Praised TV too Risky for Advertisers?

Announcing Mobile 101 – Get Knowledge You Can Use

And here's a Friday tune to get you dancing into your weekend.

(L-R) Lily Ingrassia, Abraham Graciano, Shireen El-Maissi)

MFour has hired two new client service staffers and a recruiter to ensure that the rapid, continuous rapid growth of its customer base will be accomplished with no reduction in the personalized attention, effective communications and quality results each client deserves.

Lily Ingrassia will provide customer service to users of MFourDIY® -- the only all-mobile, do-it-yourself survey platform. She will help carry out MFour’s promise to provide full, real-time live backup for clients as they design and field their own do-it-yourself surveys. For Lily, this is a “welcome back,” as she joins the staff fulltime after interning at MFour the past two summers. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Marketing from the University of San Diego, and also has worked for IMAX Corporation and the International Surfing Assn. Her biggest personal interests are surfing, hiking, cooking and rescuing homeless pets.

Abraham Graciano joins the team as a Client Service Solutions representative, dedicated to providing consistent, quality interactions for clients throughout the research process. He previously was a project manager for Welocalize Life Science. His passions include playing soccer and rooting for Mexico’s national team; he’s also patiently working on restoring a 1989 Ford Ranger to mint condition.

Shireen El-Maissi will play a key role in helping hiring managers find and evaluate talented candidates to join MFour’s fast-accelerating push to be the category-defining provider of mobile market research. Previously she worked as an employment recruiter for 24 Seven Inc. and Jobspring Partners. Shireen holds a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from California State University, Long Beach, plays co-ed flag football and is a connoisseur of many of the finer Southern California dining spots.

Welcome aboard, Abraham, Lily and Shireen!

Is the “Golden Age of Television” proclaimed by many TV critics bad for advertisers?

In many cases, shows beloved by critics are less golden than black and red. That’s black for dark characters and bleak story lines, and red for bloody violence portrayed with graphic specificity.

Two recent commentaries for MediaPost raise questions about whether TV advertisers are wandering into a thicket of contradiction and possible audience backlash when they bet heavily that bleak stories and harsh images will translate into marketing gold. They raise good questions that can only be answered by surveying consumers who watch the shows. For advertisers, and for TV networks and streaming services, it’s important to understand whether ads are being noticed and remembered, and  how they're affecting consumers' perceptions about the brand and product.The advertising and television industries acknowledge that we’re in a moment of confusion and flux when it comes to measuring TV ads’ effectiveness, and how to approach “golden age”-type shows is one more unknown that’s begging for data and insights to inform how advertisers should proceed.

Both MediaPost commentaries concern the Hulu series, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” which envisions a dark, dystopian future that’s not exactly in sync with advertising’s typical aim of establishing a mood of good feeling or positive intrigue about a brand.

“It’s odd, brutal and hard to watch,” writes one commentator, who says she was “flabbergasted” by one particularly cruel scene, “followed instantly by the insertion of a technicolor, upbeat, jaunty commercial…making the advertisers look ridiculous and creating a creepy and tasteless way to annoy viewers.”

The other commentary asked whether advertising on a show like “The Handmaid’s Tale” might create problems for brands that parallel what they face when automated digital ad placement puts their messaging on objectionable websites, or locates it amid content that's embarrassingly discordant with the image and perception the advertiser wants to create.

For these dark shows, the author writes, “we don’t know exactly how the emotional impact of content halos onto its adjacent advertising. If that halo exists, you’d better be sure the emotion supports your brand…the rise of quality long-form content may work against, not for, advertising…the producers of movie-like TV content have some research to do.”

Conducting that research must start with a panel researchers can trust – real, verified consumers who’ve actually watched the show in question. And such a study needs to reach the audience while the viewing experience is fresh in mind. Advanced, in-app mobile surveys can do the job quickly and efficiently. The difference-maker is a quality, deeply engaged panel of mobile consumers who’ve already provided detailed, trustworthy demographic information that’s crucial to targeting your study to the right viewer/respondents.

The MediaPost commentaries point to the need for a detailed understanding of how viewers respond to TV programming. For information on how you can most reliably address that need, just get in touch at solutions@mfour.com.

Advertising is at a crossroads. Brands need to bet heavily on social media, because that’s where the public is. But there are serious pitfalls in this new terrain, especially when it comes to finding accurate and transparent ways to measure social ads’ effectiveness. And as the saying goes, what you can’t measure, you can’t manage.

The stakes are clear: social media advertising is surging rapidly, including 12% year-over-year U.S. spending growth in April, according to a report from Standard Media Index. Compare that to the “scant 3%” growth for other digital advertising, which the report says has been losing steam.

So getting social media ads right is crucial. To help brands meet that challenge, MFour and Kantar AddedValue have partnered on a pioneering approach called Emotional Brand Connections Social Media Ad Testing. In a nutshell, it lets you quickly get a handle on how well an ad you’ve prepared is likely to perform on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social sites. Mobile consumers see the test ad in their actual news feeds. The test then collects passive data that shows how recipients are engaging with the ad on their phones, and proceeds to a survey phase for deeper insights into why the ad grabs them – or fails to grab them. Here’s how it works:

• Send a test ad to members of an all-mobile panel whose validated demographic characteristics identify them as the kinds of consumers you want to reach.

• Recipients don’t know they’re part of a test. When the ad shows up in their social media news feeds, it’s indistinguishable from regular ads they receive.

• In the first test phase, you capture passive data that shows how recipients are interacting with the ad. Do they even notice it? If so, how much time do they spend with the ad? Do they click on it? Watch and listen to any video? Share the ad with Facebook friends or Twitter followers?

• The next step is to survey the same test-ad recipients, to learn how well they recall your ad and how they perceive it. Does the concept and content engage them, spark interest in the brand and product, and push them toward shopping and buying?

• If your test ad’s a hit, you’ll launch your mobile social media campaign with full confidence. If its performance falls short, you’ve bought yourself a chance to revise and retest the ad until your audience tells you you’re in good shape to proceed.

Social media is the new mainline to marketing success, but a good road map is a must for avoiding costly wrong turns. To learn more, just contact us at solutions@mfour.com.

In 1960, a revolutionary consumer technology reached a milestone, and now history is repeating.

1960 was the year that marked television ownership's growth to to the point the of saturation, with just short of 90% of American households equipped with at least one television set. TV ownership had leaped tenfold from 1950, when just 9% of U.S. households could tune in. In little more than a generation, we’d gone from a chicken in every pot (the slogan Herbert Hoover used to win the presidency in 1928), to a couch potato in every living room.

Now the Smartphone Era is completing its first decade – and the boom in adaptation has been even more explosive than it was in TV’s early years. The first Apple iPhone, introduced in 2007, established pocket-sized, multi-application computers as mass consumer products. By 2011, 35% of U.S. adults owned a phone, according to the Pew Research Center, and in the ensuing five years the total more than doubled, to 77%. For Americans under 30, smartphone saturation already exceeds 90%.

Mobile consumer surveys designed strictly for smartphones and tablets debuted in 2011 with the introduction of the Surveys on the Go® research app. In 2010, MFour’s founders had recognized that mobile devices were well on their way to defining how consumers would access and transmit information in all its dimensions – sound and text, still pictures and video. Mobile was consumers’ new comfort zone, and they saw that market research’s new challenge was to reach survey respondents in the information zone that was most convenient, and where they felt most at home.

Mobile surveys of varying quality, consistency and technical capacity are now in relatively common use: 65% of research clients and 77% of suppliers surveyed for the most recent GreenBook Research Industry Trends (GRIT) report said they’d tried some form of mobile. But most of them still have no idea what real mobile research is, because they’ve only had exposure to “mobile optimized” approaches that merely switch the same old online research methodology to a smaller screen. Because there’s still a lot of haze and misunderstanding surrounding mobile research, we’ll periodically share some granular tidbits of information to help you better understand the technology, methodology, uses and best practices of real mobile research – in short, what you need to understand to take full advantage of the most all-encompassing consumer technology since the television set.

Think of it as Mobile 101. We’ll start at the beginning with an upcoming post that will tell you what a “native” mobile app is, and why that matters to making data fraud-proof. So stay tuned! For more information right now, just contact us at solutions@mfour.com.

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

Read the Declaration of Independence from Online Panel Fraud

What the iPhone's 10th Birthday Means for Market Research

Take a Tip from Savvy Cows: USE MOR MOBL

And here's a Friday tune to get you winging into your weekend.

Maybe you’ve seen those cute billboards for Chick-fil-A in which 3-D spotted cows team up to scrawl messages around the theme, “EAT MOR CHIKIN.”

Judging by this report from Business Insider, chikin – uh, chicken – has indeed been making a big move on quick-serve restaurants’ menus, even among brands known more for hamburgers or Mexican food. Instead of cute cows writing on billboards, the article cites lower wholesale prices for chicken as a key driver of the trend.

But QSR brands need to get it from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, if they really want to understand what consumers think about their menu items, and why they buy or don’t buy. Have you noticed that nearly every human does a great deal of talking into a smartphone – often in the midst of a meal? If you want horse's-mouth consumer insights on QSRs or any other product or vertical, in-app mobile surveys are the way to go. In a nutshell, here’s why:

• Panel fraud has reached pandemic proportions for online surveys, and the last thing you need is infected data.

• Buying online panel without full transparency that allows you to be absolutely sure of its sourcing and representativeness is a recipe for being defrauded or, best case scenario, having to weight your data heavily in an attempt to compensate for a dearth of completes from the demographic groups you need.

• Each smartphone has a unique ID, which assures you that you’re talking to real, validated, individual consumers and not fraudsters who double-dip or fail to truly engage with a survey.

• In-app mobile is the only mobile method that matters. “Mobile optimized” surveys that are taken on phones are really online surveys by other means, because they require respondents to follow a link to a questionnaire that puts them online, where dropped connections or slow loading times often make survey-taking an off-putting grind instead of an engaging opportunity for consumers to be heard while getting paid.

• With in-app mobile studies, all your questions load instantly into respondents’ phones, enabling them to complete the questionnaire offline, where there are no connectivity issues. Just as important, those evil survey bots that lurk online have no way of preying on an offline, in-app survey.

Back to the chikin, er, chicken.

• Is price really the leading driver that’s landing more poultry on QSR grills and fryers? It’s a reasonable inference, but why assume when you can get answers from actual mobile consumers whose purchases you’ve validated by asking them to use their phones to photograph and submit their receipts?

• Does it make sense to survey a QSR customer a week, or even a few days, after the meal you need to ask about? Do you remember what you had for lunch the day before yesterday? Or even where you bought it?

• The antidote to recall bias is a GeoLocation-driven survey that captures Point-of-Emotion® insights from consumers while they’re ordering or eating, or just after they’ve left a restaurant with their takeout orders.

• You can’t count your sales before they hatch – but you can do advance mobile testing of ad content across any channel, to give you the best chance to make your campaign lay golden eggs.

• The latest innovation is testing mobile social ads by injecting them into target audience members’ actual news feeds to passively measure how they engage with them, followed by a survey to measure brand and product awareness and intent to shop. Consumers also will tell you what about your ad is working, or not working – and why.

• And yes, you can GeoLocate and survey actual mobile consumers who’ve been exposed to any billboards, including ones that might feature cute critters making appeals to our sympathies and senses of humor.

We could go on and on about the advantages of in-app mobile research, but we’ve made ourselves hungry, and it’s time for lunch (today it’s a cow product, but don’t fret, billboard bovines – it’s only yogurt). To sum up: USE MOR MOBL. And to learn more, just get in touch at solutions@mfour.com.

(L-R) Matthew Xa, Brandon Fletcher, Katherine Haldane

MFour has hired three more tech and survey operations employees as it continues to hone and extend its innovative mobile market research technology and its delivery of high-quality, consistently reliable data.

Katherine Haldane joins the team as a Software Engineer focusing on implementing new features and optimizing performance for the Surveys on the Go® research app, now used by more than 1.3 million active panelists who give SOTG consistent ratings of 4.5 stars out of five in the App Store and Google Play. Katherine previously developed and maintained flagship products for Surfline/Wavetrack Inc. and Resolution Interactive Media. She holds a diploma in Computer Programming Analysis from Fanshawe College in Ontario, Canada. Katherine’s leisure interests lie in realms both digital (video games) and non-digital (camping, rock climbing and cosplay).

Brandon Fletcher and Matthew Xa come to MFour as Software Programmers and Data Experts who’ll play key roles in conducting clients’ research projects. Brandon will focus on survey design and data analysis. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and a Master’s degree in Communication Studies, both from California State University, Long Beach. There, Brandon honed his ability to amass relevant data and draw persuasive insights as a member of the debate team, including competing in tournaments nationally and in China. Matthew’s duties include survey programming and quality assurance. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from California State University, Fullerton; his credentials also include a black belt in Taekwando.

Welcome aboard, Brandon, Katherine and Matthew!

It took 1,458 words for the Founding Fathers to declare independence on July 4, 1776. Revolutionizing market research isn’t quite as complicated as launching a new democracy, so here’s a declaration in 70 words:

We hold these truths to be self-evident:

• All Businesses Have a Fundamental Right to Quality Data

• Panel and Data Are One

• Panel Quality Is Data Quality

• Bad Panels Mean Bad Data

• Bad Data Drive Mistaken Analysis

• Mistaken Analysis Drives Wrong Conclusions

• Wrong Conclusions Drive Clients to Wrong Decisions

• Wrong Decisions Are Extremely Bad for Business

• Quality, In-App Mobile Panel, Data & Insights Are Here, and They’re Yours By Right

King George III would have torn up this declaration and fought to save online research and the status quo. Innovative thinkers like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin would have signed our declaration in an instant. And then they would have gone to battle for it.

How about you? You've grilled your burgers, you've flown your Stars and Stripes, and you've thrilled to the cherry bombs bursting in air. Now you're back at work, and it's time to revolutionize what you can accomplish. Insist that your panel providers back up their product with full, transparent details about how they're sourcing your data. Demand that they tell you the specific measures they're taking to fight survey bots, double-dipping and other forms of panel fraud. And remember: when it comes to consumer panels, paying for anything less than validated quality amounts to taxation without representation. Our founders refused to take that lying down. How about you?

To learn more about revolutionary in-app mobile, just contact us at solutions@mfour.com.

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

Stop Bots and Fraudsters! End Panel-Sharing Now!

When the Beatles Sang About Market Research

To Tip or Not To Tip: MarketWatch on Our Survey of Uber Riders

And here's a Friday tune to get you banging into the pre-4th of July weekend.