News notes

The ESOMAR Global Industry Study 2014 reports that online research is now the most frequently used mode of research in eight of 10 of the top research markets. Only France and China were not included, with online research tying with automated interviewing in France and China not reporting.

The proportion of surveys accessed by mobile devices continues to grow, along with their completion rates, says Stamford, Conn., research firm FocusVision. Survey starts on mobile and tablets increased from less than 10 percent in 2011 to more than 25 percent in 2014, according to the FocusVision 2014 Trends Report. Completion rates on tablets rose to 74 percent, comparable to those of desktop computers, and to 64 percent for mobile phones. “This study reinforces that researchers need to continue focusing on survey designs that accommodate smaller screens and touch devices such as tablets and smartphones,” said Aaron Jue, director of research, FocusVision. The firm reviewed thousands of independent surveys of Decipher, the research technology firm which it acquired in January 2015, to determine the rates.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and state attorneys general announced the hoped-for end of a telemarketing campaign conducted under the guise of political polling, with nearly $1 million in penalties agreed to in the settlement. According to the FTC, although the national Do Not Call Registry and telemarketing robocall rules don’t prohibit automated political research calls, “the defendants’ robocalls violated federal law because they incorporated a sales pitch for a cruise to the Bahamas. The robocalls generated millions of dollars for the cruise line. Caribbean Cruise Line Inc. and a number of companies who aided and abetted the illegal robocall campaign agreed to settle charges of illegal telemarketing, robocalls and Caller ID falsification. Litigation continues against several other parties. The Marketing Research Association (MRA) applauded the settlement. MRA had called for legal action after at least one of the association’s members was falsely identified by the defendants as the company behind the so-called telephone surveys. “The survey, opinion and marketing research profession supports this penalty,” said Howard Fienberg, MRA’s director of government affairs. “Robust legal enforcement by the FTC helps deter and punish consumer fraud and abuse. We’re particularly pleased to see the FTC and state attorneys general targeting this kind of fraud - sales under the guise of research, known as sugging – which discredits the entire research profession.”

President Obama has appointed the first Chief Data Scientist and Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Data Policy, Dr. DJ Patil. His new responsibilities include creating nationwide data policies, determining how to maximize return on federal data and working with agencies to establish best practices for data management. Most recently, Patil was vice president of product at RelateIQ, a Palo Alto, Calif., software firm, and has also been a faculty member at the University of Maryland, at the Department of Defense and in senior roles at LinkedIn, Skype, PayPal and eBay.

The SP Jain Institute of Management and Research, Mumbai, India, is collaborating with the University of Michigan to establish a center for big data in marketing. The center will offer a training program for companies on how to use big data and will distribute information on uses of big data to students and corporations. The Jain Institute will also introduce modules on big data in marketing as part of its MBA curriculum.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has asked the government to replace the current every-five-year census with a 10-year census, as is used in the U.K. and U.S. David Kalisch, the ABS head, said that the bureau had spent more than a year developing means of producing accurate population information without a census and believed it could accurately update state populations every three months and smaller populations every year. The main concern with the current census is its cost, which reached $AUD 440 million in 2011, but new legislation would be required to change the frequency of the census. Researchers argued that the Australian census is the envy of other developed countries and changing the census frequency would have far-reaching social ramifications. The next census, scheduled for August 2016, will be the first paperless version.

Gallup, Omaha, Neb., plans to cut its call center staff in Lincoln, Neb., and Omaha as part of what spokesman Johnathan Tozer called “Gallup’s long-term migration plan toward online data collection.” Tozer did not provide specific numbers, but call center staff has already been reduced from 1,350 to 1,200 over the past two years. The shift in strategy follows the drop in U.S. homes with landlines. A 2012 Pew Research Center study showed that the percentage of households in which polling companies were able to reach an adult by phone fell from 90 percent in 1997 to 62 percent in 2012.

Facebook’s privacy policies violate European consumer protection law in failing to meet the requirements for legally valid consent and fail to offer adequate control mechanisms to prevent content from being used for commercial purposes, says a study by the Centre of Interdisciplinary Law and ICT at the University of Leuven, Belgium. The report notes that users have no way to stop Facebook from collecting location information via its smartphone apps other than switching off location access at the OS level, which “places too much burden on its users.”

Acquisitions/transactions

Critical Research, Luton, U.K., has purchased RSM Research, London. The RSM project management team and support staff will remain.

Stratus Consulting, a Boulder, Colo., environmental research and consulting firm, has merged with Bethesda, Md.-based research firm Abt Associates. Stratus Consulting will be integrated with Abt’s existing environmental capabilities into a new environment and natural resources division, which will be led by Joshua Lipton, former president and CEO of Stratus Consulting, reporting to Abt’s Executive Vice President and Chief Business Officer Jay L. Knott. Mike Conti, who has led Abt’s environmental practice, will be the division’s chief operating officer.

In Seattle, Amazon has acquired Denver-based IoT software and tech firm 2lemetry. Terms were not disclosed.

Paris technology firm Bilendi will acquire the U.K. panel activities of Springboard UK after reaching an agreement with Vision Critical. The Springboard UK team will join the Bilendi London office.

New York information technology firm Sprinklr has acquired Pluck, an Austin, Texas, social community platform.

U.K.-based Agility Multichannel, a product information management firm, has acquired Axpa, its longtime support, services and technology partner based in Malmö, Sweden.

Court Square Capital, a private equity firm, has completed its previously announced acquisition of Research Now in Plano, Texas. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Generation Research, a Swedish travel retail specialist, has been acquired by financial advisor Fredrik Lindh. Generation founder Yngve Bia will remain as a senior advisor at the company while Lindh assumes the CEO role.

Telecommunications firm NewsHunt has acquired Vauntz, a big data analytics company. Both companies are based in Bangalore, India.

Shelton, Conn., research firm SSI has agreed to acquire MRops, a Philadelphia-based provider of data collection and management and business-to-business research. MRops CEO Ian Kiernan will join SSI as senior vice president, global operations. At press time, the deal was expected to close in the first quarter of 2015.

Stamford, Conn., research firm FocusVision has acquired Insight Marketing Systems, creator of the Research Reporter research management technology platform. This acquisition follows FocusVision’s acquisitions of quantitative technology firm Decipher and qualitative technology firm Revelation.

London marketing company Ebiquity has acquired Spanish media auditing firm Media Value from its shareholders for total consideration of up to €6 million ($6.7 million in U.S. dollars).

Nielsen, New York, has completed its acquisition of eXelate, a provider of data and technology to facilitate the buying and selling of advertising across programmatic platforms. EXelate is a member of the Network Advertising Initiative, Interactive Advertising Bureau, TRUSTe, Council for Accountable Advertising and Evidon’s Open Data Partnership and these affiliations will remain in effect.

Alliances/strategic partnerships

The U.K. newspaper The Guardian is teaming with word-of-mouth specialist Keller Fay, London, to analyze and track in-person, phone and online conversations regarding the 2015 U.K. general election. The study is aimed at determining how the views of friends, family and co-workers influence voting choices.

Panel platform provider Cint, Stockholm, Sweden, has become a preferred strategic supplier for market research firm GfK, Nuremberg, Germany, in a multi-year agreement. GfK account and operations teams and customers will now have access to panelists within Cint’s OpinionHUB marketplace as well as support on API integration and supply chain management workflow.

London marketing and advertising firm OMD UK has partnered with Buzzfeed, The Guardian, Global Radio, Google, Facebook and Outbrain to create an insight and ideas team, Newsroom. It will be led by Toby Gunton, head of innovation at OMD, along with Sarah Gale as head of insight and Julian Flavin as head of data science. The new unit is aimed providing creative ideas for OMD clients based on the items currently capturing people’s interest.

Toronto software firm Q-Fi Solutions is collaborating with Humber College, Toronto, to provide software solutions for student research projects in Humber’s Research Analyst Postgraduate Program.

Boston researcher InCrowd is partnering with Skipta, a Lancaster, Penn., online medical community specialist, allowing Skipta health care professionals to join their peers on InCrowd’s research panels.

Portland, Ore., researcher Rentrak is partnering with AudienceXpress, a New York marketing and advertising firm, to establish a programmatic TV ad platform. The platform will allow digital video and TV campaigns to be optimized together utilizing Rentrak’s TV viewing information.

Tokyo online panel provider GMO Research is partnering with Bangalore, India, research firm Borderless Access Panels. The Borderless Access panelists will be added to GMO’s Asia Cloud Panel. Clients will also be able to access the Borderless proprietary panels in Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan, Singapore, China, India, South Korea, Thailand and Australia.

Encino, Calif., researcher Instantly has partnered with New York marketing firms xAd and Vistar Media. Instantly will include their ads as part of its Instantly Ad Effectiveness platform, which measures the impact of campaigns across mobile, out-of-home and online ads.

GfK, Nuremberg, Germany, has acquired a stake in YouEye Inc., a Mountain View, Calif., firm that offers a technology platform to conduct and analyze both quantitative and qualitative market research data.

Sprout Market Research, Brisbane, Australia, has partnered with Market Publishers Ltd., London, allowing Market Publishers to distribute and sell its research reports. Separately, Market Publishers Ltd. and DataGroup Booksellers, Birmingham, U.K., are partnering to allow the DataGroup research reports to be distributed and sold on the Market Publishers Web site. And, Market Publishers Ltd. and Global Industry Analysts, San Jose, Calif., are partnering to allow the Global Industry research reports to be distributed and sold on the Market Publishers Web site.

Chicago research firm Information Resources Inc. (IRI) is joining with Kline and Company, a Parsippany, N.J., research and management firm, to provide services to consumer health care clients, including over-the-counter drug companies. The arrangement will combine the point-of-sale data from IRI with Kline’s database and experience with moving from prescription to OTC status.

The Business Research Company (TBRC), London, and Literated.com, Bangalore, India, have partnered to allow the TBRC market research reports to be promoted and distributed through Literated.com.

Tokyo-based GMO Research (GMOR) has partnered with Japanese medical research panel specialist MedPeer, adding access to the 74,000 MedPeer physicians through the GMOR Asia Cloud Panel.

LinkedIn, San Francisco, is partnering with New York technology firm AppNexus to begin a global display advertising network. B2B marketing software from Bizo, which it purchased last year, will allow LinkedIn to deliver ads based on both its own data and 2,500 other B2B sites. Advertisers can sign up for a quarterly or annual subscription but will have to have a minimum of 20,000 visitors to their Web site.

New York researcher Nielsen is partnering with Concentric, a marketing technology firm in Cambridge, Mass., to utilize its agent-based simulation technology. The tool will provide clients with a replication of consumer and marketplace conditions to test various ad campaign strategies.

Wilton, Conn.-based Kantar Shopcom, an analytics and insights division of Kantar Retail, will partner with Chicago researcher IRI to integrate Kantar Shopcom’s retail purchase transaction loyalty card data with IRI’s consumer panel data and point-of-sale transaction data and jointly create a portfolio of all-outlet, multichannel media planning, targeting and measurement solutions.

Association/organization news

The Market Research Society, London, won the 2015 Innovation award at the Association Excellence award ceremony for its Fair Data initiative, which set forth 10 principles for inclusion in company policies to ensure their fair use of consumer data.

New accounts/projects

U.K. think tank the Larrey Society has selected U.K.-based DJS Research Ltd. to help develop strategic projects and campaigns designed to seek the views and ideas of its members and the wider health care community on a fit-for-purpose 21st century ambulance service.

Global Education Consultation Services has selected Literated.com, New York, as the marketing and distribution partner for its market research reports.

The Joint Industry Committee for Population Standards of the U.K. advertising industry has appointed London information technology firm CACI as its sole data provider.

Portland, Ore., researcher Rentrak has signed an agreement with NBC-affiliate KOMU, owned by the University of Missouri. Also, the Israeli Audience Research Board has extended its contract with Rentrak for television measurement until 2019. Rentrak has also been selected by the Game Show Network to provide TV ratings and Video on Demand measurement. And, Rentrak announced an agreement with Lilly Broadcasting to provide local market TV ratings to the Lilly Broadcasting Group including; WSEE (CBS) and WSEE2 (CW) in Erie, Pa., and WENY (ABC) and WENY2 (CBS) in Elmira, N.Y. Lilly Broadcasting will have access to Rentrak’s full suite of local services.

New companies/new divisions/relocations/expansions

Jeff Savitz has opened Savitz Consulting, a Dallas-based research firm. The company is online at www.savitzconsulting.com.

Kristin Luck, former president and CMO of research firm Decipher, has opened a consulting service based in Bend, Ore.

Research firm Macromill will open a new office in Mexico with Ricardo Cuéllar as its managing director.

MMR Research Worldwide, Oxford, U.K., has opened a new office in Mumbai, India, to be managed by Sandeep Budhiraja, along with a new office in Durban, South Africa, to be headed by Maria Da Serra.

San Francisco app data analyst App Annie opened an office in Singapore in April. It will serve as the center of operations across India, Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand.

GroupM has introduced its MEC, Mindshare and MediaCom agencies into sub-Saharan Africa. Their operations will be overseen by Nandu Buty, COO of Scangroup, the east African advertising and communications company controlled by WPP. MEC will be led by Monica Kambo, MediaCom by Rajiv Gopinath from MediaCom Singapore and Mindshare by Mac Machaiah from Mindshare Southern India.

The Sound, a Vancouver researcher, has opened an office in Mumbai, India, with James McLintock as managing director.

Labbrand, a Shanghai-based brand consultancy, has opened in office in Paris.

KCR, a contract research organization serving pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms, is relocating its head office from Warsaw, Poland, to Berlin.

In Paris, Ipsos has launched a new division, Ipsos Connect, to handle its brand communication, advertising and media businesses. It replaces Ipsos ASI and Ipsos MediaCT. Ipsos Connect will be led by Yannick Carriou.

Software firm Nebu has moved to new offices in Wormer, on the outskirts of Amsterdam.

Avention, a Concord, Mass., information services firm, has launched the Avention Partner Connect program, enabling partners to utilize Avention resources in consultation with clients. Also, Rob Kornblum has been named senior vice president of corporate development.

Vancouver, B.C.-based researcher Vision Critical continued its expansion in Australia with the opening of a Melbourne office and new Sydney location.

Guy Bisson, Richard Broughton, Ben Colbeck and Dan Stevenson, all former employees of Screen Digest, have opened Ampere Analysis, a market research firm in London.

Research company earnings/financial news

The board of directors of New York researcher Nielsen has approved a plan to change the company’s legal domicile from the Netherlands to the U.K. The change is subject to approval from Nielsen’s shareholders, which can be obtained at its 2015 annual meeting of shareholders. The shift in legal domicile is not expected to significantly change Nielsen’s worldwide effective corporate tax rate. The company will be renamed Nielsen Holdings plc.

Cardlytics, a data analytics and digital advertising company, has utilized its recent $70 million round of investment financing to relocate its employees from four Atlanta-based offices into a renovated Sears, Roebuck & Company building in the Ponce City Market area of Atlanta.

Revmetrix, a Washington, D.C., consumer insights specialist, has secured $2.2 million in seed funding. It plans to launch an omnichannel data platform for retailers, which will collect interactions from customers whether they occurred online, in-store or on a mobile device. The data will be identified and stored as unique customer profiles.

Surveypal, Finland, has received a $1 million extended seed investment, to be used for North American sales and marketing. It recently opened a U.S. headquarters in San Francisco.

Lancaster, Calif.-based Simulations Plus Inc., a provider of consulting services and software for pharmaceutical discovery and development, released preliminary revenues for the second quarter of its fiscal year 2015, ending February 28, 2015 (2QFY15). Preliminary revenues for the three months ended February 28, 2015, were $4.544 million, compared to $3.081 million for the same period in 2014, this represents an increase of 47.5 percent or $1.462 million. $1.241 million of the 2QFY15 revenues increase is attributed to Cognigen Corporation, which was acquired at the beginning of the 2015 fiscal year. Preliminary revenues for the six months ended February 28, 2015, were $8.630 million, compared to $5.722 million for the same period in 2014, an increase of 50.8 percent or $2.907 million. $2.376 million of the 2015 revenue increase is attributed to Cognigen Corporation.

Chicago research firm Information Services Group has reported fourth-quarter revenues of $53.2 million, an increase of 4 percent at constant currencies. Annual revenue was flat at $209 million, with growth in Europe but declines in the Americas and Asia-Pacific.

In Tokyo, consumer insights specialist Macromill posted a 2014 year-end revenue increase of 44 percent to 25 billion yen ($216 million), with 12-month sales reaching 31 billion yen ($260 million). The firm also announced plans to open new offices in Singapore, Brazil and Mexico.

Definitive Healthcare, a Boston health care information specialist, has received a significant investment from Spectrum Equity. Jeff Haywood, a principal at Spectrum, and Chris Mitchell, a managing director at Spectrum, have joined the Definitive board of directors. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Following an investment by London-based M&A firm Subito Partners, Geoff Westmore and Neil Brown have joined the board of research community panel provider Verve. Westmore and Brown are founding partners of Subito.