Summary
The era of ‘Big Data’ offers new opportunities for researchers, as analysing a person's data trail can generate new and invaluable insights without falling foul of any 'research effect' from directly asking the participant's opinion. However, as this paper argues, once human interaction is removed it is easy to look at the results of passively captured data and assume they are the gospel truth. The paper looks at the specific example of cookie tracking, a popular and well-established method of passive data capture, and describes an instance in which it only provided a small portion of the whole story and led researchers down the wrong path.

Summary
This paper describes a mobile-based research methodology to explore comparative levels of political engagement among young people in the UK, China and India, and reasons for the differences between these nations. Using the Mobile Aquarium app, which allows respondents to deliver picture, video, audio and text content throughout their daily lives, this methodology aims to offer a fresh insight into motivations and opinions among youth. This research showed that issues in China revolved around the importance placed upon 'community' and 'society', as youth are mindful of the impression they make on the rest of the world. In India, respondents demonstrated that they also recognise their country's emergence as a world economic power and they focused strongly on the growth of new markets, as well as education reform. In the UK, youth were focused primarily on issues that directly affected them. These appear to have implications for political engagement of youth in these respective societies, as in the UK, they have far less engagement with society as a whole compared to China and India.

Summary
The role of technology in the insights industry over time can be separated into three phases: Enabler, Collector and Generator. The adoption of technology as an enabler allowed the industry to raise the bar in terms of analytics. It allowed the industry to retain its existing business model, which in turn helped it to grow rapidly as sample sizes and throughput increased. As the internet grew, the industry came to view it as a collector of information - a phase driven by the ability to ask people questions over the internet and get data faster and cheaper. This phase changed the game and resulted in the industry being forced to answer a lot of tough questions. The transformation of mobile phones and the growth in social media has led to technology playing a more central role as a generator of insights. This role is here to stay and the insights industry needs to embrace it fully.

Summary
This paper outlines how Coca-Cola changed its approach to consumer behaviour in order to deal with an increasingly complex global beverage market. It outlines how the company collects and analyses its consumer research data from over 100 countries, as well as providing advice on how to respond to pressures the market research industry faces from new entrants, methodologies and technologies. It also emphasises the importance of its "protocol custodian", who oversees the application of the newly designed global framework and ensures it remains locally relevant without compromising global comparability. The paper also provides recommendations for the research industry and examples of the type of analysis that is conducted by Coca-Cola each month.

Summary
In order to assess the extent to which market research companies were engaging with 'smart' technologies, the authors of this paper conducted a survey among 230 companies in 36 countries about firms' use of smart technologies when analysing large unstructured datasets, policies for dealing with mobile survey takers in online surveys, and techniques and technologies applied in presenting data visually. In all three areas, the survey has found that it is only a minority of companies that are engaging with technological advance in areas that are fundamental to modern market research. However, researchers are advised to engage further with these technologies or rish falling behind.

Summary
BrainJuicer's DigiViduals approach - building "research robots" to combine social media monitoring with qualitative and ethnographic analysis - has been successful in European, American and Asian markets. This paper details an experimental study undertaken in China, a market posing severe challenges to any social media monitoring technique. The practical difficulties of creating a Chinese DigiVidual are explored, including censorship, cultural differences and the scale of the market. It details how these challenges were overcome and how the study output led to reframing assumptions about the target market.

Summary
A report from Datacentric, an event organised by Warc. Among the major themes discussed by presenters are: that the rise of "big data" has helped firms to tap new sources of information about customers, giving them the ability to optimise communications in real time; that clients are using online data in a variety of ways, and with varying degrees of success; and that the regulatory environment, particularly for web cookies, is likely to get considerably tougher in future.

Summary
This article outlines the results of a two-year research initiative to understand how social media can be used to map the dimensions of customer interest in a certain topic through the capture, analysis and clustering of online discussion around that topic. The chosen topic was the business impact of marketing but could be any other large, multidimensional topic area. The writers set out to understand what the most commonly used terms used in online conversations are and how can these be used to cluster the conversations into a more narrowly focused set of sub-topics; which venues are host to the most interesting conversations on the sub-topics; and who the most authoritative commentators on each sub-topic are. Analysis was run on approximately two years worth of data, resulting in a data set of 21,000 records with three different approaches. Records fell into eight categories and topic areas attracting the most records were brand equity, then performance measurement metrics. This example demonstrates the ability of social market intelligence to inform understanding of any multi-dimensional topic.

Summary
The mobile research 'revolution' is not near - it's here. And given the extreme pace of technology, and its effect on consumers and thus on research, ignoring it is a risky prospect, particularly for suppliers who will need to invest in technology and partnerships ahead of the inevitable avalanche of requests for mobile research. This presentation examines the primary perceived benefit: speed. In addition, various applications are investigated, including geo­location, cross-platform applications and tablet usability.

Summary
A report from Warc's 2011 Advertising Research conference, featuring insights from Baskin Shark, Synovate, Hall & Partners, Mindlab, T-Mobile and decode marketing. The presentations indicate that researchers have a duty to prove the value of what they do to clients, and this can be achieved by learning from insights from advertising visionaries of previous generations. Equally, they suggested that neuroscience is a potentially useful marketing research technique – but there are limits, and it should be used judiciously. Finally, the presentations concluded that integrating research findings from new techniques such as neuroscience with more traditional survey-based research is the ideal way to go.