Your Next Customer Might Be a Bot

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Would you trust a synthetic audience with your next ad test? Would you let an agent buy your holiday gifts? In episode 151 of The Exchange, Karen Lynch and Lenny Murphy get into the deals, the tools, and the uncomfortable questions reshaping research, and they make the case that good data still needs a smart human behind it.

Thanks to our producer, Karley Dartouzos. 

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Transcript

Karen Lynch: Game to play game.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah. Happy Friday, everybody. We're winging it today for sure based on our pre-show pre-planning here. So hi, Karen.

Karen Lynch: Hi, Lenny. We didn't even say hi. We didn't even say hi on the pre-show. We just went right in. Oh my gosh, so hi, everybody. Well, what's a segue? Because you were at ad week this week, right? I was at advertising week. Um, fun fact: advertising week and ad week are two different things, and they okay, they both had events this week in New York City, which um is fascinating. And I managed to get to both. Advertising week is like the Super Bowl of advertising, um, it's huge. It's a four-day event with multiple, multiple stages, and everybody who's everybody in advertising and brand marketing is there. Ad Week is a much smaller, you know, it's a magazine and it's a much smaller event, but they have very carefully curated content as well, you know, a couple streets away at a loft. It's a really cool little side event that kind of piggybacks on. What's happening at advertising week. So, you know, also some good things happening over there, but they definitely piggyback on the larger event. So, not unlike things that happen in our industry, I will say.

Lenny Murphy: So, yeah, pretty interesting. Back in the day, right? The evenings were spent with piggyback events off of ARF.

Karen Lynch: So, all right, but you had some fun. Well, I had some fun. What I did not expect was I should have expected it, but there were lots of lots of folks talking about podcasting as, you know, kind of the medium and podcast ads. And shout out to the team at podcastadgame.com, which we will link to in the show notes. But they have this really cool card game. And I said to them, I will definitely have to play this with my cohort. So, cohort. So, let me tell you, in this deck of cards, this is what I was laughing about, Lenny. Literally a deck of cards, color-coded cards. And one of them is one set, you put three piles in front of you. You can play with groups of people. One is a type of podcast. Well, we don't have to come up with a type of podcast. We have one. We'll use the Green Book Podcast. I'm putting Lenny on the spot. We'll use the Green Book Podcast as the type of podcast. So, a podcast that folks in the insights industry about things relevant to insights and analytics professionals. That is our podcast. But they have lots of differences. For shows. And then it's a new product that's going to be advertised. And I pulled one of those cards just before we started. And then a little gimmick that you have to work into the show. And I pulled one of those too. And I'm going to fling that at Lenny. So the show that Lenny is going to. Add Lib a potentially 30-second ad spot for us if he's reading air on the Green Book podcast, as we do of our sponsors when they buy ad spots on our podcast. It's called FitQuit, a gym membership that donates to charity when you don't go. You're not lazy, you're generous. Lenny's going to read that, and he's going to come up with a holiday sale promotion. So, Lenny, go.

Lenny Murphy: Thank you to our sponsors for this edition of the Green Book Podcast. FitQuit. You're not lazy. You're generous. FitQuit was designed for people like me who have the best of intentions to get in shape, but actually don't end up going. But instead of the money being wasted, it's going to charity. It is a win-win for everybody. And we head into the holiday season, you're going to put on those extra pounds because that's just what happens. There's a special two-for-one matching promotion by FitQuit. Join now. And when you're too lazy to go over the holidays because you've gained too much weight, FitQuit will make sure that a charity of your choice gets double the money. FitQuit, the best solution for lazy people to feel like they're not lazy. There you go.

Karen Lynch: How's that? I love podcastandgame.com. I hope you're listening because they gave me the deck of cards. You have no idea. I'm actually going to do Friday with my cohort. So, Lenny, that is why we love having you read the ads for our partners. So, there you go. That right there was worth the cost of admission to Advertising Week, if you ask me.

Lenny Murphy: It's actually a pretty cool idea. I kind of like it.

Karen Lynch: So fun. I know. I know. Well, it's so fun. It's this great dick of parts. And there's a lot of other things and a lot of things to blame here. Super fun idea. I'll probably order one and like to have it shipped right to your house because you could do it like with your family, too. It's just so fun. What fun, what a fun thing to pick up at the event.

Lenny Murphy: So, well, and Mr. Lynch just chimed in with Lazy Boy just called. They want to co-sponsor this episode. Yes, affiliate marketing. There we go. We've started it already. What a pit quit and Doritos.

Karen Lynch: Yep.

Lenny Murphy: Taco Bell. And there's so many possibilities.

Karen Lynch: So many possibilities. So, yeah, it was really cool. In other news, the event was really great. It was very interesting. There was some, you for me, you know, I was obviously there to kind of check out the event. Some of our partners were there, Sint was there, Zappy was there. We saw Electric Twin do a demonstration of their product. Electric Twin, if you don't know, they were the Insights Innovation Competition winner at IEX Europe this year. One of the winners, they won the Experts Choice Award. So they did a live demonstration of their synthetic audience products. So that was really exciting to see them putting it on there. For some kind of synthetic response to ad testing. And so, you know, it was just a really neat, neat way to, you know, kind of not only check out what a very large event is doing, but also then see what's happening in the world of content, what's happening in the world of how AI is impacting the media and measurement space. And, you know, and just thinking about what marketers are thinking about, because that's pretty relevant to the work that we do here, you and I, on the show as well. So, all very relevant. And, the bottom line is everybody needs human understanding.

Lenny Murphy: So, yep, yep. And good stuff. But boy, there was so, and when I again the promos, but I'm sure you noticed that this week was more. Challenging in terms of the level of the content coming in, and for us to winnow through and decide what was relevant. And this, because there's a ton related to marketing and agentic purchasing and advertising and all of that ecosystem that we can't even get to.

Karen Lynch: I'm sure that it was a buzzing week. It was. And because I was, yeah, because I was because I was in New York. And not necessarily reading so much of the news until I was on the train on the way home or something. And I was seeing everything you were putting in. I wow, the news doesn't stop just because we get busy. And I was watching what you were doing. And agenting purchasing was a big part of it this week. So, yeah, I'm anxious to get there and talk about a lot of that because so much of what's going on was in that space. And, you know, again, we'll get there with a lot of that. You know, certainly chat with our friends. Our friends at Chat GPT had a large presence at this event. You know, you know, open AI and ChatGPT advertising was a big buzz. Right. At the event. So, you know, it's not just here in our industry. It's not just here in our ecosystem, in the ecosystem of this live stream that it's being talked about. It is being talked about, you know, in depth in the advertising industry.

Lenny Murphy: So, but just quick, quick segue: this morning, I've had four meetings before this with consulting clients, but this topic was the dominant topic. In all of them based upon the various and sundry their particular spin on things, but it does have big implications. So, yeah. And speaking of talking about big implications, man, we got IIEX West just around the corner.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. Yeah. It's coming up very fast. Yeah. The last call is coming up soon. So IIEX West registrations are ticking up. Probably, you know, getting to that point where it's really getting exciting for all of us that are able to go. We're getting excited for, you know, the agenda is done, you know, fixed. The speakers are all solid. We have confirmed we have demos in one track from listen, outset, and conveo. Oh, boom, all in one track. The demos, we've secured all those contracts and it's happening. Our top three sponsored spots are, you know. Those three speakers with those three demos talk, it's just funny.

Lenny Murphy: Is that just going to oh, yeah, hold my beer type of stuff?

Karen Lynch: Oh, yeah, hold my beer. Well, and yeah, and I really hope they're listening to this. The order is, I think, conveyed in the demo track, conveo, then listen, then outset. So, you know, outset gets the final word, which, you know, I just think it's really interesting. I imagine a lot of us don't always expect the demo track to be one of the most heavily attended tracks at our events. You know, usually people are curious about the demo tracks and they're attended, but they're not the heaviest attended. Whereas right now, I imagine a lot of people are going to want to get over that one. So it's going to be very interesting to see how this all shakes out. So I'm excited about that. And of course, you know, of course, what's happening for the competition. It's just going to be a really interesting high-energy event for a West Coast event, which is actually kind of chill, you know. So, yeah, we're excited. We're just excited to see what it's all about because it is an inaugural event out there, too. So, we don't, on some levels, we don't know what to expect. And on the other hand, we're really excited about the level. We're all simmering a little bit.

Lenny Murphy: It's going to be great. Well, and yeah, the pace of change. So, if we just follow through this idea of this buzz that was happening at advertising week and ad week, I didn't know there were two things. Yeah, yeah. Good to know. And then we carry that in. This is, I think, the last of the big insights events for this season. I think everything else has kind of cleared the deck now. But the conversation, the networking. About all of those things and the type of things that we talk about here. It's all going to mix into that stew pot, right? Well, based on the date, the witch's brew, would that be appropriate to call it there?

Karen Lynch: I guess it is. It's right before Halloween weekend. Yeah.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah. That, and that's where magic happens: everybody's synthesizing these things and connecting and talking and, you know.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, and there’s round tables. Both there’s round table discussions both days, also, so people and different topics both days, so there’s a total of um what, 16 topics, uh eight each, eight tables each day, different topics each day, so um you know there’s no overlap there. So you will have the opportunity to really dig into a lot of the topics of the day. So um, yeah, really really exciting times, and there is one more. There is an event the following week, SMR. You know, as we have promised them that we would give them that shout out. One last time, November 3rd and 4th, SMR North America. Yes. Their unfiltered event is taking place in, did we say Atlanta?

Lenny Murphy: Is that where it is in Atlanta? It is in it.

Karen Lynch: It's in Haiti. Although probably not so hot in November I guess I don't know.

Lenny Murphy: It's a, it's a, it's a roll of the dice. I've been in shorts on Christmas Day in Atlanta, so uh you never know.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, so we have standard pricing available through October 11th, but as an SR partner we're offering 15% off registration code. It's an unfiltered 2026 underscore green book that's your registration code to get 15% off the SMR North America event 2026. So I think that one might actually be the very, very last one if you're heading to that one. And then, yeah. And you know, then we turn the calendar year into 2027 hits. And our first event is in Bangkok. So we'll be talking about that before you know it.

Lenny Murphy: Yep. Yep. Well, so it's interesting because you and I did not talk about ad week and any of the advertisement week and all that stuff. But yet our first first couple news topics are right on point with that.

Karen Lynch: So yeah. Unraveled. Go ahead. You go right in there. Is that pronounced unraveled? Unraveled?

Lenny Murphy: Unrivaled? So I'm not sure. I'm not, I was not familiar with these companies.

Karen Lynch: It's another one of those companies that takes out the vowels. Right, right.

Lenny Murphy: Easier to secure the domain. I think it's unrivaled, acquired 2CV and the value engineers, small agencies, but putting it together. Right? From research, brand strategy, digital delivery. So, an integrated system put together makes an awful lot of sense trying to maximize scale and efficiency. But putting together fundamentally the workflow from insights to activation from a brand strategy standpoint, I think we're going to see a lot more of those types of roll-ups start to happen.

Karen Lynch: And did you read in there that we might see a lot more from them, too? One of the quotes in there says, not finished. So, what else is going to be grabbing up? I thought that was really interesting, too.

Lenny Murphy: Like, they're, you know, adding testing tech, you know, something of that nature.

Karen Lynch: It's very clear that, you know, this is a growth strategy that a lot of people are like, this is how we're going to grow, friends.  

Lenny Murphy: So, um, 100% own the workflow, which and so.

Karen Lynch: This saga of the brave bison continues.

Lenny Murphy: Yes, brave bison. Uh, they raised their final by god, it's our final offer for system one um uh on October 7th. And yeah, you know, I wasn't paying a hell of a lot of attention to that original originally because Brave Bison is an investor, they own you know a significant share of system one, but um, they're an agency. And they want and here here's the killer thing is that it finally came out and expressed they said it explicitly they want the data so they consider the the uh normative database and uh all of that that system one has built up for 20 years back when they were brain juicer uh for that to power advertising effectiveness as it basically a new a new underlying ai uh system and yeah trying to predict trying to predict consumer reactions trying to get to that using ai to predict you know predict reactions to ad campaigns basically right yep so in an agency fun break bison's fundamentally an agency outside of the world and they want that to be able to you know increase effectiveness advertising effectiveness um yeah uh well I I think we'll see more deals like that too yeah. So, yeah.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of deals, speaking of big deals.

Lenny Murphy: Speaking of deals, yeah.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. You want to talk about this one? Well, yeah. You know, when I first read this, I was thinking, oh, Kantar launched Kantar Experience Impact, Kantar getting into the CX game. And then I'm like, oh, it's actually supported by Qualtrics Experience Management. So, and I don't know why that seemed so surprising. You know, of course, Kantar would be, you know, in a kind of collaboration with Qualtrics. That makes sense. But they're connecting basically customer experience with brand tracking and operational data. So they're working with their insights teams, showing where their customer experience, investments, I suppose, are going to be supporting growth and kind of working together. Soup to nuts. So, um, you know, it makes sense that they're just getting going public about, like, yes, you know, we're tying customer experience and research and enhancing it for all teams. Um, yep, that's a powerful, to me, that's a very powerful partnership, Qualtrics and Canter.

Lenny Murphy: That's powerful. I agree. And I mean, they've had a partnership for a while in different ways, but this is what I think was really compelling about this is, and think about this whole. Theme that's coming through as agents take over more of the path to purchase from discovery to activation, right? And I think it's going to skyrocket now from a consumer standpoint because everybody's got a freaking consumer agent now. Yeah, but when you can't control that, what can you control an impact experience? And so I think that that focus is super smart too. Understand if buying toilet paper is just an agenda process, you know, okay. But where's the experience really replacing how we've thought about the brand, right? And that's super smart, really important, probably going to drive that experiential component is probably going to drive marketing. More than advertising. At least for important things. So right, more emotionally resonant decisions than buying toilet paper. Yeah. So sorry, our friends at PNG who make toilet paper, I always use that as an excuse.

Karen Lynch: Well, I mean, it's an important topic. It is a very important topic. Let's just all remember COVID. I just say every time toilet paper comes up, it's another podcast.

Lenny Murphy: Absolutely. Where's my three-ply?

Karen Lynch: I need a three-ply. Oh my gosh. That's when I discovered the brand. I actually discovered the brand who gives a crap when they like shipped boxes of toilet paper to my house. I was like, no pun intended. Oh my gosh, it's such a great brand, by the way. But another, like, you know, who gives a crap was this great brand where they sent us individually wrapped. Rolls of really pretty rolls of toilet paper. This beautiful company. Who gives a crap? Oh, it's oh, yeah, who gives a crap? Really great crap. I saw this. So great. It showed up. I found it during COVID. They sent it to my house. And then, like, when my kids went to college, I'm so lucky. My kids went to college. I had, I sent them away with, you know, beautiful wrapped rolls for their first one. I'm like, This is your beautiful, you know, your beautiful rolls of toilet paper for your college dorm. You will never be able to afford to buy it again, but your mother will set you off beautifully. I love that after this, you're on your own, you're gonna have that single, you'll never have pretty wrapped toilet paper again, but it'll look good in your dorm, you know, dorm or your apartment for the first time. But anyway, no, no, but what I like about it, though, is just this whole idea, which we talked about when we were first talking about agentic. In the customer experience world, there's an experience issue. Now we're, now, you know, there's an experience issue. You know, Cantor is well equipped to understand it, to find out like really how the issue, what the issue is, why it's upsetting, what's really at the heart of it, like really get to the understanding instead of just trying to solve the problem because you can solve the problem and not learn from it. But with the right customer understanding, you can learn from that problem and make sure it doesn't happen again. You know, because I think there's one thing about just putting a band-aid on it, fixing it, like giving them a pacifier to be oh, here, you know, we upset you. Let's give you $5. Every time, you know, I, you I do, I use Instacart. I've been public about this before. I use Instacart and have groceries delivered. And if they mess something up, they're like, oh, here's $5 off. I'm like, that's not the point. The point is, I'm really mad you didn't deliver my right. I wanted that. I don't want five dollars off. I wanted that. I don't want $5 off the next time. I wanted that because I'm making something and I needed it tonight. I want them to understand that what I really need is someone to go back to the freaking store, get it, and bring it to my house. They're not doing that. They're giving me $5. I want someone to understand that. And I think with a customer insights agency in that mix. They might actually get to understanding and not just have an agent make a solution. So that's why that's my hope for that type of partnership with CX and research together.

Lenny Murphy: And that's such, so my son's a drummer, right? And I talked about that. And he just got a new drum set.

Karen Lynch: There's a company called Sweetwater.

Lenny Murphy: And Sweetwater is legendary for musicians because of their service. And they truly are. They almost bug you, right? Okay, how's that? You got to need help? And amazing, amazing service to make sure that you are totally satisfied with their generally pretty expensive products. What was interesting though, this particular drum set, we actually bought from Guitar Center. And they copied it.

Karen Lynch: Meaning they were just as bugging me. Yeah. Sorry, guys.

Lenny Murphy: Don't take it. If you're listening, I appreciate it very much.

Karen Lynch: We're calling out a lot of brands today.

Lenny Murphy: But, the point was they're focused on the experience, on the buying experience, and they were putting in the resources to ensure that we're totally satisfied, had no questions, et cetera, et cetera. And I know that's not an inexpensive thing to do for a company to have that human connection, but I think it's become even more and more important to your point. And companies that have gotten scale through technology, that's wonderful. We got to find the human connection to folks on experience. And that's the type of stuff that'll come out here.

Karen Lynch: So, anyway. Anyway, Well, it's a good segue, actually, to talk about some brand tracking data. So let's do that.

Lenny Murphy: It is. It is. Friends at YouGov and, you know, full disclosure, a client and I actually were speaking to them before this call. But they're doing a lot of really smart stuff just independently. I just want to set the disclosure aside. Taking their brand index product now that's MCP based. But it's not just about being an MCP. It's about letting people query and unlock more value from that. And we're just seeing chat plugged in ChatGPT and cloud and just that trend. And we've seen the same thing with NIQ. We've seen lots of other companies that are just realizing the way of the asset. Compounds in value when you unlock utilization.

Karen Lynch: And these are the tools that unlock utilization.

Lenny Murphy: Focus on keeping the asset world class, right? Yeah. So, but you don't have to hold it captive and unlock it. And I just think we're seeing so many companies do that. And yeah, hats off to them.

Karen Lynch: Our friends at AYTM. I was saying, speaking of clients, AYTM is a, you know, good customer of Green Books and IIEX. Yeah, introduce the bridge. Good packaging, way to use conversational AI to kind of check the data before you go out and commission new data. Make sure that you're looking at past research before you go out and do it again. I think that's common sense. That's always been something that. You know, as a researcher, you always want to do it. It's always been hard to do going into those, you know, knowledge hubs. They're just talking about it and making sure it's known that this is something that we can do. Is making that much easier. And, you know, they're doing it through a conversational interface. So, smart use of AI right now. I'm glad they're publicizing that they can do it. I'm glad they've introduced that capability. Yeah.

Lenny Murphy: Everybody should be doing that.

Karen Lynch: And I think everybody. Yeah, it's on that path, so yeah, for sure.

Lenny Murphy: Um, yeah, uh, this was very smart. The Toluna, uh, Bina, that's the Toluna. Uh, and by the way, I don't think we put it at it here, but uh, since all the announcement that Frederic is stepping down as CEO, um, so just shout out to Frederic, you know, wonderful guy. Um, uh, but you know, Toluna, the Bina. What I love about this is the synthetic, but then connect into the flywheel to let's validate it and ask more questions, which is, I think, is the exact right use case of synthetic to be able to test it and make sure that it's right since there's so much debate about the models. So very cool.

Karen Lynch: And I mean, I think for all this, because I can talk about, we talked a lot about synthetic last week, right? And how people are validating synthetic. And if you're, if you're a buyer, if you're, if you're on the brand side or, um, or even, you know, a larger agency buying, buying these tools, talk about that. Don't, you know, how are you validating? What is the work you've already done? What's your, you know, what's your you know, what's the work that you've put into replicating? Like, ask the questions so that you feel confident and trust the results. Like, don't just dismiss, um, and don't just take it at face value either. Just like go ahead and have those conversations with your partners because everybody right now should be having these conversations and you should be asking and they should be answering and everybody should be comfortable and it should be a dialogue in my opinion. So, yep, yep, I agree. And everybody should be comfortable having those conversations. Nothing should be, or everything should be transparent right now. Nothing should be hidden from you.

Lenny Murphy: 100%. And that's actually a segue into the next piece, right? So Oros, Oros, we need to ask him Oros, I think, how you pronounce it. Formerly user testing, and they rebranded. Which all did UX testing. But I thought this was really cool that now they want to understand your experience, your trust with AI products and launching a whole other component of that outside of just kind of the usability testing, which is kind of where they always were, you thought about them. And like, wait, you know, these now that. Everybody's launching agents and it's just going to accelerate and grow and it's a whole new user it's not about the user interface because that's pretty straightforward you just talk talk to it or type it right right but there's deeper levels of experience now with these technologies uh so hats off to them I thought that was super cool uh for them to go direction yeah because it's it's it's usability with all of these AI products, but also your adoption of these AI products, your trust in these AI products.

Karen Lynch: So, yeah, they call it the AI relationship quality. Yes. So, yeah, good. Check it out.

Lenny Murphy: It's pretty cool. Yep. Yep. And just not too fine a point but the truly the explosion of agents driven mostly by Muse for the consumer standpoint, but then. You know, OpenAI, Lobstots, you know, Rockbot, Cloud Code, blah, blah, blah. Right? That we're just beginning to see the explosion of that. I think it's come into its own. I think people are going to be shocked if we can measure it by the level of usage of agents during holiday shopping. I think it is going to drive adoption to the moon. Because this is the perfect timing, right? You're stressed out, you're trying to juggle all the stuff. Oh, Calgon, take it away, Yeah, yeah, please definitely age yourself there.

Karen Lynch: I don't know your audience, I know exactly what you mean. I don't know that everybody does.

Lenny Murphy: Well, good. Because probably as I say it, I realize, wait, that visual was like a lady in a bathtub. Nobody needs to think about me in a bathtub.

Karen Lynch: So funny so funny all right all right big tech big tech so yeah big tech I mean this is you you yeah we were just we were just at ad week this was a big deal at ad week so open ai expanded their uh chat gpt ad measurement programs uh just this week uh monday monday Early brand measurement testing, you know, with Kantar and Since in particular, which is really interesting because they were very since certainly at this event, they had a big presence at this event. We talked quite a bit. Hi, Ariel. Good to be thinking about you again because we talked quite a bit when we were there. You know the idea that they are working on measuring the very ads that are placed in these platforms. And then we'll be reliant. We're not only, it's like we've given up so much control. Like, the change is just happening. We're watching it unfold. This is just what's happening. By the way, we didn't even ask for this, and here it is. Like, by the way, this is what's happening now. This is the new behavior, this is where the ads are going to be, and now, by the way, this is how we're testing them. It's just all really interesting. The new world, yes. Um, that's what I find really interesting. Um, and and yeah, and brands, um, brands kind of uh, what do you call it, doe-eyed, like just you know, wide-eyed, listening and taking it in, and being like, I have to learn this now.

Lenny Murphy: You can do it at every level.

Karen Lynch: And that's a whole new environment, a whole new thing to take in, a whole new testing to a whole new measurement of it.

Lenny Murphy: Well, so I don't, you know, everybody knows I don't use ChatGPT, but I did see that they changed the form factor, kind of the display of the interface that is not just, oh, here's an ad. But seems more interactive and engaging and so there's huge dimensions of this of not just oh there's an ad on my screen they're adapting to something fundamentally different um and we're going to see that with the also probably mention this the applications if you're paying for chat gpt now for whatever their agents that's probably going to go away so because they'll become ad supported um and the same thing muse you don't pay for muse it's ad supported the so so the the entire ecosystem um of how these companies work and fund themselves it's like kind of how it always has been right um yeah but in a whole new way yeah uh whole new territory it's as a researcher it's gonna be so much it's so interesting to try and and understand these things, yeah. But to your point, we don't have months and years to understand it because literally next week there's going to be something else.

Karen Lynch: I know it's crazy, it's crazy.

Lenny Murphy: Um, good segue that Google, I mean, well, this whole thing, the Agentic, it's connected, right? Yeah, um, yeah, so it's like, oh, everybody's got an agent now. Oh, we gotta make sure the agents can do stuff. Um, right, oh, we need to. Norms, and Amazon is saying, No, we're not going to let your agents in. Shopify is going, bring it on, we want your agents, and yeah, uh, so building whole new systems to allow for agentic purchasing. Um, so Google rolled out a merchant onboarding for AI checkout, which is an issue. I wrote about it a couple of weeks ago. I tried to have an agent do a transaction and it kept stalling out. And I said, Screw this. It went where I could actually get it done. So uh, and now the infrastructure is forming around, yeah, yeah, yeah. Whether you, what, what do you think about that? That, um, because I, I, I think I just keep thinking the shopper journey, any way that we measure shopper journey or brand at this point is broken. So, and it's only gonna get more broken.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, a couple things. I think that I think there's so much work to be done. I think I've said this before: understanding the shopper journey, the new shopper journey, people that are at various stages. I think you have to understand people who are just starting out on a new shopper journey that are like, I'd like to try this, I don't know how. People that are early adopters to this type of shopping. I think there are a lot of them, you know. Traditional research has to be done, not AI research, but you really have to have an in-depth understanding of what is happening right now because humans don't even quite understand it well enough to articulate it. Certainly not in a chat button. I would like somebody, I could see somebody sitting next to me while I'm trying it so that I can find my words while I work. That's how it is for me. I would need to be almost saying it out loud while I'm doing it to try to come up with my thinking because it's too complex right now. It is not system one, that's for damn sure. Right? It's too hard to articulate what I'm thinking while I'm doing it. The journey is too complicated. So, I think really we need to be working, we as researchers should be investing in trying to understand the journey. That's one thing I think. I like the idea of merchant onboarding. I think that onboarding is one of the biggest. Biggest barriers to adoption. I think that that's the worthwhile investment in that also. I think you're going to not just onboarding any kind of merchant, but any kind of brands that might be working with a merchant have to be onboarded how to do that. I think there's a lot of money that should be put into that. Right there. So that's what I think. I just think that they don't take for granted that it's easy to do.

Lenny Murphy: Agreed. So this is a segue to our next thing because this week, that topic of the friction, the barrier of just onboarding as for change has just come up over and over again. And particularly in our industry. The small to mid-sized companies that are, they just don't have the time, the talent, meaning there's not people dedicated to this type of world, right? I mean, the tech and all this stuff. There's so many and what I hear are so many companies that are like, dear in the headlight, we know we need to do this, but I'm too busy running the business. But oh crap, the business is declining because the path to purchase is changing.

Karen Lynch: Somebody please help.

Lenny Murphy: Can you fix this for me? Just do this, you know, implement these changes. And that goes to Nelson, our grit guru, who did an analysis on some data we had and more data coming out on Agentic.

Karen Lynch: Research purchasing.

Lenny Murphy: And we've known that's why we asked these questions because we knew this was coming. It's not just coming, it's here. It's still relatively early, but what I thought was absolutely utterly unsurprising was this other class of non-research buyers that tend to be more tech-centric. They're like, yeah, I just want to. I just want to push the button or let my agent push the button, but the entire procurement process needs to be done agentically.

Karen Lynch: I don't want to email somebody.

Lenny Murphy: I don't want to talk to them. I don't want to go back and forth with an RFP. I just want it done that way. Not quite that of the traditional research, but still growing. And this is one of those fundamental things you just do . How do I give people the opportunity to pay me? I mean, I have the best service in the world. But if I can't be found and then people can't engage with me because I'm working on some antiquated system, it doesn't matter. Yeah. And so, this back to that point, having somebody to onboard and help and say, we got this for you, that's huge because so many businesses just don't know what the hell to do with this. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, Nancy. Is going the way of the dinosaur. I heard anecdotally this week from multiple companies that they were losing business because they were not agentically procurement enabled. So, um, the uh, because the buyer, the corporate buyer, the brand, did RFP, here's my specs. Press the button, you fulfill the project.

Karen Lynch: So that's here.

Lenny Murphy: That is it. So all of this theme, right? Sorry, I'm going off on a soapbox, but all this thing on, you know, agents and path to purchase and advertising and marketing and branding. And, it fundamentally affects our industry because we sell things to people.

Karen Lynch: And that is what is changing. Yeah. Yeah. I just went down a little. Sidebar in my head too, Nancy, with that. I think before that fully happens, though, the cautionary tale is people with the RFPs that are in play right now, people asking AI to complete them and not trusting AI too much. Because what we talked about at our AI event was. Some of the proposals are just AI slop and crap. And people are like, oh, I'll just have my AI do it. And they're not meeting the needs and they're not being thorough and they're putting forth crap and they're not winning the jobs because of it. They're like, they're taking the easy, lazy way out. And it's like, so you're not helping keep these. RFPs in play. Like, you're not helping the extinction effort. You know, you're not keeping them around if you're doing it that way. So, yes, they're probably going the way of the dinosaur. Certainly, it's going to happen faster if you're not going to ensure quality while they're still here.

Lenny Murphy: Well, I think, so we've talked about this before. There's always going to be for strategic work. And I have a hard time imagining. It doesn't mean that. It's not happening, but I have a hard time imagining that the RFP process will not still be appropriate high-end strategic creative kinds of things. I just, I just, I can't imagine what that looks like to not have some process.

Karen Lynch: Here's our problem.

Lenny Murphy: We don't know how the hell to solve it. That's why we're coming to you. Give us your best thinking on that. Yeah. Yeah. But that is not the case. From a volume standpoint in the research world, the bulk of the research that is conducted can be automated and somewhat unagentified because it's not that complex. So from that standpoint, Nancy, I absolutely see there's no reason to do an RFP when you're looking for, to conduct N equals a thousand ad test. Give me your best number. Yeah.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. And we'll talk about the next, the, the, the final kind for further reading here, and maybe that'll all be done with synthetic. Yeah, I was joking with somebody earlier. Have a good weekend, everybody. I was on a call earlier. I Yeah, I got to do The Exchange.

Lenny Murphy: Oh, so that's when you go and you scare the hell out of everybody, right? And it's like, well, I tried to, you know.

Karen Lynch: I mean, we just have to, we just have to really look at a very different future. We have to be imagining a very different future. We, you know, we just have to, you know, we just have to. Reimagine what it looks like because it's just different, and our roles are different. And how we do things, excuse me, it's just different. But yeah, this study about how we're evaluating synthetic research, and it's back to the validation issue, you know, and you know just just staying staying ahead of the curve just by paying attention to that and um I think that that debate is going to be ongoing um so if you have a synthetic product just uh just know that you're always you're going to be getting questions about that um in perpetuity probably um as we hash that out and and know that our yes our industry is still in flux and still changing and still evolving and what's coming down coming down the road might look very different from what it looks like today. And our procurement process might be different. But that doesn't mean it's better or worse.

Lenny Murphy: It's just different. Yes. And so that's a great way to wrap up, right? Because I think fundamentally, somebody asked me this week of, you know, where's value in the industry? Like, where the value's always been? Data. The right data that can be deployed to answer the question, and the expertise to know that it's right and to say, here's what it means. The process has always been a commodity. The problem is, as an industry, we just base a lot of our business models off of process. So the, and that, right? That's now it's being constricted and crunched and, you know, blah, blah, blah. Got it. But this, to your point. Where do we add value? And whether you're extracting the value of the data through synthetic or through conjoint analysis, right? It doesn't, you know, it doesn't matter. The data is valuable. Make sure it's the right data, it's good data and the process is giving you the right answer to address the business issue. So I still have tons of hope, not just hope, I'm confident. The industry is going to be okay, to your point. Process changes, and that's painful and scary and weird.

Karen Lynch: And you know, well, and the industry might be defined differently. You know, absolutely. The industry might not be a silo. The industry might be much broader. We might be sitting next to people who actually have different expertise, but they're still researchers or they're doing researchers as part of their job. Research becomes something that a lot of people do in many different fields.

Lenny Murphy: Yes. And

Karen Lynch: And

Lenny Murphy: It's a yes and field. Yes. Yes. And the barrier to entry as far as buyers is going to decrease. So these tools, as they create efficiencies and they reduce costs, then that opens up the door for Lenny's Kentucky pizza chain. To have the same access to the same tools that PNG does. And that's a good thing. So more people will leverage data to make better decisions. And I think that's amazing. Yeah, I saw Tim Visa agent cards. I actually, there's a, oh, I forget, maybe it was Stripe. That I enabled the chief of staff, my chief of staff, my Grok bot, chief of staff, to do transactions. And I was serious about setting up, I need to set up a separate kind of charge account for that.

Karen Lynch: Tell your Grockbot, your Grock bot, to go to podcastadgame.com.

Lenny Murphy: It will download the transcript of this, so it'll capture that automatically.

Karen Lynch: We have a whole other conversation about that. Give it permission and say, go buy this game. Karen says, go buy this game so you can play it at Thanksgiving with your family.

Lenny Murphy: So, just to wrap up with this, the weird world that we're in, I started out of the blue, I started getting right like I didn't authorize it. Like, all right, you have a meeting at nine. Here's what you talked about last week. Make sure that you ask so-and-so this, this, is, this. I never said do that, it just started doing it. Um, and it's just like, yes, mom. Okay, uh, it's just an interesting world.

Karen Lynch: All right, Lenny. Oh, Lenny, Lenny, Lenny. All right. Well, listen, friends, have a great weekend, everybody. Yes. And we'll see each other this week.

Lenny Murphy: Yep, everybody, take care.

Karen Lynch: Bye-bye. Everybody, take care. We'll talk to you soon. Bye all.

Links from the episode:

Register for ESOMAR North America 2026 and use code UNFILTERED2026_GREENBOOK for an additional 15% off your registration 

UNRVLD acquired 2CV and The Value Engineers 

Brave Bison raised its final System1 offer to 405p per share 

Kantar and Qualtrics launched Experience Impact 

YouGov extended its AI connectivity to BrandIndex 

aytm introduced the Bridge 

Toluna launched Bina 

Auros, formerly UserTesting, launched AI Relationship Quality 

OpenAI expanded ChatGPT ad measurement 

Google is rolling out merchant onboarding for AI checkout 

Research & Insights Services: Agents Are Coming 

Artificial Societies Benchmark: A Validation Framework for Synthetic Research