• by Charlene Weisler , Op-Ed Contributor, June 2, 2010

Ellen Romer, senior vice president of strategic planning at Experian Simmons, a division of Experian Marketing Services, has vast experience on the supplier side of consumer research. In her video interview she talks about the company's new Simmons DataStream(SM) product, the impact of set-top-box data, some consumer trends and future predictions.

Below is a short excerpt from the interview. Direct links to the full interview videos can be found at the WeislerMedia blog.  

Charlene Weisler: Ellen, please talk about what you see as the most dramatic change in the industry in recent years.

Ellen Romer: I would say that it is the changes that have taken place in the consumer arena and emerging digital technologies. This is not new -- the consumer is at the center of everything that we need to measure, understand, help drive our businesses.

And the fact that consumers have access to content across so many delivery platforms, the consumer decides what they consume, when they consume it.  This has opened up a number of challenges in the area of measurement. Companies, especially research companies, are scrambling to try and keep up and figure out how we can provide the best measurement tools that are scalable and cost-effective.

 There are also a lot of exciting developments in the mobile marketplace. We talk about mobile a lot, but I think that in the next couple of years we will really see it take off. The devices are here but new applications are coming to market. Consumers will start to adopt these applications and integrate them in their lives.

CW: Simmons has just launched DataStream. Can you please talk about that service?

ER: Yes. DataStream is a new product that allows us to provide weekly insights to the marketplace on a full range of the consumer experience. Simmons has its National Consumer Study where we survey consumers throughout the year. We release and report that study on a quarterly basis. DataStream enables us to leverage that [information], using the same survey. We are able to report on approximately 40,000 different consumer variables updated weekly through a new Web-based delivery platform.

 We went down this path for a number of different reasons. What we are hearing from clients and in the marketplace is the desire to have faster, fresher information on changing consumer behavior, [which] was really spurred by the economic recession. We had clients calling us saying "What can you tell us?" and "How are the consumers going to behave?," "How, potentially, are their buying behaviors going to shift?," "What are their attitudes?," "Will my media plan be different as a result of the impact of the economy?" So we developed DataStream after speaking to our strategic client council and a number of different constituents in the marketplace. 

 I think we also underestimated the appetite for consumer trends and insights. So what we are able to do is provide weekly trends because of the way Simmons collects its survey information. We are able to provide data to our clients, updated weekly, and they have the ability to define any number of consumer targets within the DataStream offering and conduct a week-by-week analysis of the particular consumer target. And you can run a weekly trend estimate going back with two years of data.