Chris Greenough, Alvaro Bretel and Andrew Kolb.
Market research startup Ideally is helping creative agencies reduce time wasted looking through data, and instead, cutting through to the main details of its customers.
The startup recently raised $13.4 million in series A funding to be used to upgrade the AI-powered market research platform.
VML Perth and Brisbane head of strategy Andrew Kolb told AdNews that speed has been the biggest change since acquiring Ideally data.
“When you go through a new pitch process, you don't have much time. It's becoming even quicker these days. We're being asked to turn things around in five business days,” Kolb said.
“In the past, it would take 345 days to go through a research process.
“Ideally helps you accelerate through things more quickly. The timelines in bigger projects, where we are looking at research and creative testing, the acceleration with Ideally is super helpful.
"Speed in terms of access to insight is a super important part of what we do.
“And the platform's ability to cut through data you can get in research and get straight to the interesting parts of what you're doing.”
The WPP-owned creative agency has utilised Ideally to gather insights that help inform the creative work.
Through a study called the Human Truth Project, VML explored how people in Western Australia and Queensland feel about belonging, identity, participation and community.
75% of Queenslanders feel like they belong, but only 13% actually participate in community events, according to the research with Ideally.
“We were trying to understand agnostically of clients, objectives, how we are as people in Queensland, WA, and beyond,” Kolb said.
“The cost of living crisis and the global wars are making us scared.
“What is under the skin of Western Australians and Queenslanders. How do they feel about the state today? What are their aspirations? What are their fears?
“And that research survey was designed with our strategy team. The way in which the Ideally platform has been able to uncover insights from that has been super interesting and powerful for us, working with both the state governments.”
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The agency wanted to test out branded messaging, where they replaced ‘out of stock’ with ‘gone fishing’ to see what was better received by audiences.
Thinkerbell’s executive head brand thinker, Alvaro Bretel, said the team only had to ask six questions to get a sufficient answer.
“Ideally's able to access, receive and ask questions quite quickly, while not depending on a massive third party,” Bretel said.
“The fact that we can control everything from how do we design, the questions, submission and our own analysis of the data and we can cut it up however we want it.
“Of course, you can use Survey Monkey or other forms, but sometimes you cannot get a proper sample, then you use other services, but they take too long, or they're not that user friendly.
“Ideally is fast, user friendly, and it gives me a bunch of control.
“That's the other advantage with ideally, that we don't need to ask that many questions.”
Growth mixed-services agency GrowthOps were looking for a research service that provided both traditional and modern options while working at a reasonable speed for clients.
Being a Malaysian-based agency, GrowthOps Asia general manager Chris Greenough said that the price point had been an issue with other research agencies.
“There was a gap in terms of price, with conversion rates being an issue in Malaysia,” said Greenough.
“But Ideally provides the fast quality, background and good price.
“We were the first agency with them to do a few markets they'd never launched in before. We did one AB, one creative or strategic territory test in seven different markets.
“Ideally is quite agile. If you give them a brief, they figure it out on the go.”
A GrowthOps client needed support in pricing brand merchandising, something that the agency still hadn't delved too deeply into.
The client had also recently overestimated the demand for a piece of merchandise they put out a couple of years ago.
“We started with a selection of about six to eight different items. Measured the demand, the potential, and roughly what the price was,” Greenough said.
“We then shortlisted two or three items and went into developing what the packaging would look like and how we would sell it.
“One was a blind-box, making sure that they were marketed correctly and adjusting the price people would pay for it.
“We were able to find out who the ideal customer audiences were, who is willing to pay more for it, who is willing to pay less, and how we would adjust that to distribute amongst different stores.”
Greenough said as Ideally continues to build on the products from a machine learning and AI point of view, they'll be better at finding the signals and making research even easier.
"Ideally have been quite open to and transparent about their product's roadmap," he said.
"The collaboration and hearing out how either their product or their pricing could potentially be improved.
"I think there's always going to be new and better.
"They've done a good job of making small updates every month. When they first launched, the verbatim's parts for open text sensors were basic, and now they have better sentiment and category kind of bucketing and analysis.
"Ultimately, they're the expert side, but I do have confidence that it's going to continue to progress into a better product.”
Kolb said that this research can help agencies cut through the noise and get to insights quicker.
“Agency land has a love hate relationship with research. We know we have to do it, but sometimes it can be quite painful,” he said.
“Ideally made research enjoyable, easy to use, and is used to get better at what we're looking for as agencies.”
Bretel said that research will continue to change and be more enabled by artificial intelligence.
“There's a whole debate on synthetic personas and everything,” he said.
“We do use artificial intelligence as a testing method, but we have not necessarily gone down the path of creating artificial personas.
“We've created certain experiment conditions that are informed by theory that we like subscribe to, and it's not trying to emulate what a human being will respond.
“It's more within these conditions. What do you think the evaluation of it would be?
“Emulating a human being one on one is tricky.
“That’s why Ideally is relevant and useful in a world where everybody’s trying to use artificial persona.”
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