surveys

What Did Pollsters Learn from the 2020 Election Polls?

Kathy Frankovic, a polling export who led the survey unit at CBS News for over 30 years and now consults for YouGov, highlighted two plausible hypotheses for the polling industry’s over-estimation of Democratic strength in the election:

  1. Likely voter models built on past voting practices: Likely voter models were based on the norm of Election-Day voting, and were unprepared for an election in which two thirds of 2020 votes were not cast on Election Day. One to two percent of mail-in votes don’t get counted, but in seven states, about 10% or more are rejected.
  2. The “missing” Trump voter (as opposed to the “shy” Trump voter): In states which Trump carried with 55% or more of the vote, YouGov pre-election polls showed him tied with Biden. Trump’s bashing of the polls may have discouraged his supporters from participating in polls.

Inclusion by Design in Pharma Research and Marketing

This ARF Pharma Council event followed up on the Council’s podcast episode on “Inclusive Futures of Humancare,” focusing on the importance of inclusiveness in pharma research and marketing with respect to both demographic characteristics and health conditions.  Four speakers delivered brief presentations, followed by a discussion moderated by Pharma Council Co-Chair Marjorie Reedy of Merck.

How Researchers Can Learn from Recent Political Polling Challenges

This event was suggested by the ARF’s LA Media Research Council in the aftermath of the poor performance of last November’s election polls.  Council members felt that the discussions about polling could impact trust in consumer and media research and that we should explore what research suppliers are doing to implement Best Practices. Research Quality has always been a key issue for the ARF. Most recently, an ARF event about the November polls found that while some issues are unique to political polling, many impact all survey research, for example, obtaining representative samples while response rates are declining, validity of responses, and predicting behavior and attitude trends.

Measuring Customer Sentiment 101

On October 11, 2022, Stephanie Scalice, Winner of the 2022 ARF Great Mind Awards Young Pro of the Year Award and Senior Market Research Manager at LinkedIn, led the ARF Young Pros through a deep dive into NPS, CSAT and CES—the three most used metrics by modern businesses to better measure and understand customer satisfaction. Attendees learned more about what each metric is, when and how to implement it, real life applications of these tools and more.

ATTENTION 2023

On June 7, 2023, attention economy experts came together in NYC to share case studies and participate in engaging discussions on the attention measurement landscape. Plus, attendees heard a recap of the issues debated at AUDIENCExSCIENCE and an update on Phase I of the ARF Attention Validation Initiative, an empirically based evaluation of the rapidly developing market for attention measurement and prediction.

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Use AI to Automate These Aspects of Market Research

  • MSI

Adopting AI usage into business functions seems to be the new trend, but can it be used to increase efficiency in market research? This study finds that it can help reduce costs and improve speed by automating some aspects of the process. One such way is to use Large Language Models (LLMs) as stand-ins for human survey respondents. The pool of respondents is shrinking. Moreover, the research finds that LLMs can realistically reflect consumer preferences because they have been trained on extensive online data. This process is also a fraction of the cost and time required with conventional methods.

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Inclusion by Design in Pharma Research and Marketing

  • Pharma Council

This ARF Pharma Council event followed up on the Council’s podcast episode on “Inclusive Futures of Humancare,” focusing on the importance of inclusiveness in pharma research and marketing with respect to both demographic characteristics and health conditions.  Four speakers delivered brief presentations, followed by a discussion moderated by Pharma Council Co-Chair Marjorie Reedy of Merck.

Member Only Access

AUDIENCExSCIENCE 2023

The ARF hosted its annual flagship conference, AUDIENCExSCIENCE 2023, on April 25-26, 2023. The industry’s biggest names and brightest minds came together to share new insights on the impact of changing consumer behavior on brands, insights into TV consumption, campaign measurement and effectiveness, whether all impressions are equal, join-up solutions across multiple media, the validity, reliability and predictive power of Attention measures, targeting diverse audiences, privacy’s effect on advertising and the impact of advertising in new formats. Keynotes were presented by Tim Hwang, author of Subprime Attention Crisis, Robert L. Santos of the U.S. Census Bureau, Brian Wieser of Madison and Wall, LLC and Andrea Zapata of Warner Bros. Discovery.

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Survey Fatigue Impacts Business

An analysis by Bloomberg concludes that declining response rates on surveys conducted by government agencies could have significant implications for financial markets.

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