Data, AI, and the Future of Market Research: Insights from YouGov Behavioral

In this interview, Alexandra Cirgenski, Managing Director of YouGov Behavioral, discusses her journey from private investigation to market research leadership. She explores the company's innovative approach to behavioral data collection, the challenges of measurement in market research, and the transformative potential of AI. Cirgenski highlights YouGov's unique position in collecting privacy-compliant, personalized online behavioral data and shares insights on the evolving landscape of data collection, consumer privacy, and technological innovation.

Transcript

Leonard Murphy: Hello everybody. It's Lenny Murphy with another edition of the CEO series of interviews. time to spend it with myself and my guest. And today I am joined by Ally Serginsky who is the managing director of Yov Behavioral. And we have tried for what two months to get this scheduled Ally. So it's great that we finally were able to pull it off. So Ally, welcome. it's great to have you here.

Alie Cirgenski: Thank you so much for having me, Lenny. I'm really excited.

Leonard Murphy: And for our audience, one of the challenges was that alley's in LA and so our timing was challenged by acts of God. I guess for lack of a better term, but you may Or at least acts of something, right? Yeah.

Alie Cirgenski: Yeah. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: But thankfully you and your family made it through all that. And in all good. Yeah. Yes.

Alie Cirgenski: We're But my heart goes out to the many families devastated by the fires and what, the future holds for my city.

Leonard Murphy: Right there with you. I think we can all all sing good vibes, prayers, positive affirmations, whatever feels right that it's all going to be okay. So why don't we talk a little bit about your background? So kind of tell us your origin story, Ally.

Alie Cirgenski: Sure there. Happy to. interestingly, my first ever job was in private investigation. I had an internship at a PI firm out in New York. And the reason this is relevant is because I think it was my first sort of foray into truth seeeking. I worked on a couple of projects that I actually can't talk about. but one of which required it was actually in the days, believe it or not, I'm old enough that it was a preface engagement. but Facebook was brand new. And so as a young intern, I brought Facebook to the table as the source of truth to interview some young people on how they felt about former classmates as well as interviewing individuals who, of course we had to disclose that we were a PI firm, but really using this modern tech to investigate and understand what's going on with consumers. and I loved that job. but I ended up going to college after that and kind of diverting my efforts to art history and architecture and design. Both my parents are architects. so it was kind of in my blood. I always thought I was going to be an my first job out of college was for a very large architecture firm called Rockwell Group in New York. And interestingly, even in that role of sort of project management, as much as I kind of love design and architecture, I hated being behind a computer all day. and I found myself very much in kind of business, and resource allocation and sort of strategy and sales specific positions. And the CFO just sort of pulled me aside and said, "Look, Ally, it's clear you don't want to be a designer. Maybe you should consider business school." so that's what I did. I went to McGill for business school. really to sort of figure out what kind of thinking I could get out of it. I mean, I think everyone should go to business school personally. because it structures the way that you process problems and solutions. And I also think it's been hugely influential in how I design product and how I feel you've mentioned it earlier, sort of entrepreneurial spirit in everything I do. But I take a very structured approach to it. And while at business school, I focused specifically on sort of social enterprise and supporting my local community with sort of startups and, culturally focused orgs that were sort of giving back to communities.  I sat on the board of Koko, which is the Center for Cultural Organizations in Montreal, and was exposed to the incredible sort of funding that Canada gives to its social enterprises, but also kind of the harsh realities of what it takes to run a social enterprise. Many of them sort of lose the tip in actually running an effective business and focus too much on the kind of giving back aspect. And so from there I came to LA. I had a job working for a consultancy firm that was mainly in consulting for international companies trying to get BC funding or start funding from Asia to the United States. and I actually just kind of stumbled into my role with YouGov. I ended up interviewing with Hamish who I think has been on this podcast. whose company was about to be acquired by YouGov.  So I was brought on as head of growth for that particular product line. and that is the first time I really went into market research but again it was such a tech focused role where it was really thinking about where's the market what do we need to build towards and how can we bring as much value to Yuggov as a company that had just acquired us in addition to the clients that were really looking for alternative measurement tactics that didn't exist. And so that's sort of my, design, social enterprise, entrepreneurial background. But, I'd say now I really am sort of a leader in strategy at YouGov and really focused on making sure that, we are meeting the needs of the sort of corporate pressures of profit, but also being nimble and agile enough as a department in behavioral to really, innovate. I knew you like so many stories from that job.

Leonard Murphy: Questions. But …

Alie Cirgenski: Honestly, exactly.

Leonard Murphy: I'm sure. Would you have to kill me after you told me or we'll save that for another time.

Alie Cirgenski: Yeah, exactly.

Leonard Murphy: So many of us, you found yourself here, but I didn't plan on YouGov Behavioral, which was called YouGov Safe before that, always struck me as kind of a best kept secret within YouGov, That you had built this, pretty amazing solution for behavioral data. And we should be clear for the audience, we're talking about behavioral, it's passive measurement of behavioral data,…

Alie Cirgenski: Right.

Leonard Murphy: And I love the way that you structured the data and structured the outputs and the use cases. And that was before AI emerged, All right.

Alie Cirgenski: It was in incubation mode.

Leonard Murphy: So now here you are. He's been building this product. It was kind of maybe not in stealth mode, but wasn't, getting tons of Okay.

Alie Cirgenski: We could put it that way.

Leonard Murphy: Right. In incubation mode, an entrepreneur inside YouGov building this but suddenly the demand for data like that has exploded. So, while at the same time there's all these pressures that are occurring for public companies, not YouGov and many others to try and find their way. So, what's that like as you're kind of navigating through? Are you now raising your hand saying, "Hey, we're gonna save the company." I mean, I don't mean that it needs anything, but it's like we already have the solution for this new world we're moving into or kind of what's going on.

Alie Cirgenski: Yeah. I think what's really interesting is we sort of hold the keys to a couple of different facets to the way we have this data, right? We co control and license the mechanism and the technology behind the actual data extraction while also holding, access to a panel, access to hundreds of thousands of people who we can leverage this tech on. And then also having a number of different products to commercialize from a channel perspective all of this data right whether that be data sales or actually subscription sales within displays sort of analytics of the data itself what's really interesting is I think there are a number of players in each one of those buckets but I think where YouGov has really hit its stride I would say is in the combination of those three right if we take we start with the tech particularly I love the behavioral  tech because it's so smartly built in that it gets around the sort of cookie-less world that we're about to enter into. The way in which we extract the data protects us from cookie tracking and we're able to get individual personalized online behaviors. and also it's privacy driven so we built it with a GDPR compliant backbone because we're a globally you publicly traded company. And so we have to follow the GDPR principles with anything we build at YouGov. And again I think there are local players in the US and some in Germany that can sort of take different approaches to the way in which they collect the data but we have this sort of global protection because we have that footprint. when we look at the actual panel

Leonard Murphy: Mhm. Right.

Alie Cirgenski: Because we have 20 years of historical sort of survey opinions opinion based data we can really color a lot of this behavioral data and I think we've also seen partners come to us that say hey look we have behavioral data too but it would be great if we could get the 100 thousand variables that YouGov can overlay from an audience segmentation standpoint right being able to get the granular understanding of those consumers is really the key And again, the value in YouGov is that we can take this behavioral data of actions and compare it to what people say they're going to do, and then ultimately link that to outcomes, purchase behavior and or brand performance.  And then lastly, I would say the ability to scale and the ability to both display it from a commercial standpoint, but also say to a client, we'll build any custom dashboard interface you want to pipe this data into your mechanism. I think from my perspective, the next big step is for us to get into all of the data warehouses and have more relationships with the AWS's and the snowflakes of the world. I mean, we're already in talks with both of them, but to me, becoming more of an arms dealer of our data is really the future. but yeah, I definitely have to give a shout out to my new boss, Mark Ryan, who's the new CPO at YouGov, and he certainly sees the value. He supports me and the promotion of YouGov internally.  I think really it's been less about us being in stealth mode in YouGov, but more just education with our client base on how valuable this data is, how much can you trust it, and how can you sort of overlay it on top of your existing research capabilities.

Leonard Murphy: Solutions out there. The …

Alie Cirgenski: Right. Mhm.

Leonard Murphy: But nobody really hitting a home run. and I think a piece of that was folks just didn't know how to use it. and now I think we're getting past that to an extent where it's not just an augmentation. understanding paths of purchase and journey those things were easy excuse me but to now realize to your point there's a big difference between what people say and what they do and now we can recognize that and to be more predictive and leveraging that data as the walls between marketing and research continue to come down and AI's unlocking just the ease of use of these things. It seems to me that the time has come for companies Yugo Behavioral and everybody else that's playing in this arena. and we're seeing all the traditional panel companies now morphing, announcements just recently of some of the large marketplaces of we're in the data subscription business now. because of data is the new oil. But your data I would argue is probably a higher grade oil than maybe some of just the attitudinal data that is captured from some of the legacy platforms that are kind of struggling to catch up.

Alie Cirgenski: Yeah. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: So are all right so there's my thesis. Are you seeing that in the market? So, are people really coming to YouGov saying, " you've got some really valuable stuff." And we're seeing that growth.

Alie Cirgenski: Certainly. I mean, I think the reason for that is because we have the respondent level data, There's no in between us and the consumer. and even the kind of Walmarts and the Coca-Cas of the world are seeing that, they're looking for that closer touch and leveraging their own internal data as an analytics mechanism.

Leonard Murphy: Yep.

Alie Cirgenski: I think what will become really interesting again is that who is going to play in the data arms business of you could use my data as your source data for your AI model versus who's actually going to play hard in the tech space for the extraction of that data. And obviously we're playing on both fields. but I do think some companies need to pick right whether they are going to focus on being substantial panel size substantial variables collected on that panel. and then longitudinal analysis being viable. I mean one of the challenges leader tracking is it's hard tech to maintain and it's really often the technology is clunky and users don't want to keep it on their phones.  feels like a Trojan horse. So I think if you can invest deeper in technology that is lightweight that can extract this data in an effective but user-friendly way and also maintain a substantial panel that is rid of fraudulent data. Everyone knows fraud is a huge problem here. because I think the value is really going to be in that being able to look at a year's worth of this behavioral data. It's not going to be, everyone wants that kind of continuous analytics and I think that's viable, too. But I think the real value in creating that historical data set to then have real predictive analytics is you have that person's data for an entire year's worth of data points. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: And I wonder So, as we're recording this, we're a week into the deepseek, curl fluff. And we'll see how all that plays out. but I think why that was compelling was okay, this is edge computing sophisticated, powerful, inexpensive, but can function at full operational capacity on a traditional PC. and what that tells me is, okay, the next leap is going to be OpenAI or somebody's going to come out and say, yeah, we can run GPT5, on your smartphone, full featured, because we've learned how to, leverage that type of stuff. And in my mind that helps get to that point that you were talking about that it doesn't feel so heavy and intrusive. It's built into the OS of whatever device you're utilizing AI is just embedded in to help it unlock and boom you've got that.

Alie Cirgenski: Exactly. I and…

Leonard Murphy: Yeah. Yep.

Alie Cirgenski: I think the ability to get consumers on board about that is educating them on the personalization benefits, right? 

Leonard Murphy: Yep.

Alie Cirgenski: if I can sell you on don't worry, click what kind of content you want and instantaneously you will have the TV show designed for you. I think they'll be a lot more willing to share their personal information in order to get there. Right? I think …

Leonard Murphy: Yep. Yeah.

Alie Cirgenski: If you ask my mother, do you want your phone tracked? Her answer is definitely not. But if you ask her, do you want a custom experience whenever you interact with media? Her answer is going to be yes. she often feels like, ads aren't relevant to her or there she's bombarded by them. She doesn't understand them. I think it's really a communication challenge we have with consumers to educate them on the value to them around this. Great.

Leonard Murphy: Yeah. Yeah. That plus a topic near and dear to my heart with Varaglyph which we're playing the same concept is also data monetization and ownership. did you see about two weeks ago with the whole TikTok thing that is it Kevin or Liry his name? Mr. Wonderful, whatever the hell he calls himself, the VC, but he had put forth, I thought was a pretty cool idea to solve that, which was to crowdfund buying out half of TikTok, which would effectively from the users to make the users owners of the platform,…

Alie Cirgenski: Yeah, I think it's genius.

Leonard Murphy: Giving them an incentive to share. I Yeah.

Alie Cirgenski: I mean, I'm sure there were so many influencers that, entire livelihoods were potentially going to be wiped out. They were so invested. I mean, there's a lot of wealth there, too, with these users. so right.

Leonard Murphy: Right. Sure. But even if that so hypothetically, Now they plan to happen and then Tik Tok is okay and we're going to capture all your data, right? we're going to have this piece but we're not going to send it overseas. You're going to benefit from that besides just monetization of your video by being an influencer. But I think we're just on the cusp of seeing those type of scenarios play out.

Alie Cirgenski: Yeah. Yeah. Agreed.

Leonard Murphy: Which can change the whole game from that point.

Alie Cirgenski: I mean, the scariest thing to me about the data going overseas is, China's lack of copyright law, the idea that there's no ownership once it leaves,…

Leonard Murphy: Right. Right.

Alie Cirgenski: I think, is really scary for a lot of these influencers and creators, as it should be.

Leonard Murphy: Yeah.

Alie Cirgenski: So, I think if we can create and devise a setup where we can protect their rights, while also sort of meeting the needs of global pressures, yeah, that would be an ideal scenario.

Leonard Murphy: Yeah, it creates interesting ideas for we think about recruitment channels so let's say YouGov for how do we expand our panel right do those create new ideas on how to engage audiences in new ways and to have this full featured individual level relationship with respondents that are getting lots of different benefits  That's on that. Yeah.

Alie Cirgenski: Panelists who engage with YouGov that actually the number one reason they're interested in engaging is obviously the whole ethos of we want to know what you think and contribute to the world but they want to see their own thoughts against the context of a NATREP sample. So anytime you answer a survey and it results in hey here's how you responded contextually panelists love that and they love the context behind their own thoughts and opinions. So, we're always trying to focus on creating that value beyond just paying them. I think that's kind of low hanging fruit. I don't think people who we really want to be engaging with. They go beyond just wanting to get that five points to answer the survey,…

Leonard Murphy: I agree. I think that's the icing on the cake.

Alie Cirgenski: Right? Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: But it shouldn't necessarily be the tip of the spear. So All right. So we've talked about kind of the state of the world and went all over the place. What are you most excited to be working on right now that you could talk about, right?

Alie Cirgenski: Okay. Yeah, I mean I could talk about so at behavioral again I mentioned the kind of three facets of the technology, the panel and the actual delivery methods. I'm really excited about a product that we're developing right now. It's really about journey analysis. really to meet the needs of the market around we have all these fragmented data points from touch points along the user journey and purchase behavior data and real market research around many people have done consumer journey analysis that's sort of not what I'm talking about it's more tagging these behaviors in a AI-driven but also very specific methodology where panelists can be segmented by triggered behaviors. And it's not just that you end there. You get that segment of individuals who've taken a certain action that you're trying to make happen or you're trying to make not happen and then you can survey those people or then you can track them against a ad exposure beta test or right then you can do something about it because I think one of the challenges with a lot of the existing customer journey analysis is that it sort of ends there right you see the journey you understand where people fall out in the funnel and then there's no real way to action on those individuals  And I think that's the sweet spot at YouGov is really being able to action your insights and taking the reality of what's happening and turning it into research which is in fact the new kind of marketing push that we're moving towards which is research reality around what we're trying to deliver at YouGov. But apart from that just generally the tech itself that we're working on which I can not really talk about but I can loosely talk about for the actual methods for data extraction data points around ad exposure around media consumption around app behaviors around online engagement generally is really exciting because to me a sort of just a passive meter tracking where someone can come and go as they please is not the but unique ways in which we can extract this data and ways in which we can partner with the data sources themselves to ensure that we get cogent data I think is the future. An example of that, for example, is working with a streamer who predominantly shows the consumer themselves a set of information about what they viewed, but working with that streamer to make that information be in more in depth, what ads did you see, what did you click through, how long did you spend on each page. The more we share with consumers, the more companies like us can use that data to leverage better offerings for those platforms. So, it's both encouraging to see when these tech providers are open to adjusting and reformatting the open data that they're sharing so that companies like us can actually work with them and help them have better consumer insights.

Leonard Murphy: Very cool. You got my brain spinning. I'm thinking about is that what she means? But I won't press. So, yeah, that's really cool. All right. So, I want to be conscious of your time as well as our listeners. so you've had this interesting career and you found yourself in this kind of entrepreneurial role in a very complex market at a time of incredible disruption for the industry that you're in. So what lessons have you learned as a leader?

Alie Cirgenski: Yeah. 

Leonard Murphy: Bestow your wisdom, Ally.

Alie Cirgenski: One thing I will say just specifically to market research and then I'll go more broadly. I think measurement is a huge problem still, measurement has a long way to go. Whether you're talking about ad exposure, context, media exposure, all of that is something that we need to tackle before any of us can really get at the truth. And so we're looking at companies where it's impossible for them to measure any ROI in their ad spend. We're looking at lack of standardization of measurement methodologies. and so people like us who are building the tech and the data to augment that still are waiting for industry collaboration to happen for that to be moved forward. And so from my perspective, I think as a tech leader, you need to be aware of the limitations of your market in the moment. Right? If I try to come out as the single source measurement tool which again we've never tried to do at behavioral we have tons and tons of viewership data from our panelists which we sell and package but I've not once called myself a currency right or I should say I have not once called the product a currency and that's by design because I don't believe that there will be one player who can actually come out with a solution and I think many companies make the mistake of being that leader and…

Leonard Murphy: Yep.

Alie Cirgenski: Being the first mover in that space when really the reality is that the industry just isn't there. And so cross collaboration needs to happen even in tech innovation and cross industry needs to happen when you're really trying to move big mountains. the biggest lesson I think I've learned particularly working at YouGov is like your team is everything. I mean, I sort of function my department as a startup within YouGov, but I, had to take two weeks off from an emergency evacuation of my family and home and everything was handled. I didn't feel nervous. I didn't feel like I couldn't step away and nothing is, completely dependent on me and that's by design. and I'm so proud of my team, but I'm also so grateful that we've created such an entrepreneurial spirit within our team that everyone feels like they can step up and no one feels like they have to wait for permission to do something when they know it needs to get done. so that's really important and I think it's hard to foster in a corporate environment. but I do think it is sort of leftover of an of us being an acquisition of YouGov and sort of always having that spirit. The other advice I would give is just don't get good at something you don't want to do. that has been really important for me to remember as someone…

Leonard Murphy: I've never heard it phrased that way.

Alie Cirgenski: Who wears many hats at YouGov and has probably four different roles functionally if you were to break me up into different departments. but I'm very conscious that sometimes I get pulled into projects or activities or tasks that I'm like this is a bad use of my skill set. And I think that that often gets lost on young people. I think that they get put in roles or they're told to do activities that will set them on a different career path. And I think you need to be really careful where your expertise is built because it has to be something you like.

Leonard Murphy: But that's brilliant. I characterize it so as an old fart now that I'm too old to do things that I don't want to do with people I don't want to do them with so I have a very selective skill set with that I employ with a very select group of people so …

Alie Cirgenski: Exactly. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: Because that is very very Cool insight.

Alie Cirgenski: And nowhere to play, I mean, I think if you do too much, you end up not doing anything very good, obviously.

Leonard Murphy: So what have we not touched on that you wanted to talk about? Anything that you want? Okay.

Alie Cirgenski: I think we have to talk about AI a little bit. I think in market research it's obviously been the hot topic and again just saying that I think there will be a strong divide between the players in the market who use AI from a tech perspective. the tech that sort of overlays source data and then there will be the players that have the good source data whether that create creation of synthetic panel like we see with Brocks or other sort of generative AI environments I do think the source data will actually be the real value and there will be a lot of saturation in the tech that actually analyzes on top so not to be a sort of conspiracy theorist but I do believe ultimately open AI has been already winning in this game. so it's really not about becoming the kind of monopoly…

Leonard Murphy: Yeah.

Alie Cirgenski: But rather how can we play with these large source data sets. and effectively do it in a way that feels ethically appropriate for our company. Right? I think that startups have different ethical questions that a publicly traded company does. So I think that there are going to be startups that take more risk that do more innovation that do more creativity around that's really interesting, but it wouldn't be at all be viable for a company like YouGov. and so the way that we're approaching it, we acquired a company called Yabble, which is a generative AI company that essentially leverages a number of different mechanisms to analyze and parse and essentially you can use any source data to overlay its value. I think the way that we create value with that product is obviously mirroring the YouGov source data. But we should be open to piping any source data through that AI method. We should be the best tool that can analyze YouGov's data from an AI perspective but we should also be open to other sources. yeah and that's my two cents about AI. I mean where content creation is going is a whole other thing. I think that's really cool. I'm really excited to see what the Adobe's of the world do. if they could essentially be a way in which a conduit with which someone can pipe through their own data and output content overnight. That's I think really cool and less questionable about from an ethics standpoint and more about how can we get marketing and creative excited about AI in that way.

Leonard Murphy: Yeah. Even the can't personalization I've seen early examples of almost real time creation of very immersive media. Excuse me. kind of personalized to individual tastes, I'm a big old nerd and so the sci-fi stuff and seeing that as a whole new way to create media. I mean set aside is it soulless and all that I still struggle with it but it's pretty damn cool there's no way around that.

Alie Cirgenski: Yeah. And yeah, I mean,…

Leonard Murphy: So all those opportunities are amazing until our robot overlords come and capture us. I'm still not sure that we're not heading towards some Black Mirror episode. but yes.

Alie Cirgenski: I think about it every day what's going on in the world.

Leonard Murphy: So we often joke before we start recording, we're talking about, all my kids and our youngest should not have happened, right? She's our miracle not baby anymore. She's 12. but because of the circumstances like no, she really should not have happened. And so we often joke that she was born to lead the revolt against Skynet, I mean, she manifested, and she has a temperament to do that, too. So, she came out that way.

Alie Cirgenski: Not her.

Leonard Murphy: So, she's I pity Arnold Schwarzenegger or the Terminator trying to go up against Avalon. But anyway, yeah, we could go off on hold of Tannis on that, too. Where can people find you, Ally?

Alie Cirgenski: You can find me on LinkedIn, Ali Sergenski. You can also email me alijenskyyouugg.com. Would happy to.

Leonard Murphy: That's very cool. Thank you so much for the time and for sharing your perspective. we definitely have to have you back to talk about the PI stuff. all right.

Alie Cirgenski: I got a whole bag of tricks there.

Leonard Murphy: That picture you in a fedora and All right. Thank you audience.

Alie Cirgenski: Bye-bye. Thanks for me. Fight.

Leonard Murphy: We appreciate you taking the time. Ally, thank you once again and we'll be back with another episode of the CEO series soon. That's it for now. Bye-bye. Bye.