Rep Data

Join Rep Data for an overview of how bad actors commit fraud in the modern research environment and why it is so hard to detect and combat. Vignesh Krishnan, Rep Data's CTO, will show how bad actors use tech to camouflage who they are and where they are in order to defraud researchers. Steven Snell, Head of Research, will further demonstrate that routine efforts to clean or trick fraudsters fail to identify bad actors. Finally, we will quantify the threat of hard-to-detect fraud in survey research, showing the prevalence of several types of fraud and how responses from fraudulent actors differ from qualified respondents in various domains.

Because of the nature of the business, Wunderman Thompson projects often require very niche target recruitment—especially in the B2B realm. For example, one recent project required hard-to-find IT decision makers who determine technology platform adoption at their companies, while another required individuals with certain education levels from specific alma maters. To find respondents to meet these types of stringent criteria was hard, and even some who indicated they did meet criteria gave bad data.

In fact, the team was running into significant problems with sample quality and, upon occasion, throwing away up to 30-50% of completes. These poor responses were identified as coming from bots, or unengaged respondents who were straight-lining, writing gibberish for open-ended questions, and displaying other similar nonsensical behaviors that showed they didn’t fit the necessary profile.

The team was finding that traditional digital recruitment methods, like email invitations, were not delivering the right respondents or the desired results, and were resulting in high rejection rates. This trickled down and impacted costs, as CPIs for specific projects were based on assumed incidence rates—and these rates were not being delivered upon. In order to obtain the number of quality responses needed, the research team was forced to reset study parameters mid-stream, costing high amounts of time and money, while negatively impacting data quality.

Background

Simon-Kucher and Partners is a global consulting firm with more than 1,400 professionals in 41 offices worldwide. Founded in 1985, the company has over 35 years of experience providing strategy and marketing consulting and is regarded as the world’s leading pricing advisor. Many of the company’s projects include a strong market research element. The insights from these projects allow the Simon-Kucher team to make the best recommendations to clients for optimizing things like pricing strategies, customer segmentation, user experience, offer design, packaging, as well as informing methods for sales and marketing excellence.

Simon-Kucher’s client list is anything but mainstream. Many of its clients operate in very niche spaces, such as point-of-sale software for restaurants, technology platforms for eCommerce sellers, robotic process automation and other very narrow B2B applications. Finding quantitative primary research respondents who can provide actionable insights for these types of narrow industries is challenging, to say the least.

To source respondents, the team was often forced to turn to consumer panels containing panelists who were profiled for some B2B characteristics. This approach had a wide reach but often pulled in respondents who appeared to be appropriate for a study but lacked the necessary depth of knowledge about the niche industry being explored. This negatively affected data quality, not to mention project timelines and costs, as they attempted to fill quotas. Sourcing from expert networks yielded higher quality respondents, but this method was often cost-prohibitive.

Simon-Kucher needed a sample partner with a different approach in order to overcome hurdles surrounding quota fulfillment and quality data for its sophisticated, complex market research projects.

Background

Navigate is a consulting firm in sports business and entertainment that works with the largest leagues, teams, brands, networks, and universities in the world. By executing a variety of primary research projects, Navigate is able to help its clients make strategic decisions based on quality audience insights. With a wide breadth of different goals and objectives among its clients, the firm helps them to be proactive by delivering concise data-driven answers and recommendations.

Navigate conducts both national and DMA-specific studies for its clients, narrowing all the way down to a single team’s home city. This kind of study requires that the respondents coming into a survey are balanced to represent the market in its entirety. Referred to as click-balancing, this approach can always be a bit tricky, but is made even more challenging for small geographic regions with smaller populations.

It is critical that click-balancing is done right while a study is in field so that the sample maintains integrity and the ensuing data really does represent the market. This means that projects must be closely examined on
the front end, and throughout the assignment, to ensure proper quotas are being met. There can often be unexpected movement among audiences after a project is underway and, if needed, the right corrective
measures must be implemented quickly to ensure the right people are coming into the study.

Layered on top of this need is the fast-paced nature of the sport industry, as often projects are tasked with meeting event-driven hard deadlines. Much of the time, Navigate is on a rushed timeline and the window for fielding a study is quite small. These constraints mean that there is no room for error, and Navigate needed a data collection partner who understood these challenges, while also matching the firm’s core approach
and philosophy.