Imagine you are making a TV commercial. Your creative idea has been through shooting and production. It's expensive. You'd like to know whether it will be successful or not before going to air.
Or you've come up with an exciting new product idea – but you're not sure whether your target audience will go for it.
The answers, according to the New Zealand branch of global insights and consulting company Kantar, can be found on their Marketplace platform – which hosts new artificial intelligence (AI) tools that bring technology into play that was not available even last year.
In the case of the new ad, the client can play their commercial frame-by-frame, have it analysed and measured against the properties of tens of thousands of other ads – and have an answer within 15 minutes. The AI looks at the visual and audio aspects of the ad and analyses whether they will be successful with consumers or whether parts need to be adjusted.
For the new product idea, Kantar – recently integrated in New Zealand with well-known research company Colmar Brunton to form one brand – has an armoury of "world-leading tools" that companies looking to innovate can use to "make robust decisions they can trust", according to David Thomas, Chief Commercial Officer for Kantar New Zealand.
"We can provide quantitative analysis based on feedback from thousands of consumers in the product group the client is addressing or the innovation they are working on," he says. "With the Marketplace platform, we can deliver that information at scale, at speed and at a [cost-effective] fee that simply wasn't possible even 12 months ago."
That kind of world-leading technology – available across a broad range of industries at an affordable price, and applicable to all kinds of market research – is the immediate advantage of the recent integration with Kantar of market research firm Colmar Brunton in New Zealand, according to Kantar's Chief Client Officer, Sarah Bolger.
"It's about giving clients confidence whether they should proceed with a certain idea or not," she says. "When companies get to a certain point in their innovation process, they often don't have the time or the money to go to the next step – and undertake a full programme of research.
"This new technology and tools mean they can validate their thinking in the time frame they need; they have certainty about the direction they are heading in and can do so cost-effectively, using strong benchmarks that show them whether what they are doing is likely to succeed or not.
"That certainty comes in what is now an increasingly uncertain world where things are changing at such a pace. You can have an idea and spend all that money and time – and then not even be sure you are on the right track. Now you can improve your idea, faster and cheaper."
An example is Fonterra Brands New Zealand, whose Group Marketing Manager for Insights & Innovation, Joanne Reid, says the company sees clear benefits from the technology: "Having the ability to screen concepts early and at pace offers us a real advantage, which we can also share with our customers.
"It effectively means we can be 'always on' with our concept testing – we don't have the usual costs involved in project set-up and lengthy field times. We can get results on our screens within a matter of days from sign-off of our ideas.
"We can be more consumer-led and focus our innovation efforts. This approach gives us more agility and a more consistent way of concept testing. It also helps us feed our innovation pipeline and minimises risk out of NPD."
Bolger says the technology's cost-effectiveness means that not only major companies can take advantage of the tools available through the Kantar-Colmar Brunton integration: "We know that, in New Zealand, there are many small, innovative companies – firms we are depending on to help New Zealand develop as an economy.
"But they are often being forced to make decisions with less information than they'd like – and it was formerly prohibitive in terms of cost to test those decisions. Now it's not; these tools are available and accessible to a broader range of New Zealand companies.
"The investment required to develop the sort of tools Kantar has available was a real barrier formerly – it just wasn't feasible for a local independent company," Thomas says. "That's particularly true if you are investing in technology but then see it overtaken by the next iteration.
"Now local start-ups and smaller companies are able to access Kantar's global expertise in the knowledge that the investment in technology is ongoing, so they won't be caught out by the next iteration."
Thomas says another key benefit of the integration is that Colmar Brunton's local knowledge comes into play: "Kantar is a large company and world experts in all sorts of disciplines – it has a lot of technological and intellectual grunt. We can add to that local cultural nuances and current situational influences locally to help clients understand the data and translate it into something really useful."
Another client is The Startery, Freightways' innovation hub, whose Head of Product, Daniel Ward, says: "We identify new products and ideas that solve problems and provide complementary revenue streams – and we work quickly to identify the best ventures and prioritise our team's time where it will have the most impact.
"Kantar eValuate has proven to be a very useful tool, offering quick and detailed responses and allowing our team to focus on development, rather than pounding the pavement and conducting interviews."