AI Evolution & Industry Consolidation: What’s Next for Market Research?

Check out the full episode below! Enjoy the Exchange? Don't forget to tune in live every Friday at 12 pm EST on the Greenbook LinkedIn and Youtube Channel!

The latest episode of The Exchange packed in some fascinating topics. They started off exploring how AI, particularly ChatGPT and GPT-4, could revolutionize social science experiments by simulating human behavior. It's an exciting idea, but they stressed the need for accurate data to make it work.

The conversation then pivoted to recent industry developments. Stagwell's doing well with a 7% revenue boost, thanks to their data-driven marketing approach. They also discussed some notable acquisitions: YouGov buying Yabble, and Dig Insights snapping up Ignite 360. The group pondered what these moves might mean for the companies and the broader industry.

Another interesting point was Pure Profile's clever strategy of building panels by partnering with existing audiences. It's a unique approach that caught the speakers' attention.

Throughout the episode, there was a sense of excitement about the future, both in terms of AI advancements and the evolving business landscape in the industry.

Many thanks to our producer, Karley Dartouzos. 

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Transcript 

Karen Lynch: That's definitely our favorite part of the show, is watching the countdown waiting for us to go live. Right, Lenny? It is.

Lenny Murphy: Just trying to get it just right. So hi, everybody. And we're at an Airbnb, and it's near a large Catholic church with bells. And boy, that was right on. Those bells just started going off, and we went live. So something is in sync.

Karen Lynch: That's great. That's great. I actually love that. I wish when there's a church not that far from here that had bells that ring like that. And every now and then on a good day, I can hear them. So not on a day when you have to have all your windows shut because the humidity is crazy here in the Northeast right now, so.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah, well, Debbie Downer, right?

Karen Lynch: So anyway, we were chatting about the weather with friends. You missed the weather conversation. We don't need to regroup on that because we have a lot to talk about, right, Lenny?

Lenny Murphy: We do. We do. So it's some pretty interesting stuff. So interesting.

Karen Lynch: Fun, experimental. Can't wait till we get to the place where I really want to spend a few minutes. But let's start off with this paper. Friends, we have a paper to share with you. So we're getting right into it today. It's funny because this also came at us via email, but you had already found it. So there's this paper about CHAT-GPT or GPT-4 accurately simulating human responses in social science experiments. So Lenny, tell us about what your takeaway was, what you saw when you first looked at it, because I think it's pretty cool to think about.

Lenny Murphy: Besides, holy crap, and here we go. I mean, that's right.

Karen Lynch: I think I think this is just more of the same on some level. It's validating what we know. Those of us who believed that we were getting to this place, like I feel like I anyway, to me, it's not surprising that it's capable of mimicry. Like, I don't think that's a surprise. Because we've been building towards this time, I think.

Lenny Murphy: Well, I think it gets in. So it's actually interesting. We can have this conversation about synthetic samples, right? And there's like the traditional idea of synthetic sample, which we, the industry, has done for a very long time, um, of, you know, based on models of data of behavior and that you, it's like polling, you can extrapolate, right? You sample correctly and you can extrapolate what, you know, a large population is going to do. Um, So nothing particularly new, more in-depth, more robust. But this idea of how AI takes that to a different level, and particularly in this paper, mimicked thousands of diverse demographic profiles to replicate human responses. Overall, and the implications for that are, so in our traditional way of thinking about modeling data, et cetera, et cetera, we have a fantastic new tool that can do that even more than it can be done in the past. But fundamentally, it still comes down to garbage in, garbage out. So that remains my concern that the data that is these things, okay, we've proven it can do it, great. Man, we have to make sure that the data that's feeding it is accurate and correct and appropriate or it is not going to be a good model.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. But I love the, I love the fact that there are for, for everyone who's been dabbling in synthetic sample and synthetic data and the whole idea of, you know, synthetic respondents, like, by the way, we are now having like time is passing and now we have studies that are showing us the possibilities and giving it some credibility. Like now there's, you know, kind of science behind the, you know, science, but science behind the method that I think it's like the method came first and now we're testing the method. And I think that's just from an academic standpoint, I think this is really interesting. Thank you to the social sciences for putting that level of rigor behind this sort of thing. So.

Lenny Murphy: And we should point out that it was GPT-4.

Karen Lynch: Yeah.

Lenny Murphy: So we're at 4-0 now, and 5 coming down the pike. And we have all the others. We're always kind of default to GPT, because it was the first one out. My bet is that it would have the same results for Claude, or Mistral, or anything else. The Gemini, that they're all, because they just keep leapfrogging.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, it's pretty cool. Anyway, check that study out. But what was interesting about the timing of this study coming out this week or hitting the news cycle this week is that there were these two other studies which are published by research firms, right, that are still mapping how people are feeling about the industry. And I just think that's, I mean, about AI within the industry. And I just think that's also another thing to point out is we are still doing research on the research implications or how the researchers are feeling. And both of these came at it in a different way. So the first one that we have to share is from Sand Beach, Howard Martin Bailey. And it's talking about consumer perceptions of AI and how, you know, there's optimism and there's concern and there's, you know, different industries that are leaning in or people are a little more apt to move into. It's kind of like the consumer playing field. It's saying what we've been saying for a while is that there's this dichotomy of how people feel about it.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah. I thought it was interesting that people thought, yeah, this really makes sense in healthcare, finance, fairly complex and inefficient industries in a variety of ways. Not so much on other components, right? There's a lot of pushback around data privacy, security, ethics, all of those things. People see this could, we don't know the arc here, the villain arc or the hero arc yet. Or both. Or both, right? Use your powers for good or evil, right?

Karen Lynch: Right, I think that the good or evil days are behind us and we are at a yes and, or both, coexisting and that is the, you know, paradox that we have to manage going forward with all of this is yes to all of them, right? Like, yes, we have data privacy issues and yes, we have risk of bias and, you know, yes, we have some security issues and yes, it's making us incredibly efficient in so many ways. And, you know, and yes, we can drive innovative thinking with it if we use it properly. Like those things are all coexisting. Yep, absolutely.

Lenny Murphy: And it's going to be that way for a while. Probably that's just reality now.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, exactly. This is just our new normal. It's here. We just live in it now. So yeah, that's the CMB article. And the InfoTools, they also did this one more specifically about market research. And how it's playing out. So we have the one that kind of talks about people in general, and then we have this info tool, one about the state of AI and market research. So another good read if you're tracking, you know, kind of AI in the industry. So I don't know that there was anything new in this one. I think it's really validating. I don't know if you saw anything new.

Lenny Murphy: No, I mean, our friends at InfoTools that we've worked with for Grit, they understand data, data structure, data management, right? That's their thing. Always has been, they're great at that. And that was what they zoomed in on, you know, ethical standards, data integrity, those concerns, and those are fundamental and things that our industry absolutely has a significant stake in.

Karen Lynch: Yeah.

Lenny Murphy: So yeah, I'm glad they put it out.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. You know, and I think for people, you know, in general, like, keep reading, keep learning, keep making sure you're clear on how you feel about it. Because I think that on some level, knowing how you feel about it and facing the ambiguity you may feel or facing the stress you might feel or whatever, that's one way that's gonna get you, you know, further down the acceptance, you know, like acceptance of this is what's happening, right? You know, you don't have to decide whether it's happening because it is. And now you just have to get to a place where you're comfortable, where you accept it, where you're aware of the risks, and then you can, you know, plod forward accordingly.

Lenny Murphy: And that's a good segue into. There is definitely a through line in all of our topics today. All right.

Karen Lynch: So here's the deal. I'm so excited about this. I'm so glad you spotted it. So, you know, Lenny and I both, um, check out product hunt and, um, see what's, what's happening. I missed this one and it's called me dot bot me bot me bot. Anyway, and so I was like, all right, let me check out what MiBot is all about. And there is a video. Please don't play the video right now. Wait till Lenny and I are done talking. But there is a video that had me. It had me so quickly because it was showing all of these different data points that somebody takes on and all of these random ideas. For somebody like me whose brain is always curating and pulling things in and thinking, oh, I should do this with this information, and oh, I should do this with this information. This MiBot is like an AI personal assistant, one part life coach, another part, you know, admin. And I haven't done the demo, but I plan to like as soon as, I mean, not done the demo, like signed up, like I plan to as soon as possible to try it out because I think it's cool just from a wrangling everything that's happening in your brain, especially if you have a bit of a squirrel brain like I do. I can interact with it via voice. I can share things with them. I'm giving a lot of information. And then Lenny can talk about them, then Lenny, you go with the research applications. Cause I'm still on the, what's in it for me part of the exploration. You know, you can, I can share an article. I can share an image. I can share a social media post. I can share all these random things and it will look for the through lines and the common threads. I don't even know what it could do for me. In my role as content curator. Like I feel like I might need a whole separate thing for that, but if it helps me connect dots from random thoughts I have about work and my personal life, like I'm seeing huge possibilities for this application and I'm excited. Yeah.

Lenny Murphy: I mean, it's really cool. It trained off of a large personal model. Um, uh, that's a memory archive. So, you know, we've got LLMs and now we're getting more of a focused LLM off it. I mean, I got multiple episodes of Black Mirror. Um, but my first thought was, Okay. Right. We knew this was coming. You know, we talk about avatars and, you know, and digital assistants and models, and now they're getting very personalized, et cetera, et cetera. Okay. Uh, uh, what, so would it be wrong for me to answer a survey about my shopping behavior? It's got the data.

Karen Lynch: Right.

Lenny Murphy: So, or would it even be a survey at that point? Would it actually become something almost like a diary? So there's so many implications. We're a long way from widespread adoption of this stuff, right? Well, I have a long way to go. My crystals, we all got to be bought, you know. But yeah, what do you have for Christmas?

Karen Lynch: Well, I just started thinking about what you were saying. So you know, in the last 24 hours, I have two weddings coming up in the next month of my life. And I've been out dress shopping, you know, over the weekend with my daughter, and I've been shopping online. And I finally went last night for the wedding that's coming up in two weeks. I just was like, you know what I'm doing? We're at the runway for that one. Like the decision making about how I shop. So when you start to talk about could this meet, like if the me bot had that level of information, how would it know, how would it know when I decide to go to rent the runway instead of shopping online at, you know, one of my favorite retailers or instead of going to a brick and mortar, like how could it answer questions unless I tell it, but maybe it asks me why, like, does it qualitatively interview me with the things I input into it? I don't know yet.

Lenny Murphy: No, no. Yeah. It's just an interesting question. It's anything around consumption.

Karen Lynch: Yeah.

Lenny Murphy: I would, my default would be why the hell not?

Karen Lynch: Yeah.

Lenny Murphy: Right. Anything around attitudes and preferences, probably not there yet, but I could see it getting there.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, it could. I mean, if I, Yeah, it could also just give the data like she's two weeks out from this wedding and then went to rent the runway. And that's actually prime rent. Again, I'm making stuff up, folks, but maybe what's actually telling is that shop in person, shop online two weeks before she pulls the trigger on renting the runway because she's out shopping time. That's actually interesting data that across many different platforms who might be curious as to, you know, somebody might say, you know, oh, she came to our site, but then left without a purchase, or she left stuff in her cart, which are two things that actually happened. So, you know, they might have that data, but they don't know what I actually did next, which was pull the trigger on Rent the Runway.

Lenny Murphy: Or they could, I mean, go back to that first paper, right? So with the, if you're adapting, so say, shout out to our friend Will Each, just for example, right?

Karen Lynch: There's lots of- Spoiler alert coming, anyway, go ahead.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah, that is building and they have built archetypal models of behavior based on profile information. And you layer that in, theoretically, it could mimic, you know, like, okay, here's what we know about Karen and Lenny, they fit into this personality profile, and blah, blah, blah. And here's how they tend to make decisions based on these drivers of values and emotions and all those things, which we do today. We do that. We built that in the segmentation models. So could that be overlaid into something like this? I would expect to see that happen pretty quickly, at least as an experiment. So yeah, here we are. I mean, it's all about back to the CMB stuff. It's about consumer adoption at this point.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. And well, what's interesting about that, Will, I hope you're listening today or at least some time catching this episode. Because maybe you two, at some point, Will is going to be a guest on our show. And maybe Lenny and Will could circle back to this and how that could all work out from a behavioral standpoint. Will's expertise is behavioral insights. And it would be really cool for him to weigh in on this conversation. So I'm excited he'll be on the show. Again, spoiler alert.

Lenny Murphy: No, we can tell people next, you're on vacation next week.

Karen Lynch: I know, they're going to think all I do is go on vacation, though, and that's not really true.

Lenny Murphy: No, I'm teasing. You well deserve that, yeah, so Will's going to guest host next week with me, and we will dive into some of this. I think that perspective, as a behavioral scientist, and as a marketer, I'm looking forward to it. Hopefully, our audience, you will as well. Will Leach is a great guy. He's fun and super smart.

Karen Lynch: You guys are going to have a great conversation. I will tune in probably after the fact because Friday will be a big day for us next week. Very cool.

Lenny Murphy: All right. Now, we've talked about all these things that have been set up. And then when there's a through line and all the M&A activity.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, there's so much M&A. It was really interesting because there was a lot of M&A activity this week also. You know, when we, when we try to wrangle what happened, I find that really interesting. Like some weeks there's not a lot of that activity, even though there's, you know, maybe one here, one there, but this week there were, you know, there's like a few different things to talk about. So, let's start with just money in general. Stagwell, owner of Harrispole, Harris X and Marrow Brands, reported a 7% revenue increase in the first half of the year. So it's the second week in a row we've reported people reporting revenue increases. And I just love hearing that about people. I love when they also are open about why, you know, this is expanding into AI and global markets, good for them. Anyway, I just, I do love hearing that. So again, keep those sorts of releases. Lenny and I spot them when we spot them, keep them coming into the exchange at greenbook.org. But anyway, I just like hearing good news like that. I think it's great for the industry to hear that other companies are doing well and learning how they're doing it, because I think that matters to everybody.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah. Well, and this one jumps out because I think Stagwell is the model or a model of the new integrated data-driven marketing organization, right? I mean, Mark Pan, you know, he started in polling, right? His heart's there. He, he, he knows, he knows data and understands the value of data. And they've been buying these assets that are, you know, data driven, with insight overlay, and then marketing overlaid over that to form what they call the Stagwell Marketing Cloud. And Yeah, they, I mean, 1.3 billion in sales. Now this, I remember when they launched it just a couple of years ago. So this is a company that has rapidly grown utilizing this model. And of course, there's acquisition and you roll it up and yeah, I get all that financial engineering. But the point is, they are building out that integrated model that I think we will see many companies adapt or merge into as things go forward, because the tools like AI unlock more, more value and utility and efficacy. And we're there now where we're starting to experience that. And, you know, they're owning the value data chain from collection, uh, to analysis to activation, which is the real value, right? I mean, that's why we exist. So, uh, so I think it's really interesting.

Karen Lynch: Um, and do we want to talk about the, the other, well, you should, you should leave this one because you have been tracking yabble from the, from the beginning, right? Literally.

Lenny Murphy: Well, yeah, our friends at Yabble, in full disclosure, through Gen 2, worked as an advisor with them. They were one of the first kinds out of the gate utilizing the current LLM AI models. They're an open AI partner. And deploying that within Insights. We use them for grit, for open analysis, great stuff. They're required by YouGov. But what was interesting, to put it in context here, the couple weeks ago, YouGov took a hit, right? Everybody was following this, they saw the stock, they gave an earnings warning. And that earnings warning had to do with specific products that weren't doing so well. And my hypothesis was those products were being impacted by AI adoption, cheaper, faster, that type of stuff. They buy Yabble, Yabble is not just a, they are an AI company, they are an open AI partner, they build models and solutions off of AI. At the same time, they brought in Mark Ryan as chief product officer, and Mark Ryan led products at Kantar, et cetera, et cetera. It's very clear that YouGov was looking and saying, what's our core asset? Data, and it is. They are a vertically integrated company. You don't get to access YouGov samples when they have a massive global panel, unless you're working within YouGov. They're building lots of other solutions to augment that with other data sources, etc, etc And they have lots of ways to leverage that data through research traditional research solutions now They're putting the foundation together to unlock that in new ways So if we talk about building, you know Building these profiles this me bot data type of data off of panelists. You know what? They have the tools to do that now a research company, a panel company that effectively at their core, they do a lot more than that. I'm not trying to minimize what they do, but that is the core of their offering is their own owned panel and their own data. And they're doing the work to start unlocking new value creation out of that. I think it was just as Stagwell is proof of this model, this kind of integrated marketing model. I think the YouGov acquisition with Apple is what we've been talking about, that this is where we would see companies that own data assets like panels go. Boom, there we go. We have two different connected models for what the research industry looks like, One is very service data-driven, service-led like Stagwell. The other is very technology-led and data-driven. Like YouGov. And that, that's the spectrum. Those are the two anchor points for the industry, and they're big companies. And I think that they're moving in exactly the right direction. It was a very pivotal announcement for YouGov. It's a big change for them.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. Well, what I think is interesting about it, And where my brain goes with these is always, you know, what does this mean for both businesses? Like, I guess, okay, great. Now, you know, I can see how you can benefit from what yabble brings to the table. Will yabble still exist as we know it? Or will yabble really just be, you know, lucrative enough to them that, you know, that really, they are serving in service to you gov at this point, like, how will that work out? Or are we still unsure?

Lenny Murphy: Unsure. My guess is YouGov doesn't, they haven't built their business selling to researchers.

Karen Lynch: Yeah.

Lenny Murphy: My guess is that there will be some transition period, but eventually that won't be a, that Java won't be a solution that researchers would, would leverage. I could be, I am, I am guessing. I'm guessing. I think the acquisition was about bringing those capabilities in-house and building products internally and for YouGov off of that. Yeah.

Karen Lynch: No, and I think that's cool. And I think, you know, when it comes to that type, that type of, that type of a deal, for lack of a better word, the level of finance that we're talking about there also, like change is okay. You know, like you're creating something new, like you created something great. Now you'll, you'll collaborate to create something, you know, even grander. So, um, it's different from this next, uh, kind of acquisition that I want to talk about because, uh, you know, would also hit kind of the news this week. The fact that Dig Insights, who, you know, has been a great partner to Green Book over the years, has acquired Ignite 360, is Rob Volpe's company. Rob, who's also been, you know, on my radar as a qualitative researcher, you interviewed him on the podcast, you know, great guy all around.

Lenny Murphy: The only time I ever cried on a podcast.

Karen Lynch: I know, I remember that one. But that one's a little different, right? Because they are very clear in their news, their press release about this is like, Rob will bring value to Digg, Digg will bring an offering to Ignite 360 clients, and they are going to coexist just together. That's a different kind of an acquisition strategy in my mind, as we are just complementing each other, different from the one that we just talked about. Yeah.

Lenny Murphy: Which Digg is, so they have Upside, that is their tool, their platform that has a service overlay on top of it. So I thought that's really interesting because they kind of have that experience of here's a proprietary set of tools that we have developed and are very, you know, do very specific things while having the service connection or overlay through Digg. Extending that out makes sense. So if Upside is your hub, is your platform, and this could be true for any other platform company, right? For instance, right?

Karen Lynch: Absolutely. Yeah.

Lenny Murphy: So, and if that's the hub, and you start building out service components that are owned around it, that do specific things, then I think that's a really interesting model as well.

Karen Lynch: And I mean, if there's a solid consultancy that brings that level of human expertise, or human understanding expertise, I would say they probably all should be doing that right about now, right? Because the platform is just a platform, but at least exploring it, right? So, yeah.

Lenny Murphy: So congrats to them. Congrats to Rob. I cried tears of joy this time. Instead of tears of empathy. No, it's very cool. It's very cool. And I guess, Next, this is not an acquisition, but a partnership, right?

Karen Lynch: Yeah.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah. So Pure Profile, again, full disclosure. I've been an advisor there for many years, out of Australia, great people. Thank the world to them. And they've always had a unique way of building panels. I don't want to sound like I'm pitching, but they're. They go to people who have an audience and they give them some tools and they say, let us opt in your audience and build a panel off of them. And that becomes a data asset that the client, the owner has, as well as something they can monetize. And that's what they've done with a mortgage app in the UK called Sprive. 

Karen Lynch:  I can't tell you how many times I read this kind of saying, like, I am making sense of this. I am making sense of this data and insights company. Partnering with a mortgage assistance app and the change when you start to think about the possibilities for any assistance app to start to learn how to leverage their data in a different way. And I just thought that's what made this mind blowing to me was just the light bulb that went off about anything that you interact with on your phone for so many reasons, partnering with a data collection provider to help me if I'm running that platform, to help me understand. I just thought that's interesting. A world of possibilities for this type of partnership.

Lenny Murphy: 100%, right? And we look at the companies that have done that over the years, LinkedIn way back in the day, right? Pinterest. Lots of examples, Facebook and Twitter have done things like, well, they've known the value of the data and they've built kind of research solutions on top of that. But for a company like this, where instead of them building that internally, they get to kind of outsource it, but still get the benefit. It's fantastic. And I, I keep waiting, like, why the hell is somebody not partnering with, like, every content platform out there, and every, every shopping app?

Karen Lynch: And, and that's the key. The key is, if, if, if it's a big enough business behind the app, they're going to have that functionality, or they're going to be partnering with a large company, right? They have thought through that already. But if it is a startup or a small offering, a smaller business, I'm not saying, I don't know the size of this mortgage assistance app. It's called Sprive. I think Karley already shared the link, but I'm like, all right, so there might be some, plenty of random financial service providers that have an app, because that's the way financial service providers have to. Anyway, there could be hundreds of thousands of opportunities for this type of partnership, right? I mean, it's cool stuff.

Lenny Murphy: It is. It is. All right, that gets us into because of all these partnerships and data and et cetera, et cetera, two things. I know the one thing we thought we would spend a lot of time on, we're not going to, because we're not going to have much time, but the- That was not intentional either, but I'm like, oh no, we're at 30 minutes. No. It's actually kind of a new point now, but we'll get to that in a second. Yeah, exactly. There is an update. But the Inside Association, they watch everything happening from a legislative standpoint and they have some real concerns that kind of good news and bad news is how they position that. Good news was the COSA legislation that regulated social media and minors. That's great. But there's also a lot of concerns about effectively defunding the census and the ACS, American Community Survey. That's vital data that we depend on because we don't do census ourselves. It's really expensive to do a census. Hence why the government spends billions to do it. But yeah, so we'll see. But this is why if you don't support the Insight Association or SMART or the other trade associations would encourage you to please do so because these are the battles that they fight on our behalf. They have staff that are, I mean Howard who leads us for the Insight Association is just fantastic. We need them out there speaking for our industry. Keep an eye on the ball and try to make sure that these things don't get screwed up because of, you know, how screwed up politics are to begin with.

Karen Lynch: So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm with you. This is the reason for existence, right? So keep up the good work.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah. And then on that note, and we'll just wrap up here for me. So you might have heard X was suing Garm, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media. And that came out of some government investigation around potential kind of collusion and antitrust behavior from advertisers. Now, here's the quick update. Garm just shut down.

Karen Lynch: Right, exactly. I saw that this morning. And I actually tried to put it in the brief. And I'm like, wait, why is it not here? It shut down this morning.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah, so they kind of sidestepped that. So let's see what happens.

Karen Lynch: But it just brings up- Yeah, but you can't, can I just put Just one second, because this was my burning question this morning. You can't be like, I just got sued. Oops, it doesn't exist anymore. Like, you're still being sued because you existed yesterday when you were sued.

Lenny Murphy: I don't know, I'm not a lawyer, but it wasn't just them, it was also the advertisers. So, I don't think that lawsuit goes away because Garm says, Oh, we're just done.

Karen Lynch: I think what I read was like Unilever was in there. Like some of the big ones are in there. Mars is there. Like these, there were like a hundred advertisers in Garm. So this isn't a small thing, even though it's a small chunk of the news right now. But, um, But it was a fairly large association of advertisers who are now potentially on the hook for, you know, for damages, for colluding to boycott. Is that really what it is? I don't know.

Lenny Murphy: Something like that. And let me be clear, because we and we, Karen, I debated on that. But this was politicized. We discussed it. We discussed it. This has become a politicized issue, and that may be inevitable. But the bottom line is we have to pay attention to this because our job is to help inform and advise on good decisions from a marketing standpoint. And when there's other considerations at play that may be important, we just have to recognize that, right? We just have to recognize there's a lot of weird stuff going on, but if we're going to recommend, hey, you know what? The population you want to reach is here. To sell more stuff, we should be the adults in the room and say, if you wanna make a different decision, that's fine. But let's recognize that this population is here and if you wanna sell to them, then here's the most effective way to sell to them there. What happens after that is up to everybody else. But I don't think we should just say, oh, we're not gonna do that because just objectively, that strikes me as a wrong way to do good work for our clients. The decision of what you do is different than the recommendation of where they are and think about the implications. And, you know, that's a different decision.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. And Lenny and I will always, first of all, always do our best to come to common ground. That's our promise to one another. And then also we will always do our best to connect these dots to make sure you understand the marketing implications, the advertising implications, because our audience involves marketers, not just insights professionals, but marketers. And advertisers or people making marketing and advertising decisions based on input. So we are, you know, we are in service to our audience and trying to connect dots for people across the board. So, um, yeah.

Lenny Murphy: And so we, and so we follow stories like this because they have broader implications, right? This will be settled by the courts and out of the courts will come some rules. And that's good. That's what the courts exist for, right?

Karen Lynch: Yeah, it'd be cool if Insights Association kind of looked into this too, but I know this is slightly out of their league. But because, you know, but I know the, I don't know what the, if the ARF is covering this, I haven't seen that yet or anything like that, you know, like, Oh, good point. They should be. They should be, right? Or if they said, no, no, we won't go there, but that's what they should be doing. They should be making sure that they cover all of it. So that's our plea for that agency as well, because all these agencies and associations serve a purpose of keeping people informed. We'll do our best, but we're just us. We're just humble little us. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess that's it for this week. I know we were going to try and keep it under 30. We went a little bit over again, but there was a lot to cover. Yeah. Always, always, always. Yeah, you know, we won't leave without Karley throwing up our shameless hugs for our events because we are in it. Attendance for our LATAM event. Attendance. Registration is live and happening. You know, so that's, you know, that's September in Miami. It's going to be a great event. I actually just got really great feedback from a brand who took a look at the agenda online and was like, what a great, you know, what a great, event that you guys are putting together here, really excited about the content. So check it out, join us. On the heels of that one, we have our AI event, which is going to be fantastic. I'm so excited about this event. It's, you know, for people like you and I who, you know, live and breathe this so often, I'm really excited to be bringing some of the content that is really futuristic to our audience. So, and then of course you can pay for our, you know, our intensive day. And get up to speed to make sure that you're where we are. Lenny and I will be having a cameo appearance on that day, right? Kind of summarizing that prevents learning day too. So please join us there as well. Yep. Last thing, goes back to everything else about changing demographics, et cetera, et cetera, right? If you ever, that this was always in Latin America, first chance to have it in the U.S. really encourage you to engage with that event specifically, because those are the experts in culture and difference of understanding the Latin American broad community, whether it's in the U.S. Or Latin America. And that's important. It's absolutely the fastest growing population segment in the United States. And all the experts who truly understand this at a depth level are going to be there. Plus Miami is September. Come on. I know Miami. It's so cool. The other thing though, on that topic though, and then I, then I really stopped talking. Our expert channel focused on LATAM. They publish new content, uh, with us frequently, I think twice a month. The articles, because I read them all, you know, cause I'm acting editor in chief at the moment. And, um, the articles are all like very broad views of the entire region and they cover things that I wouldn't necessarily think would be of importance, but they 100% are if you're trying to learn a landscape in a region that is not the one that you operate in and not your lived experience. So I just think it's a great channel, pay attention to what they're doing. If that is even on your radar, it's a great event to go to. And I'm enjoying seeing some of the names pop up, some of the brands that are going and anyway, so yeah, it'll be a great event. All right. Well, I'm not going to talk to you again. You go on vacation. Happy vacation. Enjoy. 

Lenny Murphy: Folks, I'll be back next week with Will Leach and everybody will enjoy it. Have a great weekend. Yeah. All right. Take care, Lenny. I'll miss you. I'll miss you too, Karen. All right. Bye everybody. Bye.

Links from the episode:

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Infotools released a new paper discussing the state of AI in market research 

Introducing Me.bot: A Personal AI Life Coach 

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Dig Insights Acquires Ignite 360  

Rob Volpe 

Pureprofile partners with UK mortgage app 

US Legislative Digest: Some Good, Some Bad  

X files suit against advertisers and industry groups over alleged boycott

X Corp. Sues GARM Over ‘Massive’ Ad Boycott