I don’t know if I should be amused or worried about the new controversy surrounding the ISO and ARF “competing” initiatives to improve online research quality.
According to Research Magazine, “Erich Wiegand, chair of the ISO working group developing online access panel standards, has voiced his concern over the news that the Advertising Research Association (ARF) has embarked upon its own standards initiative”.
Now, I may be a little retarded or picky, but my understanding is that ISO is working on standards for “access panels” while the ARF is looking at standards for “online research”. I understand that, in the past few years, many online panel companies have emerged and gone public, that there is a vague consensus that using access panels is an efficient way to get respondents for online research.
But, if we all know that “access panels” are today an acceptable solution for many online research projects, it is just one solution among others, and maybe a temporary one. In some cases, it is not the best option.
Yes, the Internet is changing research, and guess what - we have only seen the beginning of the change. “Online access panels” started to appear at the end of the 90s, at a time when Google did not even exist. Innovation is all around us, and research tomorrow will not be done the way it is done today. It took a long time for the idea of an “online access panel” to spread, for researchers to accept the methodology, for research companies to launch their own copy-cats.
But the ISO’s worries about the ARF initiative mean implicitly that they consider that any online research project is necessarily using “online access panels” or, even worse, should use “access panels”, which is at best a candid mistake. If I was paranoid, I would say that panel companies are trying to protect the benefits of a position it took so much time and money for them to establish by nurturing this illusion that online research and online access panel research are the same thing.
The challenge with a professional blog in a competitive environment is that it is not possible to share everything. I have to keep most juicy discussions and experiments to myself because we work in a competitive market and because there is a first-mover advantage. But I will tell you this: there is life after the online access panel.
When manufacturers want to produce a higher-quality product, one way to do it is to look at all processes and try to improve each process separately. Another way is to make things differently. It is more difficult, sometimes more painful, but in the end that’s what really makes a difference (read Seth for more on this). And by the way, that’s what they call innovation.
So here are my two cents for the industry: while regulating to make things better, let’s be careful not to prevent anyone from making things different.
Update: it turns out that, while the ARF’s initiative is about “Online Research Quality”, it heavily focuses on “access panels”, which may explain the controversy. Since I have been invited by the ARF to participate in the Council, I will be able to give more details about all this in the near future.
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