Transforming consumer research

Joel Rubinson, chief research officer for the Advertising Research Foundation opened day two with a report on the ARF's Research Transformation "Super Council" and what was involved in the initiative. 

What is quietly startling is the extent to which clients in the US have become disenchanted with conventional research and want to go somewhere entirely different. 

It is almost impossible to describe the number and nature of the ideas this group is generating, but it is about cross-disciplinary working drawing in disciplines such as anthropology, real-time capture of information and the synthesis of different types of data. Some of it isn't research at all but keyword analysis of blogs and webfeeds.

Most refreshing is that this is driven by clients, not by the smoke and mirrors of business development directors in research houses. The challenge, I suspect, is whether the research agencies can move nimbly enough. Much of this is being driven by marketers who don't feel the need to run it through their own research departments. 

The challenge left by Joel was that these developments required the fixing of the basics. But once fundamental