How Pernod Ricard ditched DIY for an AI-native insights operating system

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With Pernod Ricard’s Head of Brands, Ireland, Oskar Persson and Bounce’s Co-Founder & Co-CEO, Charlie Butler.

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Most industries in the world right now are under pressure to do more with less. Few are feeling that pressure as acutely as insights and marketing teams. 

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Oskar operates in Ireland, the sixth largest whisky market in the world, and he works on Jameson, the fifth largest spirit brand in the world. As a result, the region is very important to the Pernod Ricard portfolio and there's a high demand for evidence-backed insights to help the business grow and protect market share. 

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Oskar took to the stage at Quirk’s London, alongside our Co-Founder & Co-CEO, Charlie Butler, to share how he’s handling the pressure to do more with less and what he looks for specifically in a vendor. Here’s a recap.

‘Insight expertise isn’t always available internally’

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“We work with full-service agencies for traditional brand tracking. But at a local market level, we needed a more agile solution, but also one that doesn’t have the drawbacks that DIY tools have,” shared Oskar. 

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“When we first started working with Bounce, we had a greater level of insights expertise available to the team internally. I know a bit about insights, but I’m certainly not an expert. Since then, our journey has evolved. We’ve moved from that place of being able to tap into insights expertise locally to no longer having that readily available.”

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“What’s been so great with Bounce is that it’s been able to scale with us as the needs of the business have changed. As we needed more of that expertise, it’s been available to us. Equally, as my team gets upskilled, they’re able to do more themselves. So it scales up or down as needed, depending on where we are in our team lifecycle.”

‘Software hasn’t had the impact we thought it would’

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“It comes down to this idea of co-creation,” said Charlie. “More and more brands need a strategic partner that can guide them on what to do, because they have the technology to underpin that and the research literacy needed to hold the conversation.”

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“But technology or software hasn’t had the impact we thought it would. No matter which technological wave has hit research, full-service agencies have continued to dominate the industry, because most research is complex and custom.”

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“Software companies have still made huge strides. They’ve built unbelievable products and have scaled where you can put rigidity and standardisation around research. But if you think about most research questions, they’re unique. Software hasn’t been able to answer them effectively without context.”

‘The ideal solution could be something completely different at any given time’

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“One of the questions I like to ask my clients is ‘If you had a magic wand, what would your perfect research partner look like?’. What would you say, Oskar?” asked Charlie. 

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“I think the challenge is that I’d magic up something completely different at any given time. I think the magic with Bounce is that we’ve been able to tap into expertise at points where we need it. Equally, we’ve been able to tap into speed,” said Oskar. 

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“If I asked for a show of hands on how many people have more resources to work with now than they did two years ago, I suspect I wouldn’t see any. Marketing and insights teams are under a lot of pressure to do more with less and that’s why Bounce works for us.”

‘Pricing models are forcing bad research habits’

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“This leans into something a lot of companies and agencies are afraid to speak about, which is that this new technological wave is deflationary. The reason we offer full-scale service at pretty much no extra cost is because it ensures the best possible outcome.” Charlie shared.

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“When you price by survey question, you force people to make the survey as small as possible, which is contradictory to the objective. When you charge through the roof for service, people try to do the heavy lifting themselves. It has a bad impact on the research. On the outcome. This is exactly why we wanted to give brands the ability to scale up their access to expertise.”

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“How could we do that while running a profitable business? You’d be shocked at how deflationary AI is. Because of that, we have the ability to embed servicing on top of our AI platform, giving clients the flexibility to lean into tech only, or a combination of tech and talent.”

‘Here’s a real-world example of what Bounce unlocked for us’

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“I’ll give you a real world example of where I think this was an unlock for us,” Oskar added. “We do a lot of work in the music space. We were doing a piece of research with you guys back in 2023 to explore Irish music and genre preferences, with a view to execute that on festival stages over the summer.”

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“We went in with a defined idea, saying ‘OK, this is going to be a pretty straightforward trade-off between pop, rock and electronic music’. Then we chatted to your team about it and they came back and said ‘Have you thought of expanding outside of those genres, as you never know what you’re going to see?’. This might seem obvious, but when you’re in the weeds, sometimes you don’t think to do it.”

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“What really surprised us was that folk and country music came out third, ahead of electronic, which none of us would have expected. This knowledge was such a value add, because it allowed us to get ahead of the curve of where Irish music was going and execute more successful festival deals. We can really see that represented now by the likes of Kneecap and their new album topping the charts.” 

Oskar’s advice to the room

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“If you’re an insights professional, global or local, and you deliver insights to the rest of the business, Bounce has been a huge unlock for us.” shared Oskar. 

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“They’ve embedded knowledge and usability throughout our team. The reality is that we have unfortunately lost access to that specialist expertise internally, just with the nature of the beer industry at the moment being challenged and so on. So there’s a need for our team, who are more generalists, to have access to that knowledge.”

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“The other aspect is that it’s so usable. One word that I think has defined this year is shitification. There’s a lot of talk about AI, but often the features in these products aren’t delivering on their promise. I recently opened a PDF and got prompted to use AI to read it and I’m like… ‘I can read it’.”

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“The difference with Bounce is that all of the features being built are genuinely useful. I can access summaries of what’s happening from a researcher's point of view. I can quickly and succinctly give senior stakeholders a debrief. Ultimately, I wouldn’t be standing up here endorsing it if I didn’t believe in the platform.”

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What is Bounce's Insights Operating System?

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The Insights Operating System exists for insights leaders like Oskar, who need the flexibility to lean into speed when they need it and lean into expertise and servicing when they need it.

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It’s for insights leaders who use full-service agencies for large, in-depth studies, but also need an agile solution to help them stay on top of what's happening throughout the rest of the year.

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In short, the Insights Operating System has two parts. First is the Retrieval Engine. Studies show that over a third of all the research done at an enterprise level is duplicative - a huge waste of budget and effort. The Retrieval Engine unifies all of your past research and enables you to ask questions of it in plain text to see if the answer you need already exists. No need to dig through slides, scan datasheets or rely on your memory.

“Knowledge management, like many DIY tools, failed, because it was like a Google Search for your information. It would simply tell you which of your reports mentioned ‘drinkers in Mexico’. But it didn’t give you the actual answer.”

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“Only recently has it been possible to ingest structured and unstructured data and auto-tag it. We can integrate into your central data infrastructure and understand the context [behind your question], so instead of telling you where the answer might be, we can give you the answer.” 

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For the questions your past research can’t answer, the Insights Operating System runs a gap analysis and builds a custom study using the Research Engine, which is run and delivered at speed by your dedicated Bounce consultants.

“One of the critical components for an operating system is that it can be independent. For a lot of our clients, we’ll tell them the gaps in their knowledge and they’ll go off and run the research with a different partner.”

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“We’re not saying we can do absolutely everything. When speed is important and the need is quant, we will design a survey ready to go live for you in a matter of hours. But if you need deep qual, you can take the brief and take it straight to your qual partner. You may not need to run any research at all, you may need to buy Nielsen data. The point here is independence. The clarity of what you know and what you don’t know.”