Fly Research, is a well established agency, based in West London, specialising in online and mobile techniques, with particular emphasis on both speed and creativity.
Recent successes have lead to the requirement for a research executive to primarily manage a recently acquired major tracker client. The role will encompass all aspects of the continuous tracker including the development of additional surveys and special analyses.
The executive would benefit from learning ad-hoc techniques and their applications in a continuous tracker environment.
The role is likely to suit someone with 1-3 years experience, probably in a continuous research agency environment. Knowledge of ad-hoc techniques would be advantageous but is not a pre-requisite as your experienced colleagues will be happy to train you up!
Alternatively, candidates with an ad-hoc background, keen to develop their skills in continuous tracking should also apply. We can train you up on that too..
Salary in the range of £20k - £30k, commensurate with experience.
Getting to grips with mobile phone market research is certainly a learning curve, any new methodology is.When using a pre recruited panel who have agreed to conduct surveys over their mobile phone is much easier than surveying individual’s cold.
At Fly Research one of our methodologies is to use the internet browsers on mobile phones, we send an SMS message to an individuals mobile phone with a URL embedded into the message, once the URL is clicked on, it launches the internet browser on the phone and the individual is then able to take part in the survey.
From our own experiences, we know that 15 questions is the limit, we can ask different types of questions from, yes/no to multiple select, open ended, ranking, and scale questions.When asking more than 15 questions per survey, we’ve noticed that the difference between the response rate and the completion rate increases from 10%, to 30% or even 50%.
Fly Research has just recently carried out a study for a mobile phone operator using the clients own customer database. The client was looking for 300 completes’ and we were given a sample of 15000 customers.
Having decided to send out the questionnaire to a sample of 1000 customers at a time, the next major challenge was to decide on the message that the sample should receive inviting them to take part in the survey, the client wanted us to mention the costs involved in taking part in the survey on the mobile phone (in our experience, this is normally 1p-2p per survey on the condition that there is no big logos inserted) , howto get the survey started i.e. clicking on the URL and to state that the survey was from the client.The entire message that we sent out consisted of 320 characters (2 SMS messages).
The survey was sent out at 1pm on a Tuesday and we received 20 completes within the first 2 hours (you have to remember that this sample is cold and has never taken part in a mobile survey before). Within the next 24 hours no further surveys were completed. The next day, the survey was sent out to a further 1000 with very similar results.
We then decided to shorten the SMS message that was sent out to each recipient and we sent the message out at 6pm instead of 1pm.This time we were determined to keep the SMS message down to 1 SMS message i.e. 160 characters and we also removed the cost element from the message.
This time the response rate increased dramatically with 100 survey completed within the first 2 hours. One thing to mention is that with mobile surveys, most questionnaires are completed within 2 hours and then only a handful l is ever completed after that.
We continued to follow this procedure and the 300 sample was captured within the next day and a half. It’s also important to point out that no incentives were being rewarded for taking part in this survey.
At the end of the day it took us a sample of 7000 to get 300 completes. As stated before, this is the first time that these people have taken part in any mobile survey, they were not incentivised and there was a small charge for completing the survey on their mobiles.
Lessons to learn from conducting mobile surveys:
·Keep the SMS Invite message to within 160 characters
·Aim to send out the survey between 5pm-6pm
·Try not to mention the cost (this is not ideal) but for people on PAYG phones it essential, those on monthly contract normally have data bundles and the costs are included in this monthly plan
·Offer an incentive
·Keep the questionnaire to with 15 questions.
·Keep the survey question types fairly simple i.e. don’t ask complicated matrix questions.
·Try not to include too many images within a survey
·Most responses will be captured within the first 2 hours of the SMS invite being sent out
Just done a quick review of share prices in online research..everyone’s suffering but some are holding up better than others.
Toluna are valued at £81m with a price earnings ratio of 36. This is monstrously high these days and is where YouGov used to be. I presume the market expects profits to be shooting up above the £2.27m mark reported as it’s hard to explain otherwise in this environment.
BrainJuicer have the next highest PE ratio with a valuation of £11.6m on profits of £693k. It’s a healthy ratio and I think Brainjuicer are a healthy company with a good steady business from branded clients and a reliable stream of research innovations coming from John Kearon and his team.
ResearchNow seem to be suffering by comparison to Toluna (somewhat surprisingly as I’d award RNow the quality high ground). As of today Research Now are valued at £40.8m with a PE ratio of 11. Profits were £3.69m - someway above Toluna’s and I’d be surprised if Toluna had caught them up. All I can think of is that Research Now is growing too slowly perhaps, and getting sucked into price competition, whereas maybe Toluna’s move into the US panel (CommonKnowledge) and their newish community site are really working for them..Still Toluna look a risky buy at this level…I’d not touch them.
Finally we have the former poster child, YouGov, bringing up the rear and being punished for poor communication with the City and poor performance. They’ve overpaid for purchased panels, been very slow on integration and their shotgun innovation is not really paying dividends. That said with similar sales to ResearchNow, an amazing brand from a respondent point of view and a UK election brewing in the next 12 months or so, perhaps they are a little undervalued.
Who’s to know though? Weird times and the FTSE did fall 5% today down to a level last seen in 1995. Ho hum..
Some industries seem structurally designed never to make much money. Airlines is a classic example - whilst the odd airline makes a profit for a few years here and there, the industry as a whole loses money year after year after year.
I’m beginning to think access panels and online sample has some strong similarities.
Like air tickets, online sample is a high priced item - a very obvious component of the overall project costs - and so buyers work hard to find the best offer.
Like air tickets, online sample is pretty hard to differentiate. You have first class and economy in travel but most people just want to get from A to B and the airline brand is not so significant. Similarly in online sample, it’s proven very hard to develop a position based on quality - no matter how much suppliers offer wonderfully recruited, digitally finger printed respondents, most research agencies find that price is the most rational thing to buy on. This lack of differentiation puts massive price pressure on Toluna, ResearchNow, GMI Ciao et al.
Like airlines, capacity seems to be too high in online access panels…there always seems to be at least one of the major providers in a struggle to get revenue and the easiest way is to cut prices. This then infects the whole industry and we’ve in turn had sub £2 interviews offered by Ciao, Toluna, SSI and now ResearchNow.
CATI costs have come down a fair bit as well but nowhere near as much. We used to expect to pay £6+ for a 10 min online interview about 3 years ago and about £15 for the equivalent CATI interview. Now you can easily buy a 20 minute online interview for under £3, whilst the CATI equivalent would be not so different to before.
The funny thing is I don’t think end clients actually appreciate how cheap online data collection has become - I certainly don’t think (big) agencies are routinely passing on the cost savings…I think they are just shoring up their profit margins.
Also if end clients actually found out just how cheap online interviews have become, I’m not sure they would be pleased…I think they’d be appalled. Because whilst it’s obviously nice to get something cheaper, at a certain point you have to wonder about the quality. How much quality recruitment, how much data cleaning and panel management can you afford if you are selling interviews for £1.50?
If end clients found out the current costs I think they’d think they’d realise they were getting economy seats but paying first class prices.
So what does the future hold for the online sample providers? Well, I think they have to sell 30-40% more interviews every year just to hold revenue. If they want to grow they have to be pretty aggressive beyond this. Which of course makes things more competitive. Which of course puts pressure on price (plus it does not help [them] that they all have the same financial year and so regular buyers know they can just hold out until the end of the quarter and pick up a very competitive deal…).
There’s a good chance that they can grow that fast of course, but it looks like the economic value created is mostly accruing to the customers of online panels rather than the online panels themselves. And it’s disheartening to see how panels burn out…we’ve seen GMI and then Ciao both shoot up and then seemingly hit the wall. But an injured panel can still have a horrible effect on the pricing strategy of a healthy panel and so the infection stays in the system.
Is there a way out? I think at least one of the panels needs to start competing on quality (and actually turning down sub £3 work) and combine this with an Intel inside style marketing campaign to end clients. Quite a gutsy move to do this though and you’d probably lose all your big tracker contracts…so for now I see more price cuts and whilst I worry about quality control in the short term, at £2 an interview I can afford to buy in an extra 20% of interviews and then just throw away the worst ones.
This will work for a bit. After a while though one suspects that we will end up with a fair haggard bunch of respondents as panel after panel burns out on quality and switches to price competition..
I’ve been thinking…when you blog or twitter or update your facebook profile and so on…a whole bunch of people hear about it (with the exception of my blogs - cue tumbleweed and church bells). So, present company excepted, it’s like being famous..and lots of people want to be famous…and so social networking works.
If you’re famous it’s nice because you get more attention and maybe the fast track in life and, who knows, maybe more money, sex, power…but on the other hand you also have reporters going through your garbage to find what brand of toilet paper you use (presumably from a receipt obviously) and paparazzi shoving lens in your face. This is probably akin to the privacy concerns of online social networking and digital living these days - though in our case it’s more self inflicted.
So whilst it’s nice to have the social fame and influence, we also need to be aware of the downsides - potentially we could become famous not just to our friends, family and colleagues but also to less desirable people like spammers or scammers to whom we would much rather remain entirely anonymous and unnoticed..