Published: 02/28/2025
Courtney Griffin
SVP, Sales – MRA West, Dynata
Since I’ve joined Dynata nearly a year ago, I have consistently heard a few things from my clients; there is a consistent ask of “partnership,” “proactiveness,” “helping see around corners,” “consultative nature,” but when we dive into the day to day work and operations, these needs always seem to come secondary to the raw economic needs and growth objectives of the Market Research firm. The Market Research industry as a whole has been through a lot in the past several years, and I see our customers struggling to meet aggressive objectives in a world where the industry has changed in many ways. As Peter Drucker famously said, “Innovate or Die.” Well, no truer words have been said or that we are feeling more than right now.
The beauty is that one of Dynata’s emerging and more popular products covers off on all of the above asks in one fell swoop and helps future proof the Market Research Agency business model when there are turns in the market, as there have been in recent years. It helps create a strong revenue stream that can be relied on in the Advertising world and opens up the Agency to a new pool of money. When brands go through hard times, research budgets get affected, but the Brand still needs to put ads into the world in order to remind the consumer to buy something; the ad market is not going away anytime soon. Having started my career in Programmatic Media, it is my strong opinion that Market Research Agencies need to create a Media Activation Revenue stream in order to compete in this next phase of our industry.
Let me explain a bit what media activation is, how large the market opportunity is today, and how market research agencies can put this into place, literally as fast as a few business days.
What is Media Activation?
Media activation is referring to buying an ad placement anywhere online, on tv, or in the world wherever ad spaces can be purchased. A piece of creative (the ad itself) is then slotted into that space. When being purchased online, one of the largest ways of doing this is by a programmatic media buying platform, such as The Trade Desk. The Trade Desk takes the piece of creative (or several) that are selected, provides options as to who to target, where the brand wants to reach them and then executed on that in real time and at scale For today, we will keep the conversation focused around digital advertising as that is likely the easiest early application, although the market is much bigger than simply where you can buy ads online (ie, tv, radio, OOH, etc..)
How Large is the Current Market?
When you think of the revenue that could be brought into your firm, think and look up data on the current advertising market. In 2024 there was $309B in digital ad spend in the US alone, and all signs point to continued growth.
This is an enormous global market that is literally one model and one pipeline away from being accessed from your agency today. Now, let me briefly explain how to access this on a more day to day level.
How Can You Put This Into Place?
The process is actually quite easy. After a Market Research firm runs their research, we can take that audience that the brand wants to find more of (ie, high spending customers, segments of people/behaviors that the brands want to reach, etc..), run it through our proprietary look-a-like modeling tool, and push out a larger group of similar people to the Brand’s media agency of record. If the client buys their media in-house, then the MRA can simply push the audience directly back to their client as well.
To take a big step back, the Media AOR already has a directive to find people like this, so the MRA is simply bridging a gap to make the process of finding those audiences easier for the Media Agency. Put another way, the Market Research Agency offers up an audience to them that they are constantly looking for but challenged to find.
One thing that is important to note about finding audiences to activate ads on, is that it is really hard for these media agencies or programmatic technologies to find the right people and achieve the KPIs expected for the customer. It is hard because most audiences are typically a black box that are made available for purchase in these platforms that simply says “Golf Enthusiasts” on it, but the buyer typically does not actually know why or how these people got put into this golf bucket, they just know it is a group of people titled “Golf Enthusiasts”; did they buy a set of golf clubs or did they click on the main page of CNN and there happened to be an article about Tiger Woods? These are two very different types of people, one whom may not even be a golfer at all. The difference in audience quality, is that Dynata can help the Market Research firm provide a group of people that have been asked if they golf, qualifying questions about how often or how much of a golfer they are to ensure no fraudulent answers, verify that data from a group of trusted panelists, and then find other people that look exactly like those people to make the sample size larger. This is what Media Buyers are constantly working through, and why they are constantly in search of 1st party data that can be verified such as what Dyanata and the MR firm partner to provide.
Lastly, It is important to note that not only is this not in conflict with any of the 3 parties objectives (MR Agency, Media Agency, Brand), it does not require more budget from any party involved, it simply replacing lower quality and less verified audiences with more qualified, 1st party highly targeted audiences. The Media AOR is typically evaluated on campaign performance KPIs that they report back to the brand, so a Market Research Agency providing them with improved targeting born directly out of research, will help them immensely on campaign performance but also long-term relationship with their largest clientele.
Overall, in order to help our customers see around corners as I hear so often, it is our responsibility to help them settle in to the new ways of utilizing research data and how to innovate on their business, not just run the individual research project more effectively. In this world, the MR firm can leverage the research they are already doing and start to benefit from a giant ancillary industry; to me, this is an obvious way to extend the Market Research firm’s core offering, into a ~$309 Billion dollar industry. This is a cheat code to future proof your business and to worry less about the economic pressures that the industry has been under for the past several years, this is the partnership that helps you see around corners and consults on all of the pieces of the business that are actually important, this is new the way of utilizing technology to bridge the gap between Market Research Agencies and the Advertising world. This is a clear strategy to innovating your agency, and not die under the weight of inflation, market pressures, and an intensely saturated industry.
Please feel free to reach out to me personally if you’d like to discuss further or would like to partner in putting together a GTM solution for your firm that is differentiated in market; this is what we are here for.
Courtney Griffin
courtney.griffin@dynata.com