YouGov’s CEO on new frontiers in marketing effectiveness at EffWorks Global 2021

Each year, the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) hosts EffWorks, a marketing effectiveness initiative. Its purpose is to highlight important trends and practices occurring around the industry and to provide clients and agencies with resources and tools to improve their day-to-day working practices.

As a partner for

EffWorks Global 2021

, YouGov’s CEO Stephan Shakespeare joined session host Andy Brown in a fireside chat to discuss the state of market research and YouGov’s approach to audience and brand measurement in an increasingly privacy-first environment.

The conversation focused on brand tracking and Brown, from the start, highlighted what he sees as some of the big challenges in consumer research today, including decreasing response rates and data quality issues in a post-pandemic world.

In response, Shakespeare noted that the issue of traditional brand trackers feeling ‘bloated’ can be due to companies asking too much of a respondent at one time, running the risk of consumer attrition. He believes one of the ways to make brand tracking more effective with high-response panels lies in connecting data from previous surveys in order to build layers of information on an audience. By doing this, researchers aren’t asking the same questions time and time again and respondents don’t feel overwhelmed by the length of a daily survey.

This more focused approach to brand tracking even lends itself to keeping respondents more engaged while bracing for the digital upheaval coming to online market research. Consumer concerns around data privacy and stricter regulations on data collection make the jobs of advertisers and brand managers harder. But the challenges also offer marketers an opportunity to become more effective in their messaging and even improve their standing in the eyes of consumers.

“To keep people engaged,” Shakespeare says, “you need to give them a purpose and a sense that they are contributing to something. If that happens, you get over problems of privacy as well because people are prepared to share with you once they know what you’re doing with the data and what it’s for.”

YouGov’s founder also gave his thoughts on market research at its best. He sees it “as a map of how things are” and believes that consumer data should be as rich and current as it possibly can.

These ideas are reflective of YouGov’s practices in being able to conduct daily surveys and then connect data to build a rich portrait of consumers’ entire worlds in relation to different brands. All the while keeping them engaged and rewarded, but answering critical challenges in marketing effectiveness for advertisers and marketers.

“I am keen on is us being able to say things on what’s happening now in ever greater depth,” Shakespeare says. “Market research isn’t just about getting in people’s heads and understanding why. It is, at its best, able to answer some difficult questions. Where are your customers? Where do you reach them? Where is your best value for money in advertising? Where are the customers you’ve lost? If we get those right, we really save our clients a huge amount of money and increase their effectiveness.”