Ep. 230 - Phil Ahad - How Insights are Being used Across all Functions, and the Changing role of Insights' Platforms

Happy Market Research Podcast

My guest today is Phil Ahad, Chief Digital Officer at Toluna. Founded in 2000, Toluna produces online surveys and manages a consumer community of over 24 million active members in 68 countries. Prior to joining Toluna, Phil lead marketing and product strategy teams across many different industries, and has held senior-level positions at CoStar, AOL, and ComScore.

Find Phil Online:

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/philahad

Website: www.toluna-group.com

Find Jamin Online:

Email: [e-mail]

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jaminbrazil

Twitter: www.twitter.com/jaminbrazil

Find Us Online:

Twitter: www.twitter.com/happymrxp

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/happymarketresearch

Facebook: www.facebook.com/happymrxp

Website: www.happymr.com

This Episode’s Sponsor:

This episode is brought to you by HubUx. HubUx reduces project management costs by 90%. Think of HubUx as your personal AI project manager, taking care of all your recruitment and interview coordination needs in the background. The platform connects you with the right providers and sample based on your research and project needs. For more information, please visit HubUx.com.

[00:00]

On Episode 230, I'm interviewing Phil Ahad, Chief Digital Officer at Toluna, but first a word from our sponsor.

[00:08]

This episode is brought to you by HubUx. HubUx is a productivity tool for qualitative research. It creates a seamless workflow across your tools and team. Originally, came up with the idea as I was listening to research professionals in both the quant and qual space complain about and articulate the pain, I guess more succinctly, around managing qualitative research. The one big problem with qualitative is it’s synchronous in nature, and it requires 100% of the attention of the respondent. This creates a big barrier, and, I believe, a tremendous opportunity inside of the marketplace. So what we do is we take the tools that you use; we integrate them into a work flow so that, ultimately, you enter in your project details, that is, who it is that you want to talk to, when you want to talk to them, whether it’s a focus group, in-person, or virtual or IDI’s or ethnos; and we connect you to those right people in the times that you want to have those conversations or connections – Push-Button Qualitative Insights, HubUx. If you have any questions, reach out to me directly. I would appreciate it. [e-mail]

[01:32]

Hi, I'm Jamin Brazil and you're listening to the Happy Market Research Podcast. My guest today is Phil Ahad, Chief Digital Officer at Toluna. Founded in 2000, Toluna produces online surveys and manages a consumer community of over 24 million active members in 68 countries. Prior to joining Toluna, Phil has led marketing and product strategy teams across many different industries and has held senior level positions at Costar, AOL and Comscore. Phil, thanks for joining me on the Happy Market Research Podcast today.

[02:02]

Thanks for having me.

[02:03]

I really want to start out and talk about the growth that we are seeing inside of the user experience and customer experience space. If you see like the ESOMR data, market research largely has been flat and yet you have these massive growth revenue numbers in the companies that are focusing on user experience and customer experience. I don’t know if you follow hashtags on LinkedIn; I pay a lot of attention to that. And so, just as a point of reference, market research is around 350,000 to 400,000 people that follow that hashtag whereas a user-experience research is around 4.5 million. So it's crazy like the delta between the amount of people that are following these different trends and the attention they're getting despite the fact that in a lot of ways they're doing similar types of methodologies. Application might be different. Where they sit in the org structure is different. But, anyway,