The key challenges facing advertising and marketing professionals these days bring to mind a hit song by the Temptations – “Ball of Confusion.”

The nonprofit Advertising Research Foundation’s research priorities for 2017 include trying to cut through some of that confusion with a study called “Creating Effective Mobile Advertising: Maximizing the Ad Experience.” The study is needed, the ARF says, because “little is known about cognitive and emotional reactions to different ad experiences on mobile and the creative…elements that drive success.”

At its most recent conference on Audience Measurement, ARF chief executive Gayle Fuguitt tried to frame the questions the industry faces on advertising strategy and ad measurement.

“Do you know where your audience is? Consumers are…talking to us every day. Guess what they are saying about our advertising?....`Meet me on my terms. Understand my values. Understand who I am. Care about me…..We need to understand and serve [advertising] up to them the way they want it.’”

Another important voice in this conversation is the Media Rating Council, which sets and enforces standards in ad-measurement. It, too, wants advertisers to focus on the human factor amid the temptations of delving obsessively into Big Data. Digital footprints consumers leave don’t tell the whole story.

 “First, the measurement should be of people, not of hardware or devices, nor of applications  or browsers,” the Rating Council affirms. “While these…may sometimes  serve as proxies for human beings in measurement methodologies, they cannot simply be assumed to represent people without convincing evidence that they do indeed serve as a means by which  the actions of human beings can be measured.”

Testing and measuring ads is an incredibly high-stakes undertaking:

• According to Fuguitt, the ARF chief executive, more effective advertising could spare brands from spending $31 billion a year on discounting their products.

• An additional $22 billion is lost to ad-blocking by consumers who are turned off by a glut of uninteresting or irrelevant digital advertising.

• To put this money back in brands’ pockets, Fuguitt says, “creative is more important than counting. How do we make consumers’ hearts beat faster? Where are the emotional connections that will help build brands?”

So how can you put the human factor into measuring how your ads are driving awareness and leading consumers through the purchasing funnel? The most illuminating conversations will happen on their smartphones. True-mobile research lets you speak to today’s consumers in the flesh, using pictures, audio, and video. And you can ask them to respond in their own words – by making a video selfie that brings you data and insights straight from the hearts and minds of engaged human beings. You’ll know whether your ads are making the emotional connections your brand depends on. When location matters – particularly in out-of-home advertising – smartphones’ GPS geolocation capability lets you reach exposed consumers right after they’ve passed by a billboard or indoor signage.

These are the 21^st century solutions to your 21^st century ad-measurement uncertainties. An ideal way to start exploring is with MFourDIY™ – the only all mobile, do-it-yourself survey-building platform. You’ll harness sophisticated smartphone media capabilities and get the qualitative advertising insights you need in the simplest, most cost-effective yet sophisticated way. To learn more, just contact Alex at acolao@mfour.com.

In a divided country, there’s at least one thing Americans are pretty much unanimous about: watching the Super Bowl. Only 15.4% of adults 21 to 70 who responded to a recent survey said they won’t be watching the game; 65.7% said they’ll “definitely” tune in, and 18.9% said they’ll probably be watching. With so many eyes on the action, advertisers are well-justified in going all-in. Among respondents who expect to watch, 41.4% said the commercials would be their primary focus. For them, whatever entertainment the game between New England and Atlanta provides will be an added attraction, not the main event.

Those are among the takeaways from MFour’s Jan. 30 survey of 1,000 Americans who say they expect to watch on Sunday – half of them Millennials ages 21 to 34, and half 35 or older.

For surveyed Millennials, watching the game is more likely to be a social event than for the older respondents. House parties will attract 45% in the 21 to 34 group, and 34.6% of those 35 and over. Millennial viewers will be nearly twice as likely to watch from a restaurant or a bar – 13.4% to 7.4%.

Another generational distinction is the quaffing of craft beers. Asked to name all the beverages they’d prefer to drink during the game, 35.6% of Millennials named craft beers, and 30.2% listed non-craft brews. For the post-Millennial respondents, traditional beer topped craft beer by 34.2% to 24.4%. Among all respondents’ preferred drinks, craft beer (30%) ran a close second to non-craft beer (32.2%). The older respondents are more likely to be abstaining – 25.6% said they wouldn’t be drinking alcohol during the telecast, compared to 17% of Millennials.

As for food, there was widespread agreement that Super Bowl Sunday is a day to indulge in guiltier pleasures. 85.3% of all respondents said they’ll be eating “traditional unhealthy-but-tasty snacks,” compared to 14.4% who intend to eat “healthier” foods. Clearly this is a day when pleasure trumps discipline: nearly half (46.5%) of the respondents who said they’ll be opting for tasty treats admitted that they had made a New Year’s resolution to lose weight.

Oh yes, we hear a game’s going to be played. 54.8% of respondents think the Patriots will win, and 45.2% are picking the Falcons. There’s no significant generational divide here: 55.4% of Millennials are picking the Pats.

But while the survey confirms the Super Bowl’s stature as much more than a game, the data hold some cautionary insights for the National Football League. The younger the Millennial group surveyed, the weaker the tie to pro football. Among the 21- to 25-year-old group, 23.6% identified as “rabid” NFL fans, compared to 28.2% of those 26 to 34. And more of the 21-to-25 group described themselves as “weak” fans (18.5% vs. 15.4%) or “not a fan at all” (8.2% vs. 4.9%).

Should the Monday after Super Bowl Sunday be a national holiday to let everyone recover from all the eating, drinking, and shouting at the TV? On that question we’re a nation divided. Exactly 500 of respondents who expect to watch the game said yes to a holiday, and 500 said no. Millennials favor the day off by 52% to 48%; for older viewers, it’s flipped – 48% for the holiday and 52% against.

Here’s to a great game, and a great time for all.

Results

The survey took five hours of fielding to yield 1,000 completed responses. The in-app survey method, unlike online or non-app mobile, is the best way to get efficient and accurate insights into Millennials – such as those you’ve just read. To review the results of the entire Super Bowl study,  click here  and use these login credentials: ID - Super Bowl; Password - Super Bowl Survey.

Methodology

The survey was fielded on Jan. 30 using the Surveys on the Go® app that’s used by more than one million active panelists in the U.S. Demographics: 50% male and 50% female, 50% ages 21-34 and 50% ages 35-70; 59% Caucasian, 13% African American, 17.3% Hispanic, 6.2% Asian, 4.5% Other. Confidence level 95%.

MFour has added Quality Assurance Analyst Neil Byrnes to the team as part of its ongoing expansion to meet the demands of the company's rapid business growth. Neil will apply his background in troubleshooting and analysis of technical systems to support smooth functioning of a variety of MFour’s capabilities, including testing apps, enhancing web pages, and expediting in-house automations. Neil is a music connoisseur, vinyl collector, and audiophile who plays the drums. He also has a passion for restoring classic cars. Welcome aboard, Neil!

The Beatles weren’t always right – especially when they sang that “fun is the one thing that money can’t buy.”

In today’s market research industry, fun is the one thing that your clients’ money must buy. Consumers won’t take surveys if they think they’re stupid, hard to understand, or hard to take on their smartphones. In fact, the industry is pretty much in agreement that widespread sample problems are caused by surveys that are, excuse the expression, stupidly put together and therefore no fun at all for your panelists. An engaging survey gives respondents what they enjoy and admire – a rewarding, smoothly-functioning experience on their beloved smartphones. Make it fun for them, and they’ll respond with the quality data you need to do your job.

Bringing this to mind is a Super Bowl marketing initiative by the Southern California Honda Dealers that promises to create lots of audience engagement because it seems like so much fun. Except, perhaps, for advertising agencies and their clients who can’t take a joke.

The car dealers are leveraging this Sunday’s Super Bowl commercials for an online charity event called the Helpful Bowl. Not a bad idea – the National Retail Federation estimates that 24% of the 189 million viewers expected to tune in will be watching mainly to enjoy (or ridicule) the commercials. Recognizing how attuned today’s public is to the inner workings of anything media-related – especially Super Bowl ads – the auto dealers are inviting viewers to watch the commercials intensely, then go online to report sightings of 17 “advertising clichés” listed on the Helpful Bowl’s website. For each cliché that crops up in any Super Bowl commercial, the dealers’ group will make a donation to Boys & Girls Clubs in its region. Here’s a sampling of the advertising clichés, and their payouts:

• Animated Characters: $5,000 per ad in which they appear
• Celebrities: $500 per ad, the smallest payout (will their egos suffer?)
• Space Aliens: $10,000
• Dumb Guys: $10,000
• Puppies: $20,000 per ad, the biggest payout (giving Boys & Girls Club members one more reason to love puppies – as if they needed one).

It sounds like a lot of fun – which should mean plenty of audience engagement for the car dealers’ initiative, and a nice sum for kids’ recreation.

The same dynamic of interactive engagement determines the success or failure of consumer surveys. It’s getting to be a cliché that mobile research is a must. But generic mobile or “mobile optimized” surveys are bad clichés that definitely do not pay off in engagement or accurate, valid data. To engage smartphone users, you have to reach them in the way they prefer – with a native app that makes surveys display and function with speed and precision. MFour’s app is Surveys on the Go® – which has more than one million active users, including hard-to-reach demographics such as Millennials, Hispanics, African Americans, and parents of young children. Give people a fun and rewarding experience on their phones, and see what happens. Your clients will never mistake you for a “dumb guy.”

MFourDIY™ – the only true-mobile survey-building platform – is the simplest, most cost-effective way to get in on the in-app survey fun. You could become one of your research department’s  biggest celebrities, and that’s no cliché. To find out more, just click here.

Here’s a case study that might change the way you think about using GeoLocation technology to capture Point-of-Emotion® insights. A widespread problem for retail outlets is non-buyers – shoppers who go to a store but leave without buying anything. The challenge for one national retail client was to capture reliable data about the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of consumers who left their stores with empty shopping carts.

The GPS-enabled research helped the retailer conclude that nearly one of six shoppers had entered and exited without making a purchase – for an estimated $10 million in daily chain-wide losses! Just as important, respondents revealed the reasons why they were leaving the store without spending money.

The insights were used to make store-level operational changes to improve the shopper experience, capture missed sales, and enhance loyalty and goodwill. Since these are ongoing concerns, the study can be repeated monthly or quarterly, as needed, to show trends and continue to identify problems and suggest fixes.

But what about you? How can you use GeoLocation surveys to capture GeoValidated insights at a specific point in time? You can turn to MFourDIY™ – the world’s only true-mobile DIY platform. Here's how it works:

• Step #1: GeoFence each of your locations nationwide – it sounds ambitious, but it’s very fast.

• Step #2: Set demographic criteria, choosing from more than 200 different points – including sex, age, income, employment, race, and ethnicity.

• Step #3: Panelists are identified when they cross a GeoFence – both entering and exiting. Upon exiting, they receive an in-app push notification inviting them to take a survey to be completed within 48 hours to ensure against memory decay.

• Step #4: Screening questions quickly to identify non-buyers, qualifying them to continue; qualifiers are further screened to meet any specified demographic criteria – such as Millennials, African Americans, Hispanics, and parents of young children, otherwise hard-to-reach groups who are amply represented on MFour’s well-cultivated panel.

If one client identified $10 million in daily losses, imagine what type of insights MFourDIY™ can deliver for your brand. Click here to learn more.

Is recorded music going to be a big moneymaker again?

The Music Industry Blog reports that music streaming subscriptions hit the 100 million mark for the first time on Dec. 31^st – nurturing hopes that the recording industry may finally be finding its footing in the digital era.

Looking deeper into the grooves of music data, blogger Mark Mulligan says there’s other evidence that “the recorded music business looks like it might finally be starting the long, slow recovery from its generation-long recession.”

• Streaming subscriptions worldwide grew by 53.3% during 2016 – from 65.5 million to 100.4 million.

• Major record labels enjoyed a 52% increase in streaming revenue in the second quarter of 2016.

• Spotify, which has the most subscribers with 43% of the streaming market, is expected to make its initial public stock offering this year, heralding “a level of interest in the music business from financial institutions not seen in over a decade.”

• Amazon Music has a 21% market share; others are playing catch-up. Tidal, led by rap superstar Jay Z, has just 1% of the world’s music-streaming subscribers.

• Not all the signs are good: overall, major label revenues grew just 10% despite that 52% boost in streaming income. That’s because with paid streaming subscriptions on the rise, purchases of individual songs and albums through downloads “are in freefall.”

• Also, there’s not much room for price-driven growth beyond the standard subscription fee of $9.99 a month. “At some stage, perhaps in 2017, we will see streaming in many markets hit the glass ceiling of demand that exists for the $9.99 price point.” If true, revenue growth might depend on finding ways to sell lower-priced streaming options without cannibalizing higher-priced subscriptions.

Clearly this high-profile entertainment sector remains in flux, making it crucial for all industry stakeholders to obtain sound insights to guide their business moves. That includes not only the labels and artists who are trying to establish a livable economic equilibrium in this deeply disrupted industry, but radio programmers and brands who need to know which tracks will drive listenership or advertising lift.

Against this backdrop, DIY – three letters often proudly associated with the world of independent music-making and music-marketing – should be uppermost in the minds of decision makers who need valid, accurate insights about popular music. MFourDIY™ --  the only true-mobile do-it-yourself survey-building tool -- lets you field surveys to a panel whose million-plus U.S. active members include 700,000 Millennials who are prime music consumers. They’re listening to music on their phones – and they love taking surveys on them, too. Smartphone technology lets you test songs, video clips, or even artwork for advertisements and LP/CD covers. You can target music-consumers by the apps they use, including Spotify, Pandora and SoundCloud. Hey Jay Z – if you want to talk to your competitors’ subscribers, here’s how. To come backstage and learn how to rock mobile DIY, just click here.

Here's your Friday roundup of 3 items from MFour to keep you up to speed on mobile research as you kick off your weekend.

• Do the Math: GeoLocation + Mobile Qual = Success

• Only Chumps Let Mobile Innovation Pass Them By

• Why Your App-less Research is Hapless Research

And here's a Friday tune in honor of Mary Tyler Moore – and to launch your weekend on a fondly celebratory note.

MFour welcomes Graphic Designer Erin Roach to its team, making her the point person in advancing and innovating all visual and design aspects of the MFour brand. Erin will bring her talented eye to all graphics and illustrations coming from MFour – including its website, marketing materials, conference booths, and app aesthetics. She comes to us from Cryptozoic Entertainment, where she worked on graphics for merchandising spinoffs from DC Comics, the “Ghosbusters” film and TV series “The Walking Dead” and “Adventure Time.” Erin’s visual stamp is on products bought worldwide, including game cards and game apps. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Design and Digital Media from Laguna College of Art and Design. Erin’s creative imagination doesn’t rest in her free time –  drawing, painting, photography, and the culinary art of baking are among her favorite leisure pursuits. Welcome aboard, Erin! You make us look great.

What’s your attitude toward innovation? Here’s a simple, single-question survey to give you useful insights about yourself – if you’re willing to answer honestly, of course.

So let’s get started. Which of these answers best describes your first reaction to the following recent news announcement: “Airbus Group plans to test a prototype for a self-piloted flying car as a way of avoiding gridlock on city roads by the end of the year.”

1. This is the silliest thing I’ve ever heard.
2. Interesting, but I don’t think it will work.
3. I doubt they’ll be able to make it safe, affordable, and non-polluting.
4. I’m interested in seeing how they’ll tackle the obvious safety and affordability issues.
5. I admire this company’s innovative spirit. I hope they’ll pull it off.

Here’s what your answer means:

• If you selected #1: Your mind’s in a box, and new ideas may never get in. Get a box cutter.
• If you selected #2: Your skepticism is reasonable, but are you really open to new ideas?
• If you selected #3: Your mind’s analytical, but that negative predisposition could be self-defeating.
• If you selected #4: You’re innovation-receptive, prudently aware of challenges, yet open to possibilities. You’re in a good place.
• If you selected #5: You’re an enthusiastic innovation-embracer. Applauding others’ ideas and efforts means you may well have some visions of your own to pursue – and to one day make real.

Thanks for taking the survey and considering our analysis. Now we’d like to give you a first-hand experience of innovation. It’s MFourDIY™ – the only advanced, all-mobile, do-it-yourself survey-building tool. If you’re feeling boxed in by slow, inaccurate data from outdated online and “mobile optimized” survey methodology, here’s your way out. Just click here and see for yourself.

If you need clarity on what mobile apps mean to market research – or to any other consumer-facing business activity – then you can’t afford to miss a new report by AppAnnie, a leading data clearing house on app use and user-satisfaction.

It speaks to the need to adapt, with the financial services industry serving as a cautionary case in point. The report suggests that traditional retail banks have been slow off the mark in perfecting their smartphone apps – leaving them vulnerable to rising financial tech companies. The takeaway applies across all business sectors: If your app delights consumers, you’re golden. If it doesn’t, you’re toast. And failing to recognize that apps are now the standard for all your transactions and communications with consumers is suicidal.

Here are key insights from AppAnnie’s report, “The Nexus for Retail Banking Apps: Stay Innovative or Lose Out to New Fintech Competitors:”

• Overall, financial tech apps such as Venmo earn user ratings of 4.2 out of 5 stars – 16.7% higher than the average for retail banks’ apps.

• Millennials are retail banks’ heaviest app users, nearly doubling the number of sessions among users 45 and older. But they use them grudgingly – 75% are dissatisfied.

• “Mobile apps’ user experience is of paramount importance to overall banking happiness….Mobile is the most likely channel to delight retail banking customers.”

• “Mobile is eating the web, and banks should prioritize mobile apps in their user acquisition, user retention, customer experience and loyalty strategies.”

• Getting apps right pays off: Chase Mobile is one of the highest-rated retail banking apps, and it consequently nearly doubled the average user-retention for all financial apps.

What about your industry? Do you know your customers well enough to choose apps that actually address their needs, so they can address your bottom line?

If you’re looking for the most refined approach to market research, the next step is to check out MFour, the company that has pioneered, advanced, and defined in-app mobile research. You can always get started with MFourDIY™ – the only advanced, all-mobile, do-it-yourself survey-building platform – by contacting Alex at acolao@mfour.com.