What is the most common attribute of a corporate thought leadership report today? It’s not the type of content: companies now publish written content, audio and video, and visual content, in order to appeal to different audiences. It’s also not the length of content: modern campaigns include content ranging from tweet-length snapshots through to full-length reports, and everything in-between. But the one thing that is nearly always consistent? Thought leadership studies almost universally draw on a survey as the primary research input. Even the emergence of AI hasn’t fundamentally changed that. 

It’s one of the reasons why we think the traditional thought leadership model is a bit tired, as we argued in a recent webinar. And our view is in order for companies to stand out, they need to get more creative with their research methods.   

A brilliant recent example is the Guinndex, which used an AI calling agent to call 3,000 Irish pubs for St Patrick’s Day to ask the price of a pint, and create a price index on the back of it, which got a huge amount of media attention. That in turn also led to an American Gas Index, where the AI agents called over 170,000 petrol stations to find out the price of a gallon of fuel. The gas price index shows a host of information, including the cheapest fuel pump near you - and how much more to fill the tank since the Iran war started

The point here is about being willing to explore and test new and varied research methods - and ideally to either create, or tap into, proprietary data wherever possible, going beyond the traditional closed-ended survey. These examples are rare, so it’s especially interesting and rewarding when we do see them emerge. 

Here are a few we’ve enjoyed: 

1. Dentsu’s The attention economy

First up is an example from advertising group Dentsu Aegis, which looked into the idea of attention being a scarce resource. This is a straightforward idea, but they sought to actually quantify this, revealing for example that only one-third of adverts get an audience’s full attention. And when people can skip ads, they will. And if they can’t, then often look away. It all led to an initiative by Dentsu which it called ‘the attention economy’. But the interesting part was how it actually conducted the research, which was based on eye-tracking technology to analyse exactly how people watched (or didn’t watch) some 17,000 video adverts shown on TV, within social media, and as pre-roll on video platforms. Eye-gaze data measured attention and reported whether eyes were on the ad, or on-screen but not on the ad, or off-screen completely. Read more about it here.     

2. Adobe’s Digital Price Index 

A more ambitious and ongoing study is Adobe’s Digital Price Index, which aims to be the most comprehensive measure of inflation in the digital economy. Developed by Adobe Digital Insights along with two economists, Austan Goolsbee and Pete Klenow. The core idea is that regular consumer price indexes struggle to account for sudden changes in consumer habits or the introduction of new goods, especially in the realm of online shopping. Adobe claims to have taken data from over one trillion transactions, across over 100 million unique product categories. Things get economically nerdy from here-on in: the company’s approach relies on a method called the Fisher Ideal Price Index. This allows the index to dynamically adjust prices over time - and to account for issues such as when an item’s price rises and shoppers instead swap over to a cheaper rival product. But essentially the study works with a combination of some funky economic formulas and the significant amount of shopping traffic that Adobe is able to capture from its marketing cloud offerings.       

3. Spotify’s Culture Next insights 

The Spotify team continues to deliver innovative and data-driven insights, which draw on its proprietary data about people’s listening habits. In its Culture Next report, Spotify draws on both its first party streaming data and a survey of 7,700 Gen Zs. The idea is to provide a richer set of insights about Gen Z trends, habits and thinking. For example, one of the findings is about how social media has heightened feelings of isolation among Gen Z, but in turn it’s led to a sharp rise in shared listening habits: blending with friends and celebs, collaborative playlists, sharing profiles, and more. The overall outcome is a more interesting set of findings than either a standalone survey, or purely listening data, could produce in isolation. 

4. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index 

Over the past five years, Microsoft has created a significant body of research that aims to investigate and better understand how working habits are changing and evolving. From pandemic-era shifts to remote and hybrid lifestyles, through to the emergence and impact of AI tools within the workplace. As part of this, the company has drawn on a range of research methodologies and approaches, but one of the most fascinating was a study exploring how meeting fatigue affects anyone with a day full of Zoom calls. Microsoft’s researchers asked 14 people to take part in video meetings while wearing electroencephalogram (EEG) equipment—a cap to monitor the electrical activity in their brains. These volunteers participated in two different sessions of meetings, to directly measure the impact on their brains. (TL;DR findings: breaks are good, and you’re not alone in feeling stressed when you hop directly from one meeting to another.) 

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