How to build a global insights engine without a large research team
With Magnite’s Senior Manager, Marketing Research & Insights, Spencer Baldwin and Bounce’s Co-Founder & Co-CEO, Charlie Butler.
As businesses demand faster, sharper and more actionable insights, insights teams are being asked to play a more strategic role. For many enterprise brands who have a small, or in some cases, one-person research team, that poses a huge challenge. How can these teams find the right balance between strategy and execution?
For Spencer Baldwin, Senior Manager, Marketing Research & Insights at Magnite, this is about control. Keeping control of the beginning - the question and design - and the end - the reporting and insights, and handing off the middle to a trusted partner, allowing him to focus on the parts that are most impactful to the business.
Spencer took to the stage at TMRE, alongside our Co-Founder & Co-CEO, Charlie Butler, to share how he’s driving scale and strategy with a small insights team at a publicly listed company delivering over $700m in annual revenue. Here’s a recap.
‘The sole dedicated market researcher at a thousand-person company’
“I've spent this year travelling around the world speaking about the biggest challenges for research and insights people. One thing I realised as I was speaking with Spencer about doing the session today was that the clients that I've spoken on stage with so far are all big: TikTok, Heineken, Diageo, WPP, and that makes me feel good about our business, but the reality is that most insights teams are much smaller,” shared Charlie.
“So for today's session, Spencer is going to speak about these challenges through a more relatable lens; low budget, high pressure, and the expectation to inform decisions across the world. Would you like to introduce yourself, Spencer?”.
“Thanks, Charlie. My name is Spencer and I'm the insights lead at a company called Magnite. If you haven't heard of Magnite, I don't blame you, but you also probably interact with us every day, as we're the technology that helps advertisers connect with audiences across platforms like Netflix or Disney+ or Spotify,” said Spencer.
“We're a thousand-person company across 20 different global offices. What's a bit different about my position is that I used to be on the agency side, but now I'm the sole dedicated market researcher at a thousand-person company. So it presents me with a unique set of challenges and a very specific set of needs from a partnership like we have with Bounce.”
.png)
‘Here’s the lay of the land right now’
“I don't envy researchers on the client side,” shared Charlie. “Not because there’s 100 people trying to sell to you in the exhibit hall, but because there are three wildly imperfect solutions presented to you right now.”
“The first is full-service agencies. They’re home to some of the best people in our industry, the smartest people, the researchers who pull the strings and have created this industry from the ground up. But the challenge is that they have no core competency in technology, so their business models aren’t fit for the future needed by research teams - fast-moving technology, fast-moving decisions.”
“On the other side of the fence, you have software tools. They promised faster and cheaper, and delivered it when they could implement structure and rigidity within the research. Think customer experience, employee experience, creative testing. Certain companies, Qualtrics for example and other amazing companies like this, have innovated massively. But with the arrival of AI - to use another Irish reference - they're trying to turn the Titanic. A 10-15 year old software company trying to transform itself into a fluid, agentic, generative system is borderline impossible. Ultimately, what you’re left with is a rigid self-service or managed-service system that isn't really serving your needs.”
“Finally, we have the third option: AI companies. Now, whether we like it or not, everyone is using them as some sort of personal companion. They’re exceptional at speed and convenience, but their biggest issue is the thing every researcher is terrified of: no guardrails, no verification, no defensibility. As much as we are data nerds in this industry, we’re also emotional and rational and so are our businesses. If you allow unfettered usage of a non-verified system, you have a massive challenge on your hands.”
.png)
‘The three biggest problems researchers face’
“These imperfect solutions have led to three big problems. The first is inefficiency, the second is a problem that's always existed in research: it cannot move as fast as a business demands. The third is attribution. Every function, team, industry in the world right now is being interrogated on why they deserve a budget. Researchers in particular have become like the middle of the dartboard,” said Charlie.
“Spencer, I'd love to hear your experience of these problems, if at all. How have you thought about them? Where am I right? Where am I wrong?”.
.png)
‘The trap of immediate gratification via speed and cost’
“To your point about the middle of the dartboard, that's something that was really tough for me to comprehend before becoming a client-side researcher,” shared Spencer.
“A $30,000 market research project doesn't sound like a big project when you're the vendor. But when you're within a company, that's a huge line item compared to what other people are submitting. So you do become the middle of the dartboard, but it's somewhat justified by the cost.”
“Which do you think is more important?”, asked Charlie. “Speed and cost or value and attribution?”.
“Well speed and cost is actually the weapon that makes value and attribution easier. It's much easier to justify a $10,000 project versus a $50,000 project and people are immediately more receptive to it, especially if you can exceed expectations with what you're putting out.” answered Spencer.
“In my mind, the perfect business model that should exist in the future is only charging based on the revenue or growth that was driven by the research you delivered. Then you wouldn't have as many fights in the boardroom trying to convince stakeholders that the research is valuable.” added Charlie.
“Attribution has always been tricky because of delayed gratification. If you go to the gym or eat well for a day, you don't know if you’ll look any better or feel any better for a long time, so you have to trust the delayed gratification. This makes it really difficult for researchers, because there’s no immediate impact. That's why everyone's becoming obsessed with speed and cost, because the benefits are instant. But I've never met a researcher that wants their life to be faster and cheaper, they want their life to be easier and simpler.”
.png)
‘As a short-staffed team, we need to focus on impact’
“When I think about my ideal research partner, particularly in my position at Magnite, I have a very specific need from the partnership.” shared Spencer.
“Nobody can be experts in everything, and that's particularly true when you work in a somewhat niche industry like Magnite with a small team. What we needed was a solution where we could control the design of the research, because it reduces back and forth with an agency that may not be familiar with the types of questions that we're asking, and then where we can also control the reporting. At Magnite, we have an in-house design team and we use our research for thought leadership, so there’s a real focus on the deliverable itself.”
“I was looking for a solution where we could put most of our effort into the beginning - the design - and the end - the reporting. As a result, we needed to hand off to a trusted partner who could manage the execution - all the day-to-day work, the fielding, the programming, the data processing - to allow us to focus on the parts that are most impactful to our research.”
“A good way to illustrate this is like when you're working at a research agency and you're on a project, you typically have an analyst whose job it is to QC the work: the data, the scales etc. When you're an internal researcher in a small team, you don't have that luxury. So, having a partnership where you actually have someone looking at your work, where you can send off your survey and have someone review it with a critical eye, definitely leads to improved quality versus uploading it into a software and hoping it works.”
“I think that balance of having a person there for reassurance, for a second eye, is critical.”
.png)
‘The markers of a successful project for Magnite’
“What I’ll leave the room with is how I label a project as successful," said Spencer. "Firstly, does this project give us local, highly relevant data that will arm our sales team and empower our business? Secondly, is it cost-effective and are we easily able to justify the business expense that it incurred?".
"Finally, the last piece is something I touched on earlier. Was my team able to spend the most amount of time on the pieces of the project that were most impactful to our business? If we checked all of those boxes, we’re good to go. On to the next one!”
What is the Insights Operating System Magnite are using?
Bounce's Insights Operating System exists for insights leaders like Spencer, who need a solution built specifically for their needs. One that allows flexibility - in Spencer's case, the ability to own the beginning and the end of the process, while handing off the heavy lifting to a team of researchers he trusts.
It’s for insights leaders who value having a second pair of eyes and expert guidance to help them get to the right outcome, rather than just a log-in and a contact button.
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.
.png)
“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.”
“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.”
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.
.png)
“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.”
“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.”
.png)
