Conference Review ESOMAR 70th: Better World Etc.

Hardened cynic Nick Thomas headed to Amsterdam for last week's ESOMAR Congress, in search of inspiration. The 70-year-old (that's the Congress, not Nick) seems in Ruud good health, as we say in Holland. Part 1 of 4.

These days there are any number of ways to watch or hear an ESOMAR Congress - if you didn't want to go to Amsterdam last week, you could watch a live stream or videos after the event, follow various Twitter feeds, get a colleague to attend with a head cam and track their every move, and so on. In some ways it seems odd to write up sessions for later consumption, especially when for various reasons I don't get them finished for a week or so after. And yet... I know I quite like reading summaries and getting a flavour that way, and the number of views our DRNO conference articles get generally suggests I'm not alone, with the key ones climbing past the 1,000 mark. I'm customer-driven, so while you keep reading, I'll keep writing.

One other thing to note. This conference is big: there were 149 speakers and session leaders, by my count, spread over 4 days and three main halls (Blue Stage, Green Stage and Pink Stage). Inevitably, my comments represent a toe dipped in the water, and my choices of what to attend may not have been everyone's cup of tea.


The Sunday and Monday of the 70th Congress were dominated by innovation, with a heavy emphasis on client-side speakers, start-ups, future-gazing and youth research, including the inevitable 'Hackathon', organised and moderated by Reed Cundiff and Csaba Dancshazy of Microsoft USA - I can do no better than paste the description of this from the programme:

We're giving 24 people (masked) data, computers, a room to hack, refreshment and a few mentors. All you need to do is hack at the data and create a winning brand strategy for one of three leading device brands!

The sessions on these days also included talks on practical things like GDPR, covered in a myriad of other places, but still apparently not understood by the great majority of businesses.


I often think, however - and I've heard it confirmed by many others - that the main reason for going to a Conference, other than the networking and to get out of the office, is the hope of coming away inspired, perhaps just by one session, one paper or even one phrase used by a speaker. Years later I can still remember some of the one-liners I heard at previous events and know they've had an impact on what I've done since.

With that in mind, I went to the Blue Stage after coffee on Tuesday for the 'ESOMAR Foundation | Visions Of A Better World' session. This took the audience out of its comfort zone with some disturbing portraits of human struggle around the globe, but also offered inspiration by showing research making a real difference.


Saving Indian Girls from Slavery

Calcutta is known as India's 'Breaking Pit' for its role in conditioning girls for sex slavery - the world's 'second largest and fastest growing [criminal] industry'. Every 3 minutes a girl in India is sold into sex slavery and only 1% are ever rescued.

Yes - if your daily struggle is with incremental improvements to brand lift or customer engagement, Hannah Surabhi's introduction would surely have woken you up. Surabhi (pictured) is Marketing and Communications Director of the My Choices Foundation, which exists to give women and girls in India 'the choice to live lives free from abuse, violence and exploitation', by tackling domestic violence and sex trafficking. If research can make a difference to the work she does, helping to bring hope in areas of real human suffering and struggle, we can be proud of it.

The nightmare was illustrated for us by the story of one father unwittingly giving his daughter away to be married via a supposed family friend who was in fact a sex trafficker. Governments looking to tackle the crisis need an understanding of the complexities of such cases, including the social and economic factors that lead to such desperate errors - otherwise their policy will at best be a blunt instrument. The veil of secrecy around the industry is maintained partly by the shame of those caught up in it - like the father in question. This is exacerbated by poverty, which leads families to take risks - an advantageous marriage may be seen as the only way of feeding dependants. It's easy to stigmatise and think people naïve, but faced with the offer by a cunning fraud of a better life for a daughter, and the probability that one's children will starve otherwise, one can see why it's more complex than that.

For this project, researchers reached out to people in villages, using a quant-qual-quant approach to find villages to research, discussing the issues around sex trafficking in depth and then quantifying the impact of the programme. The team made use of behavioural economics to steer policy in this almost impossibly difficult area. Without the researchers' input, said Surabhi, the government would undoubtedly have tackled the problem head-on, focusing on outrage and condemnation and perhaps preventing people from coming forward. Instead, research suggested subtlety and education, and comic books were used to illustrate the dangers and the solutions, rather than singling out individuals in real situations. This was followed up by a series of movies and public events, bringing in celebrities like cricket captain MS Dhoni to back campaigns for greater respect for women and more openness about the issues. The first national helpline for the issue was set up, taking 11,000 calls in five languages, with 63 'preventative' rescues resulting.

On the down side, if I've got my figures correct that's only 3 hours and 9 minutes' worth of rescues in the course of - maybe a year? But thinking positive, the specific rescues are probably just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the beneficial effects of the campaign - who knows how many people never started down that route or how much more difficult life has been made for the criminals as a result of better awareness. Meanwhile the ability to point to specific cases, however few, is very powerful, and every success story has the potential to feed into future campaigns. Try telling the 63 young women in question that the policy was not a success.


Using Qual in Africa, Syria and Iraq

Sonia Whitehead, Head of Research, BBC Media Action, then talked about the use of qualitative methods in understanding the Corporation's audience around the globe. The role of quant in audience research is perhaps more obvious and well understood - the BBC commissioned 25,000 interviews in 2016 across Africa and Asia to find out who listens to and views its services. Key uses of qual are to report on difficult-to-reach populations; to understand sensitive subjects; and to 'unpick' and understand quantitative data - and Whitehead discussed an example of each.

For the first, specially trained interviewers spent an hour apiece with a number of refugees from Syria, Iraq and elsewhere talking about their predicament and preoccupations. This produced compelling and surprising insights into their daily lives - for example their use of mobile phones to understand their environment, options and even their whereabouts and those of their loved-ones during long treks across continents.

For the second, groups were conducted inside Syria to understand people's views of the conflict and its implications. Projective techniques succeeded in opening up respondents who were reluctant or unable to talk about their own experiences, but able to discuss the hypothetical feelings and choices of others in similar situations. The research helped to identify a number of issues and again, threw up some surprises: for example the fact that it is most often a person's *accent*, rather than any aspect of their appearance of other features of their background, that indicates likely support for the Assad regime or its opponents.

Research in Ethopia helped to unpick quant data, giving governments and agencies a better understanding of attitudes to health. It was found that individuals who had had some exposure to discussion of health issues, even where quite limited, were far more likely to connect well with health workers when they met, and therefore conducting basic activities to prime local people could have a dramatic effect on the productivity of the later visit.


Saving Children in Africa and Elsewhere

Next Georgina Day (Impact and Communications Manager, StreetInvest, UK) and Flora Somogyi (Consultant, Big Sofa, UK) alerted us to the existence of '100 million' street children worldwide - a number they later acknowledged while shocking, was 'not very helpful' because of the variety of environments and lifestyles within it. StreetInvest, a charity which aims to change perceptions of these children, conducted qualitative research assisted by video analysts Big Sofa. Rather than throwing professional interviewers into this situation, the charity trained the existing social workers to conduct in-depth discussions with children, enabling them to recruit a more representative sample rather than just those who might have come forward for a 3rd-party research exercise. The resulting videos were mined and converted into a powerful tool for informing governments about the real nature of the kids concerned, emphasizing their aspirations and the fact they are often victims of circumstance rather than 'criminal types' or other commonly held stereotypes.

To be honest, I'm not sure what impact the videos would have on a typical sceptic. For example, children said 'people avoid us because they think we'll steal their things, but we won't'. Well I've had my passport nicked by a street child, and had to run after him to get it back - but I don't assume now that every one is a thief, I just avoid them because I can't run as fast as I used to and I don't want to take the risk. In a way, the presentation was too slick - plenty of sympathetic music can make something seem more like a propaganda piece, and while the videos were touching and informative, I'm not sure they would change attitudes as intended - I would be more inspired by something acting directly to get the children off the street. However, the speakers might argue direct action is just what the videos are trying to drive - it's not conference-goers they're trying to influence, but the likes of the government of Kenya. If they can awaken leaders to the *possibility* that *some* of these children might be worth a second look and their plight should not be dismissed out of hand but addressed, they have performed well.

Following was Alexis Nestour, UK-based Senior Research Advisor at Save the Children, which works in 120 countries and conducts research principally among children and its own supporters / potential supporters. This is used for four main purposes: to inform its own projects; to influence government policies; for use in campaigns; and for fundraising. Nestour's own focus is on policy influence, and he discussed ground-breaking research such as the use of chatbot interviews to get female adolescents to open up about their diets and attitudes to nutrition; and research into child marriage in Western and Central Africa. The latter has been studied before, but it's rare to hear the views of the children themselves, as this did, rather than their parents or the general population. Nestour says research has proven useful as a way for NGOs to break down big issues into manageable and addressable subjects - to begin to tackle them. I was reminded of the supposed best way to eat an elephant - one mouthful at a time ['though I would have thought 'not at all' would be better. No speaker from the WWF was available for comment].


Inspired?

A discussion followed, ably chaired by Phyllis MacFarlane. The merits of segmentation, modelling and forecasting in social research were noted - for example to show how various proposed policies would impact various groups identified. Certain groups in this field are always going to be extremely hard to recruit and engage for research, and observation can be used to fill this gap.

Steve Kretschmer (MD of the Surgo Foundation, Turkey) tantalised the audience with the thought that NGOs represent a $135bn market - potentially lucrative ground for researchers.

And yet... despite the return to money at the end, and my misgivings about the impact of the final results of some of the studies in question, this was a refreshing and inspirational session which momentarily lifted us away from the conference staples of 'what marvellous new techniques can we use' and 'how can research stay relevant'. For someone like me who's a little tired of the endless grind of commerce, the primacy of the 'brand' and the short-termist bottom-line fetishes of big corporations and their shareholders, this was global in a good way - looking at some really huge problems, many of which are duplicated across multiple countries, and trying to make the world a better place.

Massive cliché? Well no, to be honest, you might hear such talk in a lot of Miss World contests, but very often market researchers don't even *pretend* we're doing that. To hear a number of very different examples of how research is addressing these enormous challenges was certainly inspiring and a good start to my Amsterdam experience.


Tomorrow more inspiration in part 2: ocean odysseys. Not research, but at least as exciting; and Greg Shapiro *will* make you laugh - or he's a Dutchman


Doom and gloom in part 3: The robots are coming, the polls are bust, and the students aren't paying back their loans