Ten years ago today, on June 29, 2007, the Apple Store on New York’s 5^th Avenue opened for business, and in streamed the first U.S. consumers to buy an iPhone – a distinction they’d earned by camping out four days ahead of time to ensure they’d be first at the sales counter.

Now we can look back on how Apple’s iPhone and its iOS operating system kick-started a new era in the history of communications and information sharing – along with Google’s Android operating system, which debuted in the U.S. on Oct. 22, 2008, when the first Android-powered smartphone, the T-Mobile G1, went on sale.

But when the history of market research is written, students of the industry will marvel at how a discipline that exists to provide sharply-honed, statistically reliable, up-to-the-minute data and insights into any and every shift in consumers’ attitudes and behaviors could have failed for so many years to understand the implications of what went down on June 29, 2007.  

Before we go further into that aspect of the story, let’s journey back to the events of ten years ago.

The world had first learned of Apple’s new smartphone at 9:44 a.m., Pacific Time, on Jan. 9, 2007, when Steve Jobs paused during his keynote address at the Macworld 2007 conference in San Francisco and told a cheering crowd that “today Apple is going to reinvent the phone, and here it is.” The iPhone, he proclaimed, was not just “a revolutionary mobile phone,” but “a breakthrough Internet communications device” whose functions could be controlled with a simple finger-tap. “It’s the Internet in your pocket, for the first time ever.”

(Ironically, in retrospect, Jobs then turned the mic over to Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, whose company had worked with Apple to provide built-in Google Browser and Google Maps apps for the iPhone 1 but would soon become Apple’s fierce operating system competitor.)

When tech reviewers got their hands on the devices, even skeptics concurred. The Wall Street Journal reported that the iPhone was “on balance, a beautiful and breakthrough handheld computer.” The New York Times pronounced it “a real dazzler,” and mused that “maybe all the iPhone hype isn’t hype at all.”

The cautionary lesson for market research is what iPhones and Android phones did to the market they entered. The BlackBerry, introduced in 2000, was the hottest smartphone on the market when the iPhone arrived, but it lacked Internet access. BlackBerry reached its sales apogee in mid-2009, when, according to Statista, it commanded 20.9% of global market share, compared to 17.1% for iOS and 3.5% for Android. The world leader, by far, at the time was the Nokia-associated Symbian operating system, which at the start of 2009 commanded a 51% market share.

Talk about creative destruction: since then Apple’s share of a soaring smartphone operating system market held steady and Android, licensed to multiple manufacturers, has skyrocketed. Meanwhile, Blackberry and Symbian rapidly sank into the dustbin of tech history. Nokia ended Symbian’s run in 2013, and the BlackBerry’s market share for 2016 was barely a rounding error, at 0.0048% of the global market.

“[BlackBerry] never quite managed the transition to smartphones successfully…and after several strategic shifts announced…that it would no longer make its own phones,” Statista’s report recounts.

There will be a passage almost identical to the one above in that hypothetical future history of market research. It will list a number of major research providers who “never quite managed the transition to smartphones successfully,” and suffered BlackBerry-esque consequences. And it will talk about how researchers who came to embrace the idea of connecting with consumers via their smartphone apps enjoyed a new era of prosperity driven by the fraud-proof quality data and insights that in-app mobile survey technology and app-using panelists made possible.

MFour began pioneering in-app mobile research in 2011, when it launched the Surveys on the Go® research app and began attracting a U.S. panel that now numbers more than 1.3 million active members. It started when MFour’s founders recognized that every third person or so seemed to have a smartphone in hand, and reckoned that this was just early days for what they were sure would soon be a transformational, all-encompassing technology. They saw that market research needs to reach consumers when, where and how they want to be reached – and that the answer was, increasingly, on their smartphones.

If there’s one statistic that crystallizes what’s happened since MFour got started, it’s this one from eMarketer: in 2016, U.S. smartphone users spent 3 hours and 15 minutes a day accessing the Internet with mobile apps, as opposed to 50 minutes using browsers. The mobile app is king, and if you page through our blog posts, you’ll find lots of details about what that means to market research.

So happy birthday, iPhone, and thanks for the revolution, Apple (and you, too, Google). Here’s to the next ten years of mobile excitement and mobile prosperity. And here’s a salute to the market research clients who are already on board, and a welcoming toast to the many more insights professionals, advertisers and marketers who will soon join in. As the takeover by iOS and Android has shown, it’s amazing how fast the changes come once a good idea sinks in. To find out more, just get in touch at solutions@mfour.com.

There’s a complete cure for panel fraud, and it’s available to any insights professional who isn’t wedded to online research. The cure, of course, is in-app mobile research, in which unique smartphone technology transports clients and their projects to a research habitat where real mobile consumers love to gather, where human fraudsters can’t hide, and where survey bots can’t enter.

A public window into the specific problems that are causing trouble for online panel providers recently emerged in what its participants call the Data Quality Download Podcast Series. The two conversations posted so far are intelligent, earnest, well-meaning exchanges between veteran online panel and online data professionals. Here are some of the key points from the first installment, which focuses on two leading issues: the need to identify and reject suspect survey responses, and the unrelenting problem of hard-to-detect survey-taking bots that mimic real respondents.

• Q: “Sometimes there’s a debate between the sample providers and research firms on how much sample should be rejected, and on what criteria...what's reasonable?

• A: “There is no average, there is no norm you can expect [for] what you have to scrub out... it’s all over the map…because there are so many different sample sources out there…and so many blends of sample methodologies."

• For studies involving multiple-source panels, "scrubbing can be as high as 30 or 40%."

•  “A constant vigilance has to be applied to make sure your data is going to be good, and you can have confidence in the insights that your customers are going to use.”

• “[Bot fraud] is a very dynamic, very evolving challenge for the industry. It’s getting increasingly sophisticated….You have to acknowledge that this happens in our space…so we can be really proactive and get in front of this issue. Putting our head in the sand does not help anyone, right?"

• An attempt at finding a more coordinated and systematic approach to developing fast, effective ways to detect bot attacks is getting started, “but...we’re in the early stages of that."

• Fighting online panel fraud will require providers to "create predictive checks and algorithms that can move the industry forward....If we can rely on these predictive elements rather than human review on the back end, that’s a huge time savings and it really helps."

The podcasts so far have not brought up a crucial opportunity that should be part of any conversation about solving panel fraud and safeguarding data quality: in-app mobile research, with its proven effectiveness in preventing fraud by bots or humans. Here are important additional points for you to factor into your own thinking about data quality, panel quality, and panel fraud:

• When they commission a properly sourced and fielded in-app mobile study, or conduct one themselves on an in-app mobile DIY platform, researchers see almost no need to reject any of the completes they receive.

• Bots can’t break into the in-app mobile survey space. In-app surveys load instantly into panelists’ phones. Respondents answer them offline, the entire experience taking place in-app, which means inside the phone.

• The bots are left lurking online, where they can and do find other prey.

• "Mobile optimized" research simply substitutes a smartphone screen for a desktop or laptop. "Mobile optimized" respondents have to click on a link and enter the treacherous online space to take what's actually only a mobile-mimicking survey.

• Each smartphone is individually identifiable, and each identified smartphone is in the hands of a validated human consumer. Fraud-minded respondents are detected quickly and permanently frozen out of the survey app.

• More than 1.3 million active panelists who use the Surveys on the Go research app will take your surveys in a mobile safe space that's a realm apart from the online universe where bots run rampant.

The podcast series about online research's struggles against panel fraud is fascinating and well worth listening in on, including this second installment. But if you're serious about panel fraud and its consequences for your data, it's even more important to have a clear, informative and productive conversation about in-app mobile. Just contact us at solutions@mfour.com.

It’s rare for consumers to voluntarily pay more for a service, but that seems to be the case among Uber riders surveyed by MFour. 79% of the Uber app users in our study said the rideshare company’s recent decision to make it easy to add a tip to the fare by using its app's regular payment feature is a “great idea” or “good idea.”

Developments at Uber are always big news, and the survey of 1,112 MFour panelists who use the Uber app drew coverage from MarketWatch, whose reporter, Kari Paul, used that key insight for a story headlined, “Yes, most people believe Uber drivers deserve tips.” She also probed some of the ins and outs of rideshare tipping.

Some experts quoted in Kari’s story worry that riders will feel pressured into “guilt tipping,” because Uber drivers get to rate their customers and could warn against those they perceive as ungenerous. But MFour’s survey findings suggest that a large majority of Uber riders are happy to have an easy option to show their appreciation in a way most drivers will really appreciate.

With its app-tracking capability, MFour can quickly identify which members of its all-mobile Surveys on the Go® panel of more than 1.3 million active users have a given app, then send them a timely survey. Thanks to MarketWatch for staying on top of the Uber story.

For more details on the rider survey, click here.

If you have even a passing interest in pop music, you’ve probably heard that this month marks the 50^th anniversary of the release of the Beatles’ classic 1967 album, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

What you may not know, even if market research is your passion, is that the Beatles, wizardly visionaries that they were, used one of the album’s songs to foreshadow the Great Online Panel Disaster of 2017 by half a century.

“She’s Leaving Home” tells the sad tale of one generation literally being left behind as the new one sets out to claim its place in the world. Most people – well, virtually all people -- think it’s about a young woman who can’t stand living at home anymore, so she writes a farewell note and heads off to live the rest of her life, leaving her stunned mum and dad to ask where it all went wrong.

“Why would she treat us so thoughtlessly,” they ask. “How could she do this to me?”

We’re here to tell you that it’s all an elaborate metaphor. The bereft parents are online research. The teenaged “she” who leaves them is today’s public, which has had it with taking online surveys and insists on something new – something that respects and responds to the fact that the world now revolves around smartphones instead of desktops and laptops.

The harmonizing Beatles get to the crux of the matter in the last verse, making it clear that mobile consumers need something more from their research experiences, while baffled suppliers and buyers of online research panels can only wring their hands.

“She (what did we do that was wrong?)

Is having (we didn’t know it was wrong)

Fun (fun is the one thing money can’t buy).

Something inside that was always denied for so many years.

She’s leaving home, bye bye.”

In-app mobile surveys meet consumers where they want and need to be, by providing fun, engaging, seamless and technologically gratifying experiences on the phones they love. The Beatles knew it – and now you do, too.

Hey, music fans are entitled to their own interpretations, right? And every researcher is entitled to the engaged, tuned-in panel that’s the fundamental building block of the quality data and insights that are fundamental to smart business decisions. If panel problems are taking the fun – and the effectiveness – out of your work, we should talk. Just get in touch by clicking here.

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

 See What's Really Worrying Online Panel Providers

Uber's Tipping Point: Tracking Its App Users for Fast Insights

Nailing Shopper Insights With App Targeting & GeoLocation

And here's a Friday tune to get you gliding into the weekend.

The thorough and unsparing conversation the insights industry needs to have about panel fraud and the decay of online sample quality continues to gain momentum.

Two research industry veterans have begun a series of podcast dialogues aimed at taking a deep look at the problem’s dimensions. They’re trying to get at what is or isn’t realistic when it comes to shoring up confidence in online panels and the data they provide – a matter of longstanding worry that’s been snowballing as sample-buyers’ doubts and misgivings go unanswered while the quality they depend on continues to corrode.

From MFour’s perspective, the podcasts sound like discussions of strategy and tactics for a battle that no longer needs to be fought – at least for researchers who recognize that in-app mobile research technology and methodology is changing everything.

We’ll soon put in our two cents (or more) in a coming blog post and newsletter about this worthwhile podcast conversation. But for now, here are links to the Data Quality Download Podcasts that have been posted to date. The first looks primarily at robot response fraud. The second focuses on the ins and outs of trying to use online IP addresses to determine whether respondents are legit. Each installment runs 19 or 20 minutes, but it’s worth spending some time to get a close perspective on the rearguard struggle for relevance that partisans of online panels are trying to wage.

If panel fraud is a concern for you, stay tuned. And if you can’t wait to find out more about the best way to tackle it, just get in touch at solutions@mfour.com.

A new survey of Uber riders by MFour suggests that while the rideshare giant's  image is suffering, majorities of U.S. customers still like what they’re getting.

What’s more, they say they won’t abandon the service, just because Uber has begun letting its drivers accept tips.

• A resounding 79.4% of Uber riders said allowing tips is a “great idea” or a “good idea,” while 13.1% felt negatively about it.
• 67.5% saw the tipping option as a benefit rather than a detriment, because they value the opportunity to reward service.

Scandals surrounding the company and deposed CEO Travis Kalanick have hurt the company’s reputation among more than a quarter of Uber app users. However, Uber still enjoys favorability among solid segments – those for whom personal experience outweighs negative headlines.

• 28.4% of riders said they perceive Uber more negatively than they had previously.
• 33.4% said their opinion of the company has improved recently.
• 27.4% of Uber riders said that Kalanick’s resignation is “a good thing.”
• 10.8% saw the CEO’s exit as bad for Uber.
• 23% said they have used Uber less over the past month.
• 26.2% said they’ve used Uber more over that span.

Most of the respondents who now see Uber more negatively pointed to its corporate scandals.

• 50.6% cited Uber’s company culture or leadership as the main turn-off.
• 11.4% said their primary beef with Uber is that “they don’t treat the drivers well.”
• 14.9% said they feel more negatively because of Uber’s service quality or pricing.
• 7% said other ride-share or taxi options are now better than Uber.

Among other findings:

• 56% of Uber riders said keeping basic fares unchanged and encouraging tips is the best way to help drivers.
• 14.1% favored raising basic rates but keeping the no-tips policy.
• 21% thought drivers don’t deserve more money and should simply be replaced if they quit.

Asked to sum up Uber, about 10% used terms reflecting recent headlines, including “turmoil,” “controversial,” “crisis” and “sexism.” More pointed to positives, including about 35% who cited convenience, reliability, or fast service.

Methodology:
Survey conducted Wednesday, June 21. MFour used app-targeting to identify Android-using members of Surveys on the Go® mobile panel who have downloaded the Uber app. Responses within two hours from 1,112 riders distributed across U.S. states, territories and the District of Columbia. Respondents divided evenly between males and females; half ages 18 to 34, half 35 to 64.

Questions? Just contact us at solutions@mfour.com.

A good deal of daily living in the USA revolves around meals and wheels, so countless brands and advertisers are looking for insights into how consumers shop for lunch and get where they need to go.

One crucial way to get your research where it needs to go is app targeting. It lets you identify and connect in a flash with mobile consumers whose smartphone apps identify them as the perfect people to ask about brands and behaviors associated with those apps.

Another data-rich option is the location-based mobile study, today’s technologically advanced improvement on traditional clipboard-and-pen shop-alongs and sidewalk surveys. Using GPS-based GeoLocation whose accuracy is powered by proprietary GeoIntensity^® technology, you can find and query consumers while they’re in the act of shopping and buying, or wait until just after they’ve left a store or other relevant location.

MFour recently put app-tracking and GeoLocation in action on behalf of valued clients who needed fast-action reads on meals and wheels.

Felicia Leone Trimboli, president and founder of Leone Marketing Research, wanted to delve into meals – specifically, whether Panera Bread customers would be open to paying a $3 delivery fee per order. By targeting users of the MyPanera smartphone app, she got her answers in a hurry from 100 consumers who were exactly the right people to ask. To find out what she learned, just click here. 

Cars.com went the GeoLocation route, and for good reason. It needed to find car shoppers at a specific time – Memorial Day weekend – and a particular kind of place, car dealerships nationwide. The object was to learn the who, what, how and why of car shopping over those three big days for all kinds of commerce. MFour has geofenced thousands of auto dealerships nationwide, making it easy to connect with just the right shoppers among the 2 million-plus consumers who have downloaded its Surveys on the Go^® research app. Proprietary GeoNotification^® technology made it possible to alert them to a survey opportunity as they entered or exited any of those dealerships. Researchers for Cars.com used Surveys on the Go® to connect with 600 natural car shoppers over the Memorial Day holiday while they were in the midst of shopping in a dealer’s showroom or lot. To read a blog post on what they learned, click here.

Think of mobile app targeting and mobile location surveys as the fastest, most reliable wheels you can ride on in your quest for insights. Then you’ll be able to give your clients or bosses a sumptuous, data-enriched meal of insights and analysis. Meals and wheels – just keep ‘em in mind as you think about how to serve your clients or your brands’ marketers. To learn more about app tracking, GeoLocation studies and other advanced mobile research capabilities, just contact us at solutions@mfour.com.

If there’s one thing you should understand about mobile research technology, it’s the difference between in-app surveys and mobile-web surveys. When you choose between them, you’re not just choosing a fielding method. You’re choosing between two types of consumer panels, each of which will have a decisively different kind of survey-taking experience.

In making your choice, the primary concerns should be functionality and engagement. They’re inextricably bound, because respondents’ engagement will evaporate if the technological approach you’ve picked fails to deliver the smooth, fast and uninterrupted functional performance on mobile devices that the public demands.

In-app mobile streamlines the process by letting the smartphone do all the work. The app instantly brings you face to face with your respondents because the entire questionnaire loads instantly into their phones. Your consumers can take the survey from start to finish without connecting to the Internet. 

With mobile-web surveys, your connection to respondents is like the connection between rival tennis players. Your questions are housed on a website. You send panelists emails, and those who click on your link will be connected to the survey via their mobile browser. Instead of being right there with them, you’re on opposite sides of the ‘Net – as in Internet. Each question becomes a volley – you serve it to respondents’ phones, they return it to your website – and so on until the survey is finished. That is, unless the volleying gets interrupted by a dropped web connection or slow downloads and uploads of the questions and answers. Mobile users expect perfect functionality, and if you give them anything less they’ll penalize you by dropping your survey or by rushing through it thoughtlessly to get it over with.

If all this sounds a bit too technical or abstract, here’s an example from the real world of business. Interviewed earlier this year by eMarketer, M. Scott Havens, global head of digital for Bloomberg News, shared key facts about how it interacts with its mobile readers.

Bloomberg gets six times more traffic from the mobile web as it does from its mobile app, Havens said. Score one for mobile web? Not quite.

Here’s what Havens said next: ”On the other hand, the mobile app user generates 25 times the page views per month than the average mobile web user. Our mobile app users end up generating more page views [overall].”

Consequently, Havens said, Bloomberg’s digital strategy calls for coaxing its mobile web users to give up connecting via web browsers and to download its mobile app instead.

“Once we form relationships with people, we encourage them to download the app. On one level, the mobile web is a conduit to the app. We use it as a way to introduce the site to people and hopefully drive them to download the app, where they can consume our content in a faster, easier, more personalized way.”

Faster. Easier. More personalized – not to mention 25 times the engagement. This is a prominent media executive talking about the advantages of an in-app connection with consumers over a mobile web connection with consumers.

So if you don’t quite grasp the difference between the two types of mobile technology and methodology, don’t worry. All you need to do is remember what’s working for Bloomberg. And for complete information to guide your choice, just contact us at solutions@mfour.com.

Frustrated? Confused? Looking for answers?

Marketers and advertising professionals are nodding their heads, because these are natural responses to the dizzying changes sweeping the landscape of digital advertising. The absence of clear rules, definitions, metrics and best practices for gauging the success of digital ad campaigns – especially crucial mobile ads – is nothing if not anxiety-provoking.

Turn, a marketing platform provider, recently surveyed advertising agency executives, and some of the findings were revealing: 83% of the respondents rated video ads as the “most effective means” for reaching and influencing consumers. But just how effective was another matter. 76% expressed concerns about “viewability” – a standard measure based on how long and how fully a video ad is displayed on a mobile recipient’s device. A video ad is commonly considered “viewable” – and therefore billable – if half the screen comes in view for two seconds.

Is “viewability” an adequate measure? It’s a high stakes question; Facebook, for example, gets 85% of its ad revenues from mobile.

So here’s a suggestion: instead of using a stopwatch and a ruler, how about talking to real consumers to see how they react to mobile advertising – both during the testing stage and after a campaign has launched?

In the concept- and content-testing stage, you can inject a test ad into the news feeds of consumers on a mobile research panel, knowing they fit the audience profile your campaign is targeting. The test content is indistinguishable from the “live” ads the same panelists customarily receive. This gives you the most natural and realistic preview of how consumers will respond to the test ad. If they respond well, you’ll know you’re primed for mobile success and can plan other marketing approaches accordingly. If not, you’ll have bought yourself a quick heads-up in time to make the necessary fixes. This capability, called Emotional Brand Connections Social Media Ad Testing, is a new offering from MFour, in partnership with Kantar Added Value.

To measure effectiveness of mobile campaigns once they’ve been launched, the crucial factor is the unique Ad ID that’s attached to every individual smartphone. Advertisers can obtain the IDs of the devices their ads have reached, and match them against the Ad IDs represented on an all-mobile panel whose members have all provided detailed demographics profiles. You’ll learn whether these validated recipients fit the consumer profiles you really want to reach – and get a fast read on whether you’re getting proper targeting. For deeper measurement insights, you can survey the validated recipients and learn whether they’re noticing the ads, gaining awareness of your brand and product, and being influenced to shop and buy. This technique for measuring advertising targeting and effectiveness is called Mobile Ad Metrics OnDemand.

To explore mobile ad testing and measurement further, just contact us at solutions@mfour.com.