Summary
Topics covered in this round-up of presentations from the 2013 MRS Annual Conference include Big Data, trust and transparency in the MR industry, the role of emotion and real-time research. Each of these are revealed to be fraught topics, with many researchers divided on whether the preponderance of consumer made available by the digital revolution will lead to a seismic change in how researchers practice their trade. Other subjects mentioned by the day's speakers include behavioural economics and inter-disciplinary collaboration. The report includes insights from companies including Fujitsu, PepsiCo and GfK NOP.

Summary
Since the turn of the century, the pace of change in the skills required to survive and thrive in the research industry has increased significantly. The insights industry embraced technology fairly early on because it enabled efficiency and effectiveness. Now the need is to move beyond using technology as an enabler and adopt technology as a driver. This is likely to mean the experimental mindset will assume greater significance in the future. It also begs the question of how can the industry deal with the fact that technology is going to tread aggressively into territories that were solely dependent on the human brain?

Summary
Brand owners have access to more data than ever before and the sea of data is getting deeper and a guiding light is needed more than ever. Quantitative research has to be part of the broader strategic conversation to deliver genuine value. To do this, quant researchers need to become storytellers as well as information providers. Telling a story with quant requires researchers to think about how to tell the story at every stage, from responding to the brief, to delivering the final output. This article explains the four key parts to telling a story with numbers.

Summary
The growth of audio downloading and streaming is turning music data into a rich source of insight. Data-mining services are processing daily listening and purchasing information on a global scale for the music industry to use as a predictive, decision-making tool. This data is also driving new forms of advertising, such as music streaming service Spotify's campaign that showcased on outdoor posters the most popular songs of different UK regions. This Snapshot includes examples of brands ahead of the curve and discusses the general implications of the trend.

Summary
Being able to put a finger on the variables that make the biggest difference to the success of a company gives a feeling of security, and is also critical to making informed decisions about marketing spend – especially in recessions when marketers are under pressure to do more with less. In this presentation Karl Weaver from Data2Decisions and Matt Stockbridge from Kraft look at how to measure the overall return of marketing spend as well as isolate the ROI of specific marketing mix elements across multiple territories and regions. Applying the principles related, it is also shown how making knowledge generated across markets works in practice, drawing on examples from Data2Decisions' international client base including Reckitt Benckiser and Kraft.

Summary
In this presentation from Malcolm Murdoch of Mindshare, the use of cookies to generate insight into brands is examined. Cookies provide information from the user's advertising journey on the internet, while still preserving user anonymity. The volume of data produced can be difficult to handle. Video advertising works better than standard advertising. In market sites, reach people are already engaged. Taking content to people is a good way to engage with them.

Summary
There is now heightened interest in understanding purchasing and consumption among populations that are hard to reach for market researchers (e.g. lower income, day laborers). Additionally, the original TrueSample identity validation process involving a name and address match to an external database was classifying a higher percentage of lower income, renters, young adults and ethnic minorities in the United States as non-valid, compared to other subgroups. To overcome this, TrueSample revisited the name and address validation methodology and used a secondary database that validated previously non-validated respondents through the matching of their email address. Results showed the addition of a secondary database improved the validation percentage.

Summary
Social media data extraction tools enable analysts to develop a search query for a brand and a related sub-topic (e.g. price), which is then used to extract relevant posts from existing social media data. However, this paper from J.D. Power argues that the number of potential ways a consumer will discuss a topic means each analyst will have a different strategy for generating queries. Specifically, this can mean different results and conclusions can be obtained by analysts attempting the same data search, which has the potential to significantly impact bottom-line business decisions. By focusing on telecom products as a case study, the paper establishes social media standards around query development including developing Boolean logic templates aimed at improving accuracy, validity, and reliability. It also emphasises the importance of utilising a quality control team to ensure that the extracted data addresses the business questions being researched.

Summary
Peter Dann of The Nursery looks at social media monitoring, which has focused on ROI measurement, but suggests that as research data it can be misleading with small samples and unreliable analysis. He suggests that the real value of social media research lies in analysing the content not the volume and demonstrates the value of proven quantitative and qualitative techniques and experience over data analytics. Case studies come from customer service in high street banks, sports betting and trends in baking.

Summary
The dominant practice among researchers is to treat verbal rating scales as interval in nature because of the vast array of analytical techniques that this opens up when it comes to analysis. This practice prevails despite warnings to the contrary that go back over half a century. A similar assumption seems safer when it comes to numeric rating scales. This paper revisits the issue to caution researchers to use only methods appropriate to the level of the data unless the proper rescaling is employed. The change in chi-square technique is developed to supplement rescaling using correspondence analysis, to uncover how scales are used by respondents. These techniques are applied to a sample that uses a verbal scale and three samples that use numeric rating scales. In all cases, the assumption of interval behaviour of the data proves to be a poor one. Rescaling is found to preserve the association among the variables. Strong evidence that rescaling changes the distribution of the variables leading to changes in the meaning of basic descriptive statistics is provided. Further research in this area and in the field of cross-cultural research is suggested.