Paul Neto, co-founder and CMO of Measure Protocol recently appeared on the Infotools ‘Now That’s Significant’ market research podcast. Paul was there to discuss some of the interesting things that we are doing in the behavioral data space, including some recent findings from our platform Retro, our on-demand behavioral data collection technology. Paul highlighted how most companies have big data gaps in their consumer data collection strategies, and gave some background as to why this has happened. Paul talks about how the future is “really about looking at new approaches to new forms of behavioral data and data access.”

Over the last two decades, the industry has held a lot of promise surrounding behavioral data. Paul shared that “the reality is that we haven’t been fully able to realize it or take benefit up to this time.” In specific, representation of iOS users in the behavioral space has been largely missing. In fact, without access to iOS data, most organizations are actually missing valuable behavioral data from about one billion people. With Measure Protocol methodologies, such as Retro, we’re able to access comprehensive behavioral data for an individual, including iOS, engagement, mobile purchases, and in-app data.

“You have to look at some of the basic fundamentals of both your company and your technology, and try to build an ecosystem where data sharing just happens,” Paul shared. He continued by saying, “Once you find that magic zone with consumers, they actually want to share more data. Once you have a trust-based relationship, all of the sudden, very interesting things happen.” We do this by creating a privacy-first, fully permissioned environment for our community to share information. 

Paul also talked a bit on the podcast about Retro’s recent win of the Market Research Society award for ‘Best Technology Innovation’ of 2022. “It was extremely exciting for us to get industry validation and recognition of the work that we’re doing. Retro is one of our approaches to collecting behavioral data,” Paul shared. Our approach also obtains longitudinal data. Paul explained, “so what ends up happening if you have a lot of data density, and you have it longitudinally…the overall quality of the data is much higher.”

The data that we’ve collected, using Retro, was the basis of our App Life report, showcasing the ‘top of the trees’ to showcase the various data pieces that we collect. Some of the more surprising things that we found, shared Paul, is “despite what you’re hearing about ‘millions of [app] downloads,’ the average individual really only uses about 40 [apps] per week. If you expand that to a month, it’s actually closer to 90. So this starts to indicate that there’s a small number of apps that are core to an individual.”

So why is this type of data so important for businesses to incorporate into their data strategies? “We’ve overburdened surveys to be a proxy for behavioral data. It’s clear that just asking people what they did/what they bought/how much time they spend, just isn’t viable for accurate data. The world has become an app world; it’s become a mobile world. Because we are maxed out on time, everything comes down to engagement.” Paul concludes by saying, “app engagement to mobile engagement has been largely a black hole in the behavioral world, so this becomes increasingly more important to have some visibility into it. You just can’t ignore it anymore.”

You can listen to the whole podcast episode, here.

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