We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again…the online panel landscape continues to rapidly evolve since the onset of the global pandemic pushed us all into a more digital world. Not only is the fight for respondent eyeballs becoming more intense, data privacy legislation continues to complexify on a market by market basis, and the prevalence and sophistication of online fraud continues to increase at scale.
The good news, however, is that Kantar's Profiles division, our centre of expertise for primary research and panel management, has kept one step ahead of this by remaining steadfast in our pursuit of delivering the most meaningful data to Kantar’s clients by leading the industry into a new era of quality-driven panels and online research.
This means providing compliant access to 170m+ panelists in over 100 markets and preventing 4x more fraud than any other global panel provider.
Read on for the latest quality enhancements we’ve implemented to-date, and our plans for the months ahead when it comes to ensuring our panelists are the real, engaged, honest people that you need to ensure your survey responses and data are trustworthy, meaningful, and actionable…
Live Now:
Proactively mitigating fraud via Qubed.AI:
Qubed, our proprietary industry-leading anti-fraud software, has now been rolled out across our Qmee panels and our exclusive LifePoints panels in over 44 countries. Powered by 5 Deep Neural Networks (i.e. advanced machine learning), Qubed runs in real-time and processes over 300 features for each survey session to determine within 100 milliseconds whether or not a panelist is fraudulent and needs removing. We are now working on rolling Qubed out into another 11 markets.
Providing access to the industry’s highest quality panels via Kantar Panel Platform:
Kantar Panel Platform is our proprietary panel management platform. It works hand-in-hand with Qubed.AI and has IP blacklisting, VPN detection, and digital fingerprint and activity tracking built into it to provide a complete quality solution for Kantar-owned LifePoints and Qmee panel assets. Assets which warrant the highest NPS and Trustpilot scores in the global panel sourcing sector. The platform is now live in Ireland and Spain. We will begin rollout in the US and Canada in the next week, and all Tier 1 countries will be live on KPP in Q1 2024.
Combatting ghost completes in APAC via Mobile SMS Verification:
In order to combat the growing rise of ghost completes that our industry is seeing in China and other APAC countries, our engineering team has designed and implemented a mobile SMS verification tool that validates panelists are real people who are who they say they are at both registration and when they cash out their incentives. This is currently in Beta test and will go into production in the next few weeks.
Coming Soon:
Q1 2024 will see us take our leadership economics on fraud prevention in our panels to the next level, as we focus on…
Ensuring trustworthy respondent answers via OpenQ:
OpenQ is our proprietary open-ended answer evaluation tool that enables in-survey open-end answers to benefit from live quality evaluation and scoring. It uses Generative AI (ChatGPT) technology to enable automatic scoring of thousands of open-ended responses in seconds. It scores the quality of panelists’ answers across dimensions of correct language, relevance to the question being asked, sufficient diligence and non-copied text. We are seeing good results from the initial tests and our API will be released for beta-testing towards the end of January 2024.
Eliminating duplicate survey responses via Machine Learning:
As part of our secure quality check service to solve the problem of duplicate survey responses, we have created a unique algorithmic tool. It uses TF-IDF (Term Frequency – Inverse Document Frequency) and Jaccard similarity tests to conduct in-survey data similarity checks and ensure survey data is syntactically correct (i.e. the grammatical arrangement of words in a sentence is correct). We have implemented support for 6 languages (including China) currently. Beta-testing will begin in the next couple of weeks, and the tool will be made available to our Operations teams in January 2024.
Further validating our panelists are real people who are who they say they are via our new facial coding verification partnership with RealEyes:
RealEyes is an award-winning leader in attention economy Ad Testing and provides access to the world’s largest culturally sensitive AI training set. In November, we successfully completed the proof-of-concept we have been running with RealEyes on our panels in the US and UK and are now working on implementing their XP Identity software into our production system. XP Identity will be rolled out to test in APAC in January 2024, and the tool will also become part of Qubed.AI, which will control the usage and verification process.
Also, in appreciation of the fact that good quality data starts with good quality panelists, and good quality panelists need to feel engaged to share their precious time and data, our dedicated Research Innovation team also continues our award-winning work on measuring the effectiveness of different question and questionnaire designs, with key findings from recent research including:
- Nearly 25% of respondents are disengaging when answering basic Likert scale questions
- Up to 30% of respondents fail attention checks for standard brand and advertising recall questions
- False claims are reduced by 50% when bias-reduction techniques are applied to question designs
Find more about this research and techniques to improve honesty and reduce bias here.
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