meaning: The Macer View/14

	The Macer View
	Comment and analysis from Tim Macer Number 14, December 2005

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The Macer View

Conference analysis: Tim Macer offers an exclusive report from the SPSS Directions Conference 2005 in Las Vegas

Predictive analytics and survey process automation delivered though its flagship Dimensions software platform continue to be the twin focus at SPSS after the merger of its specialist MR and larger business intelligence customer streams. CEO Jack Noonan opened the event stating it had been “a good year for predictive analytics” and this growth in demand was helping to fuel the SPSS’s recent surge in profitability. Predictive analytics, “when incorporated with key processes, generates incredibly high ROI.” he declared.

Concern that SPSS may be losing its focus on MR was allayed for the time being by a highly MR-focussed series of presentations from SPSS and several of its customers. James Turner from BT described how Dimensions had been used as a springboard to unify the company’s many ad hoc and continuous research initiatives. Concern over inflexibility in traditional end-to-end research procurement from agencies has led the firm to modularise its research procurement, often using multiple agencies to deliver different components within each research programme. Such inter-agency cooperation has only been achieved though adopting Dimensions as the preferred data collection and analysis platform, with each agency feeding their work directly into BT’s centralised research repository.
Anand Rego of Asian TV network ESPN STAR Sports showed a further shift in the power relationship between agency and buyer by demonstrating how using Dimensions to bring online research in-house, typical project life cycles for ad hoc research had fallen from 70 days to just nine. “The real impact of this that external partners can see whether advertising is working and being seen by viewers, and this has to be done quickly to be convincing,” said Rego. Massive cultural diversity across the countries covered has led the research team, which works natively in English and in Chinese, to make extensive use of focus groups to actually design the surveys, identify appropriate wording and adjust nuance to achieve consistency across markets.

Robert Philpot from Synovate acknowledged that DIY research would increase but did not see it as an overall threat.

Further consolidation among agency ownership will take place, he predicted, providing greater opportunity for efficiency and the lowest possible cost base for research. Convinced that panels still represent the greatest unexploited opportunity for agencies, he felt there was little scientific understanding yet of respondent motivation and fatigue.

There was dismay among Dimensions clients that telephone interviewing will not be fully implemented until 2007. Several technical papers showed that high levels of automation are possible, but that there are still some performance issues to be overcome. Some of the techniques on show were of mind boggling complexity, demonstrating both the sophistication and reach of the underlying Data Model and the very high level of technical skill required to operate it, which may put it beyond the reach of smaller-scale users.