Definition: The table shows the 50 companies / groups identified thus far (10 more added 14th June) with the highest most-recently-reported annual revenue (ie 2021 or FY 2022 where complete) from activities in market and social research, insight generation and delivery, market analytics (not purely for financial / investment purposes), and business data analytics. See below for longer list of inclusions and exclusions.

RAIDAR is...

Comprehensive: RAIDAR aims to include every relevant business we can find, not just those that self-identify as researchers or those traditionally included in such rankings. The second 'A' in RAIDAR is key: where a significant proportion of a company's work is in qualifying areas, but not all, the ranking attempts to put figures on how much of its revenue comes from insights / analytics activities and how many of its staff are focused on this kind of work.

Up-to-date and flexible: RAIDAR will reflect what happened in the sector yesterday, as seen in articles on DRNO. In the case of current and planned M&A activity you'll be able to select whether you want this included in the calculations or excluded - in other words, 'Show me how the table will look once/if the NielsenIQ - GfK merger is finalised' - and so on.

Open: It's not an exact science, but we're open about reasons for inclusion or exclusion of companies and of their individual divisions. By hovering over a company name you can access our comments and reasoning - and by hovering over a revenue figure, you can see any calculations used to arrive at that.

Evolving: The database that feeds this table currently includes just over 200 firms, and these will be added into the sortable RAIDAR rankings a few at a time, as we continue to sift through the available data. We believe the listing is already more accurate, more inclusive and more up-to-date than other rankings you may have viewed: but the names and positions will change, significantly, as new and previously unconsidered firms are added in.

WHAT'S IN AND WHAT'S OUT?

Included: full service and ops MR companies (including panels and sampling), the research and analytics functions of management consultancies, MR and business data analytics and presentation software and platforms, market reports firms, passive data collectors / analysts, behavioural scientists, social media analysts / analysis software.

Excluded: financial sector analysts, pure marketing functions, list providers (marketing / sales functions), credit checking and consumer credit profiling agencies, loyalty schemes, clinical trials activities, other scientific research and analysis unassociated with market understanding or business process improvement.

On the RAIDAR? Shout about it: Note that from sometime in 2023 (July?) a specific top 50 (by latest annual revenue) will be published at the beginning of each month, and on the basis of this companies can license use of a button giving their RAIDAR ranking. More details of how this works and how much it costs will appear in DRNO (and here) in January .