Bloomberg reports that television viewing patterns for the Rio Olympics defied a particularly golden nugget of conventional wisdom: the supposed invulnerability of major live television sporting events as magnets for viewers.

It turns out that the old wisdom doesn’t apply to Millennials. The group that marketers need the most is the one most resistant to the pull of live televised events. Millennials, it turns out, would rather control when, where and how they watch, instead of being called to attention on someone else’s schedule.

“NBC’s $12 Billion Olympics Bet Stumbles, Thanks to Millennials,” is Bloomberg’s headline, and the story by Gerry Smith gives the particulars: TV viewing for the Rio Olympics was down 17% overall from the 2012 London games, and 25% among the 18-49 Millennial/Gen X audience.

Like other legacy media who’ve realized they must fully embrace sharing their content online, NBC compensated by streaming the Olympics as well, mainly in hopes of capturing younger eyes. Streaming viewers totaled between 225,000 and 500,000 per night, according to the New York Times. 

Perhaps the most grabbing fact for market researchers in the Bloomberg article is this: “NBC charged up to 50 percent higher rates for internet ads than for TV because the web audience trends younger and marketers are eager to reach millennials.”

Millennials also are at a premium in market research. The balance of buying power is shifting to the generation that’s now 16 to 35 and numbers more than 75 million in the U.S., passing the previously most-numerous Baby Boomers.  If researchers can’t reach Millennials…well, let’s just say that’s not an appealing scenario.

On the other hand, if you’ve got a reliable and effective conduit for eliciting opinions and preferences from Millennials, then you’re a frontrunner in the MR race. Millennials' preferences as consumers shape up as being more complex than their elders', so businesses will need to adapt nimbly to attract and satisfy them. That will take some doing -- and some very high quality research data. 

MFour’s value proposition is that the all-mobile research technology and smartphone-specific panel it has developed is the conduit that today’s market researchers need – not just to reach Millennials, but to access  other demographic groups who are considered hard to reach by traditional online-survey methods -- including Hispanics and African Americans.

Vision, focus and experience get results, and MFour got a big jump in turning its mobile vision into mobile know-how. Our Surveys on the Go® app debuted in 2011 -- the earliest days for smartphone surveys -- and began  attracting a panel that now numbers more than a million active members who have the app and respond solely on their mobile devices. Millennials are fully present, accounted for – and are giving MFour's clients a crucial account of their views and habits as consumers and shoppers.

Again -- NBC’s Olympics advertisers were willing to pay premiums of up to 50% on the promise of reaching more Millennials, according to the Bloomberg report. How much is it worth to you to reach them? And how are  you going to do it?

For answers, browse this blog and website further, or contact us and we’ll be happy to fill you in.

There's so much to say about mobile research – we could just fill you up with the facts. Instead, take it at your own speed by sampling our weekly Friday roundup of 3 items from the MFour blog. You can expect information, insights, how-to's and occasional whimsy. Whatever else you do, don't forget to check at the bottom for something to mobilize your spirits heading into the weekend.

Everyone who does valuable work deserves to get paid.

A recent New York Times report about how key employees of hot tech startups are getting restless about whether their stock incentives ever will pay off is a clear example of that dynamic.

Although there’s a chasm between tech geniuses and most market research panelists, the payment issue facing Silicon Valley has echoes and lessons for MR, an industry that relies on authentic responses from thoughtful, honest respondents.

The young tech companies facing the employee stock compensation issue are often highly-valued because their perceived prospects for future success attract large infusions of venture capital. But the Times notes that it has been common policy in the tech world to prohibit valued employees from cashing out private shares they’ve been given as rewards and incentives. As long as they stay, those shares will remain worthless; only if the company goes public will they get a chance to sell them while keeping their jobs.  But going public is a big “if.”

 “Frustrated employees are apt to leave if they believe a promised payday in the form of a stock sale isn’t going to happen,” the Times’ Jim Kerstetter reports. “And in an area where employee retention has become a major issue, it’s all too easy for workers to defect to the next, hot start-up.” Consequently, the article reports, some companies are starting to give employees leeway to cash out at least some of their stock without having to leave.

As we said, there’s quite a chasm between the compensation of tech aces in Silicon Valley, and the cash rewards MFour and other market research firms pay their panelists.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t value and pay close heed to our panel members’ wants and needs. “Be Heard. Get Paid.” is the slogan of MFour's Surveys On the Go® app. It's crucial that we live up to the slogan, which is also a promise, by making the “work” of survey-taking interesting and fun.

The numbers indicate that we've kept the bargain. Our panel has grown to more than one million active members, and counting. Between 2,000 and 5,000 new members join each day, strictly by word of mouth as they hear about SOTG from friends or see comments online.

The panel-related number most relevant to market researchers is 4+ out of 5 – the average star rating Surveys on the Go® consistently pulls down at the App Store and Google Play. We invite researchers to check out those comments and ratings – all of them unsolicited.

Nobody’s going to swing their rent or a mortgage payment by participating in Surveys on the Go®, but the payments are nothing to sneeze at. Judging by users’ public comments, we’re fulfilling both ends of the promise to “Be Heard” and “Get Paid.” Taken altogether, they show that, while panelists may join for the payments, they won’t stay unless the app works just the way it’s supposed to.

For researchers, a panel’s value is in its engagement, its quality and its diversity. Reaching the public where it lives – on smartphones that have become all but indispensable to daily living – is the smartest bet researchers can make when it comes to choosing sample for their studies. Among those who are particularly strong smartphone adopters and users are groups that have become hard to reach by other means -- notably Millennials, Hispanics, African Americans and parents of young children.

Millennials, especially, relish technology, but feel personally offended when it gives them a bad experience and wastes their time. There’s a risk – make that a strong likelihood -- that ill-conceived or poorly-designed surveys will turn them off entirely from taking part in consumer research. That’s probably one reason why Millennials perpetually fall in the “hard to reach” category when it comes to finding sufficient numbers of them to fill out survey quotas.

It’s also important to note who gets shut out of a first-class, all-mobile panel: insincere survey takers such as “professional” respondents who lurk online trying to grab multiple opportunities, and speeders who try to game the system by rushing through surveys with minimal thought and effort. Their flimsy input is detected and cleansed from the data we deliver to clients.

In the architecture of MFour’s business, technology and service can be seen as the superstructure of the company we’ve built. The inhabitants include our panelists and clients alike. But an elegant structure will be empty if it doesn’t meet its inhabitants’ needs. Our panel inhabitants need the survey technology to work for them if we’re to keep them happily housed. And keeping that bargain with our survey-takers is fundamental to delivering the quality, on-time data our clients need.

Good research underlies good business decisions, and good respondents are fundamental to good research. We’re proud of the contributions our panelists make because they truly do want to “be heard.” We’re proud to give them the double reward they deserve – an enjoyable, glitch-free survey experience, and well-earned cash payments.

As the great poet John Milton put it, “They also serve who stand and wait.” Our panel may not include many Silicon Valley tech geniuses -- although they’re more than welcome to join. But as our much-appreciated million-plus members wait for the “ca-ching” sound-alert on their smartphones that signals another Surveys on the Go® opportunity is at hand, they’re standing ready to serve market research and the global economy it helps drive.

 

There’s ISIS vs. modern civilization, and there’s advertising-supported digital content vs. adblocking tools.

The first conflict is a to-the-death fight against religious fanaticism. But the second is crucial as well, because it may well decide the shape of world commerce in the not-at-all-distant future.

Market researchers – and the clients we serve – will likely be devoting lots of brainpower to getting our heads around this one.

Columnist John Motavalli at MediaPost.com’s “Programmatic Insider” advertising/marketing newsletter has an informative take that attempts to frame, in broader demographic and psychographic terms, the battle between Facebook and Adblock Plus, a leader in ad-blocking tools.

He theorizes that a great deal is at stake for Facebook because its users are “overwhelmingly young,” with about 30% of them in the key 25- to 34-year-old demo that advertisers need – with even more intense Facebooking among the youngest Millennials, ages 18 to 24.

These, the columnist posits, are overwhelmingly the same U.S. groups that flocked to Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign. In  Motavalli’s view, it’s a group that, not unlike its political hero, is not especially friendly toward big corporations and their established, advertising-centric business models:

“Hundreds of millions of Facebook users have no qualms about disrupting Facebook’s revenue stream. As a matter of fact, it’s probably the safest, most legal way to stick it in the eye of corporate America, other than shoplifting.”

In another recent column, Motavalli ponders whether adblockers will disprove the longstanding truism that “information wants to be free.”

It’s always interesting to look to history for context on contemporary developments, and the struggle over content-funding brings to mind the career and pithy sayings of Samuel Johnson, one of the greatest literary minds (and content providers) of the pre-digital age.

This formidable 18^th century English poet and critic more or less invented blogging – in leaflet form. Johnson got paid for his independent written musings by introducing a subscription model not unlike what major legacy newspapers and magazines still rely on as they try to figure out how to replace ever-dwindling print revenues with digital advertising income. For them, as for all content providers, adblocking poses a potential existential threat.

If adblocking does triumph, it may be back to the future for online content, with the paid subscription model Johnson pioneered as the only alternative to the publishers will have lost.

“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,” Johnson once said. In other words, if there's going to be content, somebody has to pay for it.

Businesses that rely on content-media as a conduit for commercial messaging can’t afford to be blockheaded about the advent of ad-blockers. How will advertisers speak to potential customers, if the public has decided en masse to shut its  eyes, ears, apps and browsers to commercial messaging?

The answer is: we don’t know. But as market researchers, we may soon find ourselves playing a part in this battle, called upon to deliver insights into the kinds of advertising consumers will or won’t accept, and the types of information for which they will or won’t pay.

For the clients who’ll engage us, the stakes will be extremely high.

 

 

 

As unprecedented rains and flooding brought death and untold property damage to Louisiana, two leading insurance industry organizations announced the sobering results of a recent national survey that MFour conducted for them.

 

Trusted Choice®, a branding source for independent insurance agents and brokers, and the Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of America (IIABA) commissioned the study of 1,000 American homeowners that MFour carried out earlier this month.

 

“Many homeowners lack adequate insurance coverage, do not fully understand their homeowners policies and do not have enough savings to support their households in the event of a disaster,” Trusted Choice® and the IIABA concluded this week in announcing the study's findings.  

 

Among the findings of the demographically representative survey of U.S. homeowners: 73% of respondents are “completely vulnerable” to losses from flooding because their regular homeowners coverage doesn’t extend to flood damage. The survey uncovered other misconceptions and wrong assumptions about disaster insurance, including how well-protected respondents would be under their current coverage.

 

The announcement urged homeowners to review their coverage with qualified insurance agents so they can understand the risks and identify the available insurance protections.

 

MFour designed the survey for its clients and fielded it to homeowners  among the million active panelists who use Surveys on the Go®, the native, all-mobile smartphone app MFour introduced in 2011.  

 

Katherine DiPlacito has joined MFour's team as a Research Associate in the Operations department. She’ll help guide clients’ projects from conception through completion and data analysis.

Her hiring marks Katherine's return to Irvine, CA, where she went to high school and where MFour is based. In between she went to college in northern California, then launched her career in market research and marketing with jobs in Boston and New York City.

Katherine most recently had been a research analyst in the mobile department of Phoenix Marketing International in Boston, serving a variety of business clients. Previously she had worked as a marketing associate for Red Rooster Group in New York City, which focuses on raising the branding profile of a nonprofit clientele.

Katherine earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology, with a minor in business administration, from Sonoma State University.

Her hiring continues an expansion that’s expected to double MFour’s staffing to more than 100.

It isn’t always easy to make the case for mobile research – even though by now the facts fall fully on the pro-mobile side.

 

About six years ago, forward-looking members of the market research community began predicting that the then-new mobile approach would soon change the industry as MR professionals grasped the research implications of smartphones’ powerful capacities:  fast computing, real-time data, geolocated questionnaires, and multimedia, among other compelling, research-friendly features.

 

Advocates predicted that by 2012, or surely by 2013, researchers would recognize that a change had come and embrace the new technology en masse.

 

One early visionary, U.K.-based survey software expert Tim Macer, wrote in the June, 2010 edition of Quirk’s Marketing Research Review that “mobile research presents the opportunity to get much closer to respondents at the moment of truth - the point they are actually engaging with services or interacting with products - than you can, say, with an online survey, where you’re still relying on the recall of the respondent at a point later in time.”

 

This was incredibly astute and forward looking – and MFour’s founders didn’t need persuading because they already were thinking along the same lines. In 2010 they laid most of the groundwork for MFour’s all-mobile survey business, and in 2011 MFour debuted Surveys on the Go®, the first all-mobile survey app, and had begun recruiting a smartphone-loving panel that now numbers more than one million active members.  

 

Advocates still struggle to convince their peers to embrace truths that seemed so self-evident even half a decade ago. Visionaries who assumed back then that all would soon acknowledge the rapid ascendancy of smartphones – and all it implied for market research – have been right about the dominance and omnipresence of smartphones in society at large, but wrong about MR’s eagerness to exploit them as the research tool of first choice.

 

Scientific research into the power of first impressions suggests at least part of the answer as to why there’s been more resistance to mobile research than its early advocates would have predicted or hoped.

 

“Even Fact Will Not Change First Impressions,” reads a 2014 headline in the online journal of the Society for Personal and Social Psychology. The study it reported had shown that “first impressions are so powerful that they can override what we are told about people.”

 

Many market researchers were understandably wary of early mobile advocates making enthusiastic assertions. Online surveys taken on personal computers had served them well enough. Why contemplate a radical fix to something that didn't seem broken? That conservatism, coupled with the psychological inclination to downplay facts that conflict with an initial reaction, explains why fully establishing mobile research has been a struggle instead of a cakewalk.

 

When facts and logic fail to carry the day, there’s a fair chance that myth has entered the mix.

 

And in market research, even some advocates have been susceptible to certain myths about what mobile methods can or can’t accomplish. Some  mobile proponents have voiced certain caveats about what they see as limits around mobile research -- giving heel-draggers  all the more reason to say mobile research was not the answer it had been cracked up to be.

 

Here are three of the biggest myths about mobile research:

 

Myth number one: Surveys on smartphones have to be kept short.

The feeling seems to be that there’s something about the phone that’s just not as functional as the personal computer. A number of advocates for mobile research also are advocates for shorter surveys across all platforms. They think lengthy questionnaires bore respondents and drive them away from surveys altogether.

 

This school of pro-mobile thinking holds that smartphones are suited only to  short, quick-hit surveys -- and that this limitation is in fact a blessing that will cut surveys down to a proper size.  But that sells both the phones and the public that loves them short. In MFour’s experience, there’s little drop-off even when interviews exceed 20 minutes. Of course, smartphones are indeed ideal for those short quick-hitters, but they do so much more. 

 

More evidence that smartphones can handle longer LOI surveys came from the survey GreenBook fielded to market research professionals to collect data for its 2015 Greenbook Report on Industry Trends (GRIT). The survey had an average completion time of 15 minutes – considerably longer than what some would consider optimal across all platforms.

 

“Interestingly,” wrote Greenbook editor Leonard Murphy, “the drop-off rate was higher among  PC/Laptop users, indicating that a “mobile first” design can mitigate completion rates and increase respondent engagement.”

 

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

 

Myth number two: smartphone screens are too small for an adequate survey experience.

 

Actually, we can see the point here – but where research is concerned, the point is moot.

 

One also can argue that smartphones are too small for an adequate movie-watching experience: Film critics and many movie buffs do exactly that, insisting that the big-screen experience is sacred, and that when it comes to movies on TV, even the largest home screen won’t suffice. But the aesthetes have lost this battle. Whether it’s streaming movies or answering questions, a substantial majority is just fine with doing it on a smartphone.

 

According to a 2015 study by the Pew Research Center, one-third of all Americans had paid to watch film or television on smartphones – a figure that rose to 52% for respondents ages 18-29. Of course, a great many others who don’t pay for video content are using their smartphones to access an inexhaustible trove of free video. Even if we grant that the small screen is not ideal for watching video, the public has voted with its eyes, and they’re glued to what’s streaming on their smartphones. The lesson for market research is to optimize mobile, not to ignore it. 

 

Myth number three:  smartphone panels are not representative.

 

In a 2015 article in Quirk’s entitled “The Short Survey is King,” Paul Hudson, a U.K. researcher, asserted that not only was the short-survey myth a fact (“Researchers must recognize that mobile respondents have a significantly shorter attention span than online or in-person participants”) – but that, furthermore, smartphone users skewed toward the wealthy and would leave out other important survey demographics: “Income has an additional effect on smartphone penetration. Only 39 percent of individuals earning under $50,000 a year own a smartphone,” he wrote. “In comparison, 64 percent of individuals earning over $100,000 a year own one. So when considering any form of mobile market research, sampling is always an important and pressing issue.”

 

But a Pew study, also from 2015, found that 68% of all Americans owned smartphones – and that those with lower incomes were in the vanguard of those who’ve abandoned expensive broadband connections to the web, and instead had turned solely to smartphones as a money saving move.

 

“[Declines] in home broadband adoption are concentrated among lower- to middle-income households, rural households and African Americans,” Pew authors observed. “There has also been a drop in home broadband adoption among parents of children under the age of 18…. Today 13% of adults rely on their smartphone for online access at home (that is, they have a smartphone but no home broadband subscription), compared with 8% in 2013.”

 

In other words, people at the lower end of the income spectrum are even more reliant on smartphones than the wealthy. 

 

The late, great TV series, “Mythbusters,” never got around to taking on the legends of market research. It’s been fun taking up the cause and declaring them “Busted!”

 

All we can say to market researchers who want to cling to the myths in the face of the evidence is:  Sorry, but you’re mything out.

 

 

It's summer, and MFour has the hottest market research app in the United States.

Our signature Surveys on the Go^® app has spent 30 consecutive days ranked in the top 100 among lifestyle apps at both the iTunes App Store and Google Play.

As of Monday, Aug. 8, SOTG ranked 76th in the App Store and 89th in Google Play. The rankings are unmatched by any other survey app in the category. 

The hot streak reflects four essential truths about mobile apps, says Michael Smith, MFour’s Chief Product Officer & Director of Panel.

• Smartphone users will not tolerate less-than-perfect app performance.

• Building an app that works properly requires laser-like focus and dedication over the long haul. Experience counts.

• The penalties for app imperfection are immediate and harsh: public humiliation from thumbs-down comments and bad ratings, followed by the guillotine – a tap on “delete.”

• Competition is fierce, and survey apps that aren’t backed by experienced software engineering teams devoted to advancing app technology, and operations teams who help research clients optimize  mobile survey designs will be exposed and saddled with a reputation for unreliability.

“It all comes down to quality mobile survey designs,” Smith said. “If you have a slow, clunky, thoughtless app experience, you're not going to keep that app very long. MFour has committed the last five years to studying, developing and refining mobile survey design best practices."

MFour recognized early on that smartphones would dominate communications and information exchange. It has pioneered and continually advanced the all-mobile approach that has become the fastest-rising transformative force in market research as the dominance of mobile apps impels researchers to adjust after relying mainly on online surveys and panels.

Five more numbers help round out the story:

• 2011 – the year MFour debuted Surveys on the Go® as the first all-mobile survey app in the U.S.

• 1,000,000 – the milestone of active panelists using Surveys on the Go® that we passed this spring.

• 2,000 to 3,000 -- the number of new panelists joining each day. 

• $0 – what MFour spends on advertising to attract panelists, because the unsolicited, word-of-mouth ratings and comments we get are all it takes.

• 4.5 out of 5 – the average rating users award Surveys on the Go® on the App Store and Google Play.

While we think all these particulars are interesting, you don't have to commit them to memory. All you have to do is check the rankings.

 

When your project deadline looms and time is of the essence, it’s time to jump on the fastest data vehicle in the entire motor pool of market research – MFour’s all-mobile smartphone survey app and the fully-engaged, million-member panel that’s downloaded it.

Our custom research products and MFourDIY, the only all-mobile do-it-yourself research platform, both can get the job done fast. With MFourDIY, you can build and field your survey in less than an hour.

Here’s how it happens from the moment your survey fields:

1. Push notification – your targeted quotas, including demographically representative complements of hard-to-reach Millennials, Hispanics and African Americans, hear a cash-register “ca-ching” that alerts them to a survey opportunity. No outmoded email notifications needed.
2. Qualified panelists jump on the opportunity. More than one million Americans make up our active panel. They give our Surveys on the Go® app unsolicited raves and high ratings at the App Store and Google Play, and are eager to use it.
3. Native app -- with our native app, your entire survey loads straight into each respondent’s phone. No vulnerable internet connection required.
4. Survey presentation and function are tailored for smartphones, and the native app makes it easy and fast to answer – ideal for quick-hit questionnaires, yet smooth and reliable over LOI of 20 minutes.
5.  Data cleaning -- we do it in-the-moment as it comes in, ensuring the quality you need.
6.  Real time viewing as completes come in on your Project Tracker lets you get an early jump on analysis.
7. Completion rate: 95%.
8.  Completion speed: You get 25% of the completes you need within an hour; 50% within a day; 100% within two days. We told you it’s fast.
9.  Fast reporting. Automatic visualization tools instantly generate charts and graphs of your choice for presenting your data.
10. Deadline met, anxiety relieved. You’ve freed your mind to do your best thinking about actionable possibilities of the insights you’ve gained. You're set to make your best presentation to decision-makers.      

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