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By Dani Gibson, Senior Writer

July 5, 2019 | 3 min read

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The future of market research is integrating it into the creative process, says Daavid Kahn, founder and chief executive officer, Instapanel in a video interview with The Drum at Cannes Lions 2019.

Instapanel

David Khaan, CEO, Instapanel

According to Kahn that the creative agency world has a lot to learn from Silicon Valley and the usability testing that has been built into the core of everything that tech startups do; taking a small batch size, agile approach to research and to the creative process.

Instapanel is reinventing focus groups by making it easy for marketers to send out open-ended questions and show a variety of stimuli to highly targeted groups of consumers and capture their responses on video.

It was the third year for Instapanel at Cannes Lion, and the hot topics for 2019, Kahn found included big data and tech companies encroaching on the whole advertising landscape. However, when out and about talking to individual creatives, they're were not talking about big data at all.

“It's not really something that they see as part of the creative process,” Kahn explains. “I can't blame them, it's perhaps a good way to measure the effects of the creative that they've produced but there's a different approach needed to actually inform the creative process and inspire it. I don't think big data is really the answer to that.

“A lot of people think that market research is the death of creativity but from where I'm standing it has a great chance of being its birth. Rather than an afterthought, if you run research up front and understand the audience and their story, then you as a creative storyteller are able to reflect that back to them and tell a much more authentic story and bring out the insights to drive your creative strategy.”

For research not to be just an afterthought, you need to run it in advance.

“The client is concerned that the creative is too edgy, too out there and think that research really can kill creativity,” he says. “Whereas if you integrate it earlier in the process, it can be the birth of creativity, it can give you that raw ingredients, the fuel for the insights.”

Kahn concludes by talking about the importance of storytelling in market research. “You need to have some kind of connection to the audience and the people you're trying to tell the story to. A big part of that is understanding their story. At the end of the day, most of the people here would consider themselves storytellers and it's important to build your stories with a little bit of truth in them.”

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