Delilah Quotes

Traditional market researchers are cold and calculating and scientific.

The best research you can do is to talk to people.

Sampling, statisticians have told us, is a much more effective way of getting a good census.

I've never been in a focus-group meeting. I wonder how many anchors can say that.

If you aren't taking a representative sample, you won't get a representative snapshot.

I don't have any focus groups on talent and programming. If I need five people in a mall to be paid $40 to tell me how to do my job, I shouldn't do my job.

I view my job more almost as a field biologist or anthropologist, where I'm collecting practices. I'm collecting techniques.

The company started in the early 90s or late 80s. We were a behavioural science company. We didn't pivot into data analytics till 2012. So, all the data that we collected pre-2012, which was done by the British company SBL group, was collected through quantitive and qualitative research on the ground.

Anecdotal data is not incidental to theory development at all, but an essential part of it.

When you start using test audiences, it becomes more scientific than it is about the work itself, and that's boring.

The initial research will be very indiscriminate. I do a lot of reading, buy a stack of books and read and digest them, and then I start doing phone interviews and archival research and then the travelling.

I have certainly amassed many historical research gathering skills.

Everyone takes surveys. Whoever makes a statement about human behavior has engaged in a survey of some sort.

We saw that our customers required help beyond the data sets they had and that they could benefit from a wider opinion. So we built SurveyMonkey Audience, and we've now got 4 million users who signed up to take surveys. Our clients can choose the demographic they want to hear from, and we can provide that sample.

I am a data hound and so I usually end up working on whatever things I can find good data on. The rise of Internet commerce completely altered the amount of information you could gather on company behavior so I naturally drifted toward it.

The way to do fieldwork is never to come up for air until it is all over.

Polls are inaccurate in my opinion, based upon anecdotal evidence, based upon people that I know.

We are working to understand the tastes of people born in the 1980s and 1990s - it is very different from my generation. We do our own research. Marketing research companies, I think, are relatively academic.

I have interviewed face-to-face, sitting beside me, over 19,000 people.

Our polling methodology has gotten outdated, and, in fact, it's not really telling us what it needs to be telling us.

In the old world, people used to have to go to focus groups and ask people what they thought. Now, people are writing all over the Web what they think about things.

In order to create predictive algorithms, you need to have a training set. So, that training set is created through our quantitative surveys. Those surveys need to include either basic market research questions or basic political polling questions, which might be added to get your opinion on a brand or an issue or a candidate.

If a kid goes and buys a CD at Best Buy, we have no idea who the person is, how many times they listen to it, or anything like that.

When I started in the nineties, a sample size was a 4 and a 6.

If you're a social scientist worth your salt, you never do a univariate analysis.