Research Now
Enabling Better Market Research with Big Data

Research Now MarketplaceTM automated research studies address an unmet need of business line managers for fast, accurate answers to everyday business questions. “Traditional market research can certainly answer these questions as well but not always with the speed required or at a price point that fits within their budget,” says Gary S. Laben, CEO, Research Now. Automated research studies play a critical role in competitive marketing environments, where understanding the audience is critical for making informed business decisions. By leveraging one of the world’s largest and most diversely represented global panels, Research Now, a Plano, TX-based company enables marketers to understand consumers and connect with them in the most appropriate ways. “We are also engaging with the broader community of innovative data management companies like Quantcast, LiveRamp and Placecast to enhance the value of our existing datasets.”

To reach consumers and business leaders alike, Research Now has created fast, high-quality and comprehensive research solutions. “Through cross-platform integration and thorough profiling techniques, we are able to target and survey hard-to-reach B2B and B2C audiences at home or even when they’re on-the-go,” remarks Laben. The firm’s advanced data collection and processing technology opens up new possibilities as it makes collecting and analyzing massive data sets possible and gives researchers more accurate targeting of their surveys and other studies catering to the demands of the customers. “Big data opens up entirely new possibilities,” says Laben. For instance, leveraging big data, the company records every exposure through every display outlet an ad generates at an individual level which can be billions of impressions in just a couple of weeks. Research Now then matches people seeing the ad to people within its panel as well as to similar people in its database who were not exposed to the same ads and survey them for things like ad awareness and favorability. “This lets us understand exactly how effective ads and delivery channels are.”

Through cross-platform integration and thorough profiling techniques, we are able to target and survey hard-to-reach B2B and B2C audiences at work, home or even when they’re on-the-go

Research Now leverages big data tools including Kafka and Flume for high volume event data collection. The company then uses Hadoop to house the resulting large datasets and Hive to query them. In addition, the use of proprietary visualization tools helps bring data to life and make its meaning more easily extracted which is essential when the data sets are very large.

The company regularly revamps its technological systems to improve both quality and efficiency and come up with better approaches to automate market research. The company’s systems, by utilizing rule-driven algorithms, embody the complex tasks associated with profiling panelists, assigning them to appropriate studies, balancing loads, monitoring results for quality control, and analyzing them by creating visualizations.

An ardent explorer of new ideas and technology, Laben has transferred this trait to his company where creativity, innovation and taking risks are supported and promoted. “Automation is the future of market research and it will affect all aspects of the business including audience segmentation, study fielding, data collection, reporting, analysis and more,” says Laben, “We will continue our solution development focusing on leveraging technology. We must be inquisitive and proactive to discover the opportunities before our competitors wield them against us.”