Bots and Fraudulent Data, Fraudulent Data and Bots – they are first cousins living in the same neighbourhood, in fact, living right next door to each other, always intertwined and in each other’s faces.

Bots loves Fraudulent Data’s tuna casserole and Fraudulent Data loves Bots’ Chicken Curry – two peas in a nasty pod. If only we could send them on a one-way excursion to Siberia, never to be heard from again.

The problem is that even if you permanently waved goodbye to these two ugly creatures, you would still be light years away from a utopic ride because there’s a third member of their club that stops by to share recipes with them and that is Disinterest.

You see, even if Bots and Fraudulent Data were to somehow take a hike, Disinterest still rears its ugly head when it comes to panellists, and that doesn’t bode well for data.

To those who would argue the point, let’s get down and dirty when it comes to the world in which panellists live. Today’s panellist environment consists of a bland, vanilla invite for research unexpectedly being tossed into one’s sea of emails as a starting point. Next, if the invite is somehow stumbled upon, you enter the exciting world of repetitive demographic questions which absolutely get the juices flowing. Finally, you either don’t qualify for the survey and are frustrated because you have nothing to show for your time or if you happen to qualify, it probably isn’t overly enthralling and may well be on the lengthy side. 

The trick is to eliminate Disinterest and send it on its journey with Bots and Fraudulent Data because if you don’t, but do succeed in diminishing Bots and Fraudulent Data, guess what? Your data, I’m sorry to say, is nonetheless crap! So, how do we do it?

Players on their favourite apps and panellists completing surveys have never been invited to the same party, but how vastly different are they from each other? After all, they both access things and work to complete them. But let’s be real – at best, they’re distant cousins.

Can you imagine how players would feel if the only way they could indulge in their favourite apps was to receive an email from the app company letting them know it was now available to be played? Needless to say, it’s not the world they would want to live in. They would be ticked off to the nth degree and that certainly could affect their performance and may lead them down the path to of all things, an old friend of the panel world, Disinterest. But, of course, players have total independence and can access their favourite apps whenever the urge strikes.

Ah, I think you may be starting to see where I’m going. If the panel world could take a page or even a few paragraphs from the app world, could you imagine the possibilities? It would finally mean that the respondent experience and the survey experience were no longer interchangeable concepts – as is the current thinking of the market research industry – and that the latter was simply part of the former but not equal to it.

Why is this so important? It’s because if the overall respondent experience was found to be entertaining and fun, even when those boring invites showed up and turned into lengthy surveys, maybe the efforts of panellists would be better than they are today because they’re part of something bigger and better. At the end of the day, isn’t this what our industry would truly want?

Michael Rosenberg is founder of Gmify