LIVE ONLINE

 A MORE CLEAR, VALID, AND INSIGHTFUL APPROACH TO QUAL AND HYBRID QUAL+QUANT

  • Live Online™ Group Sessions leverage ACUPOLL’s AI-powered platform to deliver deeper qualitative insight and sharper decision-making. Whether you're evaluating and refining ideas, exploring new territory, or diving into a key audience, Live Online combines the best of qual and quant in real time.

    • Probe qualitatively on the fly to understand the why’s, and quantitatively to get more precise understanding.

    • Eliminate 100% of group bias, with 80–90% less time than traditional individual interviews.

    • Live Online has been trusted to launch a multi-$Bn global brand, optimize Super Bowl ads, and shape the strategies for brand acquisitions (see how in our Case Studies below).

TRANSCEND

  • Traditional qualitative methods are deeply flawed in today’s fast-paced, insight-hungry environment:

    • Focus groups have a high risk of bias; every respondent can be influenced by the first speaker.

    • In-depth Interviews consume a TON of team resource time.

    • Both approaches spend valuable time collecting basic information that could be captured faster and more precisely with quant questions.

    • Analyzing responses across segments is difficult and often imprecise.

STATUS QUO

  • Live Online is built for hybrid learning, seamlessly blending qualitative depth with precise quantitative confidence. It’s ideal for:

    • Evaluating and optimizing stimuli: concepts, positionings, packaging, ads, digital content, and even product prototypes.

    • Exploring key themes or issues: sustainability, clean ingredients, etc.

    • Understanding target audiences: millennials, brand switchers, etc.

  • InFocus (n=15–20) provides qualitative insight with greater validity; Qual+Quant (n=30–100+ per group) blends qual and quant in one or more streamlined session(s) to answer the what, how many, why, and how to improve.

USE CASES

  • No group bias or even moderator influence (appearance/voice/judgment); anonymity drives greater honesty and deeper truths, especially for sensitive or personal topics.

  • More efficient than traditional IDIs — more insight in less time/fewer staff hours

  • Easier to analyze for greater insight across respondents.

  • Superior qualitative response versus online survey verbatims (which respondents can rush through, unlike in our platform).

  • Integrated quant and Predictive Qualitative™ — gauge group agreement with key insights in real time, giving your team greater confidence and alignment for action.

ADVANTAGES

  • Watch our 5-minute Web Presentation demonstrating the process!

      Or, here’s the process at a glance:

    • Participants log-in to our proprietary platform — no camera, no microphone, fully anonymous.

    • The “moderator” posts one question at a time to the group.

    • Everyone answers questions simultaneously, without seeing other’s responses.

    • Quant questions get fast, precise answers while qual questions or exercises get the why’s.

    • Iterate and adapt the questions (or even the stimuli) on the fly based on real-time responses.

    • The result: richer insight, faster decisions, greater team confidence.

HOW IT WORKS

CASE STUDIES

  • See how leading brands have used Live Online to: sharpen creative for high-stakes advertising, guide brand strategy post-acquisition, explore key audience needs and drivers, and more:

  • T-Mobile wanted to launch a new loyalty program, but they needed to learn a lot before defining it. First they had to understand how people feel about loyalty programs: What do they like? What bugs them? What’s the ideal? Then they needed to shift more specifically to loyalty programs in the Telecom industry. And finally, they wanted to share their seed idea for their own program and learn how to make it better.

    Live Online™ Sessions came to the rescue and helped them get to the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ quickly, iterate and build new ideas in real time, and engage internal stakeholders in the learning — all with great quality sample. The session provided rich verbatims contrasting T-Mobile vs competitive users and capturing customer excitement, and on-the-fly probing turned up a key insight: people wanted to be auto-enrolled. We also learned ‘fast facts’ about their reactions, as well as precise details about what changes to make and how best to enhance T-Mobile perceptions. The auto-enrolled insight drove the whole “no need to audition for Magenta Status” campaign, including this Super Bowl ad (one of several) that generated 56 million views on YouTube.

  • Abbott was urgently striving to save lives during the pandemic by increasing penetration of COVID testing via the launch of their new BinaxNow home test. They needed to optimize the concept, an easy-to-use app, and instructions for use — and it was crucial to pinpoint the best way to communicate clearly and allay any concerns about effectiveness.

    While they were planning to conduct focus groups and then have us provide quantitative global concept testing, they quickly pivoted from traditional qual to our Live Online™ Sessions, given the greater clarity and confidence it could deliver. We helped them uncover a key insight underlying people’s concerns about efficacy, and the launch generated over $1B in Year 1 revenue in the U.S. alone. BinaxNOW remains the #1 home COVID test globally.

  • Nestlé was in a rush trying to develop their TV ads for the biggest marketing showcase of the year: the Super Bowl. They had two rough ads to choose between and optimize, and they didn’t want to rely on focus groups with the risk of group bias, or one-on-ones that would generate a laundry list of changes with no way to clearly prioritize across the diverse conversations.

    The brand turned to our tried-and-true Live Online™ process that blends qualitative input with quant questions for greater precision and confidence.

    “Given our tight timeline and situation we were in with the two concepts, this seemed like the best way to get the deepest, most actionable insights in the time allowed. What ACUPOLL helped us do was understand that this really had legs to win in the big game.” — Butterfinger Brand Manager, as reported in Advertising Age.

    The ad generated 480 million impressions and a historic launch for their new campaign.

  • Sauer’s wanted to evaluate and improve their brand packaging — pronto! They had three new directions to choose among, but wanted to optimize them first, for their best “shot on goal” before moving into the validation process. The first Live Online™ session on a Tuesday helped them identify each design’s strengths and opportunities for improvement; they got to work and quickly revised the stimuli for a second session that Thursday, which helped finalize which design to run with and what needed to be tweaked. Then, we tested the optimized concept in a FastTrack™ survey for national validation just a few days later — and, in less than a week, demonstrated the significance of their improvements vs the old design.

  • Kimberly-Clark and Ogilvy needed to develop a shopper marketing program for Walmart (in-store and online) to help cater to key neglected shopper segments and boost brand sales. They had a dozen loose program ideas targeting three different groups and wanted to get reactions to the various “big ideas,” identify the strongest interest areas, and “co-create” how to best execute the program elements and mechanics. A series of Live Online™ Sessions helped bring focus and direction, inspiring the team and rapidly moving them from rough concepts to well-defined programs for launch.