Tuesday, April 15, 2008
The River of Hope
I must step up my blogging activity, too many fingers in too many pies at present. But it's temporary.
There once was a world where we made products. We made TV adverts which interrupted people. That world changed and it became slowly less efficient. Then we changed the nature of the TV adverts such that it was all about salience and stand out. And now we cannot even do that easily because the world is just too cluttered and digitalisation is eroding what it means to be mass market. And now we have behavioural targeting.
There once was a world where we interrupted people to do research. And it became less effective over time as response rates and attention levels declined. And we developed panels to deal with the issue. The problem was that the panel came under strain as communities and the number of people willing to take part in the panel / research company equation changed in degree.
Here is my point. Today some commentators talk about 'river sampling' (intercepting people on the web to take surveys) as an approach to supplement the managed access panel ideal. We have come full circle. And in the same way that advertising shouted harder when the model came under strain so it is with the way we engage people. The trouble is that the river model is stil built for the benefit of the researcher and not the person taking the survey per se. Until we address this it is just a short term solution.
Or to put it another way:
'the web is the worst technology ever invented to intercept people who don't want to be intercepted'. That sums it up nicely. And that is the problem of the river - we need to evolve the panel model, not go backwards.
There once was a world where we made products. We made TV adverts which interrupted people. That world changed and it became slowly less efficient. Then we changed the nature of the TV adverts such that it was all about salience and stand out. And now we cannot even do that easily because the world is just too cluttered and digitalisation is eroding what it means to be mass market. And now we have behavioural targeting.
There once was a world where we interrupted people to do research. And it became less effective over time as response rates and attention levels declined. And we developed panels to deal with the issue. The problem was that the panel came under strain as communities and the number of people willing to take part in the panel / research company equation changed in degree.
Here is my point. Today some commentators talk about 'river sampling' (intercepting people on the web to take surveys) as an approach to supplement the managed access panel ideal. We have come full circle. And in the same way that advertising shouted harder when the model came under strain so it is with the way we engage people. The trouble is that the river model is stil built for the benefit of the researcher and not the person taking the survey per se. Until we address this it is just a short term solution.
Or to put it another way:
'the web is the worst technology ever invented to intercept people who don't want to be intercepted'. That sums it up nicely. And that is the problem of the river - we need to evolve the panel model, not go backwards.
