What’s the point of a market research survey that could take weeks when consumer sentiment is rollercoasting up and down every day?
That’s the problem MX8 Labs aims to tackle. The new startup is trying to increase the speed of current marketing and customer survey results.
The company went to market last year, after co-founders Tom Weiss, the product and tech chief, and Megan Daniels, who runs the show, spent years wrestling with the current research and survey system. Daniels was a researcher at Forrester in the mid-aughts, then managing director of research at the market insights firm Phoenix Marketing International, which was acquired by MarketCast. Weiss was CTO and chief data scientist at Dativa, also acquired by MarketCast.
The problem was “near and dear to my heart,” Daniels told AdExchanger.
How it works
MX8 doesn’t operate its own panel or a consumer-facing entity like YouGov that’s known for doing survey-type research. The startup plugs into the main half-dozen services that enable paid media survey distribution. The company says it can get survey results to clients in as little as a couple of days, compared to more than a week with a traditional vendor.
Which begs the question: How does MX8 boast so much faster turnaround times when it uses the same survey system as other market research firms or agencies?
The survey research process incorporates many layers of human services, Weiss said. The business and survey company work together to determine the right handful of questions. That script is tested and then, if approved, goes to the field.
The survey operators use overseas workers, so the time zones don’t sync and it usually takes some days to get started, plus some days to run the survey and then produce intelligible results. A week and a half later, there are some insights ready for the client.
“This is why all brand lift surveys are always so generic,” Weiss said.
With AI tech to sift the data and automate content, like survey questions and survey-takers’ prompts, MX8 can be brought down to a couple of days. And it cuts out a great deal of human services costs.
In practice, Tim Glomb, VP of digital, content and AI at the performance agency Wunderkind, is used to six-digit annual contracts to produce one or two reports per year with big market research and survey firms, including Nielsen, Comscore, McKinsey & Co. and eMarketer.
Sometimes he suspects the research firms take so much time “because they feel that they must justify the costs,” he said.
A $200,000 annual budget with eMarketer, for instance, has dropped to $0 this year, according to Glomb. Wunderkind has been able to run 20 more reports, he said, for only some thousands of dollars. And eMarketer is the survey firm he has positive feelings about.
“We always hated Nielsen and Rentrak [now Comscore],” he said of a previous role in TV marketing. “Still do today.”
He compares MX8 Labs to companies like iSpot that pitched themselves as alternatives to Nielsen’s incumbent ratings and research.
Completing a survey in a day or two and operating the process via API, rather than human exchanges, opens up whole new opportunities for research, Glomb said.
Especially in a post-tariff economy, he said that overall consumer sentiment and the factors affecting purchase decisions can change day to day. A typical survey takes too long for the results to be relevant. It wouldn’t even be worth asking questions that matter in real time.
Also, with the API controls, it means results of the surveys come in every day. As a content producer, the agency can start working on the report because they see trends in the partial results. The agency also saves money because it can halt a survey once it reaches a minimum threshold.
Sometimes the agency and marketer have a strategy in mind, but are “hemming and hawing about going to market” because there isn’t the right data to justify the idea, Glomb said.
Now, a survey can come back with strong data on what a potential target audience looks like or how consumers respond to a campaign, which helps clear that bottleneck.
One advertiser had a months-long strategy for a major global product campaign upended a few weeks ago by sudden tariff changes, he said. If another round of survey research costs tens of thousands of dollars and takes weeks to run, the company would be frozen in place right now.
The market research business, he said, needs a way to measure “daily shifts in consumer sentiment, depending on the news cycle.”
