Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome to the Bob Left Sets podcast. My
Speaker 1: guest this week is CEO of Civic Science, John Dick.
Speaker 1: John Bob good to be here. I met John we
Speaker 1: were on a piano for an Access TV show. Because
Speaker 1: Mark Cuban is involved on the board of Civic Science
Speaker 1: doing Grammy predictions and John is in town. He sends
Speaker 1: a weekly email talking about trends in the world at large.
Speaker 1: Because ultimately, what would you call your company? Wouldn't call
Speaker 1: a polling company. I would call us a polling company.
Speaker 1: I wish there was a sexier way to describe it,
Speaker 1: but we're a new breed of polling company, okay. And
Speaker 1: he's always revealing fasciniating insights, so I thought it'd be
Speaker 1: great to have him on the podcast. Let's start from
Speaker 1: the beginning. You're in Pittsburgh. Correct, Why Pittsburgh the next
Speaker 1: big thing? Pittsburgh is going through a tremendous renaissance. But
Speaker 1: actually we're there. The company is there because carnegiel And
Speaker 1: University is there, and the talent and technology that powers
Speaker 1: the foundation of our company came from there, and so
Speaker 1: um and it's a great place to live, and it's
Speaker 1: a really emerging city with lots of talent and just
Speaker 1: a smart place for us to Are you from Pittsburgh
Speaker 1: born and raised? Yeah? Did you go to Carnegie Mill?
Speaker 1: I did not. Where do you go to to Rollins
Speaker 1: College in Winter Park, Florida? Okay? So then how did
Speaker 1: you hook up with all these new technology things at
Speaker 1: Carnegie Miller. Well, I started a company earlier in my
Speaker 1: early twenties. Um sold that company in my late twenties.
Speaker 1: What was that company's called GSP. We helped early stage
Speaker 1: tech and biotech companies do business with the government, very
Speaker 1: different business. And so I exited that company and had
Speaker 1: the business plan for what became Civic Science shortly after,
Speaker 1: and I knew it had some technology needs and found
Speaker 1: a couple of guys that knew how to solve those
Speaker 1: technology needs. Okay, So why did you want to be
Speaker 1: in the polling business? Because it's broken? And uh, well
Speaker 1: two reasons. When it was broken and at a little
Speaker 1: slower Why is it broken because people don't participate the
Speaker 1: way they used to because we're too busy. Um, it's
Speaker 1: not a pleasant experience for people to participate in polling
Speaker 1: as it's sort of originally constructed. My phone's ringing while
Speaker 1: I'm having dinner, or I have to sign up at
Speaker 1: some web page and answer surveys all day for five bucks.
Speaker 1: And it's just not a user centric experience for anyone.
Speaker 1: And so what happened is landline phone ownerships started to plummet,
Speaker 1: and the people who have landline phones don't look like
Speaker 1: the ones who don't, and so the quality of the
Speaker 1: data started to suffer. And then posters said, well, that's fine,
Speaker 1: we'll we'll call cell phones. But people don't answer cell
Speaker 1: phone calls from numbers they don't recognize, or at least
Speaker 1: the people who do don't look like the ones who don't.
Speaker 1: And then you had the advent of what are called
Speaker 1: survey panels, which are these websites people sign up at
Speaker 1: and answer surveys for money. And those people don't look
Speaker 1: like either of us. They are too much time on
Speaker 1: their hands. Okay, just one other thing, generally speaking, because
Speaker 1: you've lived in a place in Los Angeles, you're constantly
Speaker 1: getting email whatever, Come participate for fifty a hundred dollars.
Speaker 1: What are those panels worth? Well, I mean, what are
Speaker 1: they worth? They certainly are powering a lot of decision
Speaker 1: making in commercial America. I don't think they should be
Speaker 1: because the people who answer those surveys don't look like
Speaker 1: the real world. They are people who are highly incentivized
Speaker 1: by that financial incentive, and so they're heavily biased. Um,
Speaker 1: and then that financial reward inspire some of the wrong
Speaker 1: behaviors too, And when you're trying to research someone as
Speaker 1: opposed to getting their honest opinion about something. So that's
Speaker 1: all been broken, and it started breaking twenty years ago.
Speaker 1: It started to really sort of, Um, the chickens kind
Speaker 1: of came home to roost in the last election cycle.
Speaker 1: We see polling just isn't working the way that it
Speaker 1: used to. Okay, we got we got a bunchet things
Speaker 1: on what is the other reason you wanted to go
Speaker 1: into this business? Because I think it needs to work.
Speaker 1: It needs we need to figure out a way to
Speaker 1: understand what people think. There was a mindset ten or
Speaker 1: fifteen years ago that social media was somehow going to
Speaker 1: replace survey research is the way that we understood what
Speaker 1: the world thinks, and it just doesn't work that way.
Speaker 1: I'm not myself on social media. I'm a curated version
Speaker 1: of myself. We need a discreet means of understanding people's opinion.
Speaker 1: There's a reason we pull a curtain behind us on
Speaker 1: election day, because if our opinions are subject to scrutiny
Speaker 1: and peer pressure and invective, then we um, we don't
Speaker 1: tell people what we think. Why did everybody get it so?
Speaker 1: I mean, now we have Nate Silver, who now presently
Speaker 1: at five thirty eight, used to be The New York
Speaker 1: Times the previous election cycle. He balances polls. He got
Speaker 1: it wrong, although he will say he thought the odds
Speaker 1: of Trump being successful. Hire New York Times got it
Speaker 1: completely wrong. What did we learn there? Well, on a
Speaker 1: national level, from a popular vote standpoint, the posters were
Speaker 1: pretty strong. I mean they said most of the averages
Speaker 1: said Hillary Clinton would win by three percent, and she
Speaker 1: wrote one roughly by three Um, we're broke down. Was
Speaker 1: at state levels, where a couple of hundred thousand votes
Speaker 1: across three or four states were able to swing the election.
Speaker 1: What did we learn about it in the grand scheme
Speaker 1: of things was that there was an entire universe of
Speaker 1: people out there who were piste off and we didn't
Speaker 1: know about it. Um. One of the reasons, and we
Speaker 1: study this a lot in our own data, Conservatives tend
Speaker 1: to be much less outspoken on social media than their
Speaker 1: liberal counterparts are. Why because they believe that when they
Speaker 1: speak out on conservative issues, they are opening themselves up
Speaker 1: to attack from the left, and so they tend to
Speaker 1: keep their mouth shut. We've studied this extensively, and so
Speaker 1: there was an entire um sub layer of us, the
Speaker 1: US population that was piste off. But because they weren't
Speaker 1: trumpeting it from the rooftops on social media, we didn't
Speaker 1: know about it, and we didn't know about it until November. Okay,
Speaker 1: so you move back to Pittsburgh, you align with these
Speaker 1: people at Carnegie mellon what are the next steps in
Speaker 1: starting civic science. Well, we had a lot of technology
Speaker 1: and to build what was that technology, database and database
Speaker 1: architecture designed to kind of find all the stuff we
Speaker 1: can find in our data. We had to prove that
Speaker 1: the data the methodology we were inventing worked. Now, the
Speaker 1: methodology you started with when was this two eight? Is
Speaker 1: that the same methodology you're still employing. Absolutely, So explained
Speaker 1: to my what you with that methodology. So we encounter
Speaker 1: people and polls and quizzes across the web. Inside of
Speaker 1: content they're reading, it might be a polar quiz you
Speaker 1: might see on a buzz feeder or Facebook of what
Speaker 1: kind of wine or what kind of Simpson's character are you?
Speaker 1: But more it's an opinion type of poll of the
Speaker 1: day that you might find in an article you're reading
Speaker 1: on your local newspaper, on a site like Paris Hilton
Speaker 1: or Univision. We're generally asking somebody a couple of questions
Speaker 1: at a time, no more than three or four, because
Speaker 1: we know that if we add too many questions, we
Speaker 1: start to see a decline and participation and that's no good. Um.
Speaker 1: We give people back, um instant results, which we think
Speaker 1: is really important. So I answer a question, you know,
Speaker 1: what is my favorite color? And after I click, I'll
Speaker 1: see what everybody else's favorite color is. Sure. Sure, we
Speaker 1: don't generally ask favorite color, but yeah, sure, yeah, And
Speaker 1: and we think there's some a lot of particularly today. Um.
Speaker 1: And what we hear back from people is they appreciate
Speaker 1: that we're giving them the answers right back. It's unvarnished,
Speaker 1: unfiltered truth that here's what the world thinks, and here's
Speaker 1: what people like you think, and it's not being passed
Speaker 1: to you through the lens of a media company that
Speaker 1: may have some bias now with somewhat Okay, what is
Speaker 1: incentivizing them to answer the questions to begin with? Uh,
Speaker 1: it's that intrinsic benefit of a feeling like I'm participating
Speaker 1: in something good, be the interestingness of the results that
Speaker 1: I get back feeling like, Okay, I just learned something
Speaker 1: about the rest of the world by virtue of my
Speaker 1: participation in it. And do you compensate the sites where
Speaker 1: you're quizzes are now? So how do they end up
Speaker 1: being placed there? Um? They it's effectively a bartering arrangement. Um.
Speaker 1: But what they they learn things from the information that
Speaker 1: we gather that help them grow their businesses, that we
Speaker 1: help them improve their editorial functions and their ad sales. Okay,
Speaker 1: So let's say you're on website A. You would approach
Speaker 1: them and say, I want to do this, but I'm
Speaker 1: going to share data with you that's going to be
Speaker 1: your compensation. Correct. So how many sites are you presently on?
Speaker 1: Well over a thousand at last count. Um? Very uh
Speaker 1: piece together to give us a diverse representative view of
Speaker 1: the US population. So we want to make sure we
Speaker 1: have ample number of media companies that reach hispanics. An
Speaker 1: ample number of media companies that reach women and so forth. Um,
Speaker 1: the media companies make a distinction from us that the
Speaker 1: size of our poll sitting on their web page, that
Speaker 1: we are delivering more value to them from that information
Speaker 1: than they would get from a banner ad that was
Speaker 1: sitting in that same place. And as long as we
Speaker 1: can maintain that equilibrium, we can continue to collect that data.
Speaker 1: How do you choose what sites to place your quizzes on? Um? Well,
Speaker 1: it's we have a team who goes out and sells
Speaker 1: that essentially, and we do we prioritize at any given time,
Speaker 1: We prioritize sales to publishers or partnerships with publishers who
Speaker 1: meet demographic imbalances in our sampling. So if we if
Speaker 1: we notice over time, hey we're starting to get a
Speaker 1: disproportionate number of men answering our polls, we want to
Speaker 1: go and target sites that have a disproportionate audience of women. Okay,
Speaker 1: I am someone who never re answers those questions, So
Speaker 1: that begs the question are certain people ultimately not included
Speaker 1: in the sample? Yes? What do you do about that? Well,
Speaker 1: it's a fundamental flaw. UM, I guess what we tell
Speaker 1: the marketplace. And what we can prove in our research
Speaker 1: is that because we've limited those barriers as much as possible,
Speaker 1: that our audience looks more like the real world than
Speaker 1: any other methodology you would think of. So you're not
Speaker 1: going to be the person who signs up and answers
Speaker 1: surveys all day for five bucks either. Um we are.
Speaker 1: We are all missing some portion of the US population.
Speaker 1: We're just missing a much smaller portion of the population.
Speaker 1: And do you sit in your office and say, how
Speaker 1: do we reach those people? You just tell your customers
Speaker 1: some people are unreachable. Um, we're not giving up. I
Speaker 1: think we spend a ton of time trying to understand
Speaker 1: what types of questions or what kind of interaction will
Speaker 1: bring people who otherwise don't want to participate to participate in.
Speaker 1: Our response rates as a result, have gone up a lot.
Speaker 1: The percentage of of people who see our polls on
Speaker 1: a website and answer them has skyrocketed in the last
Speaker 1: two years because we've invested very heavily in solving that problem.
Speaker 1: I would assume it's still below ten percent. Sure, sure, um,
Speaker 1: but if you think about what's that, how's that relate
Speaker 1: to say, the likelihood of somebody clicking on an ad,
Speaker 1: it's a hundred times more than that, right, because there's
Speaker 1: there's something engaging about it, as opposed to, Oh, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna click on this ad and somebody's gonna try and
Speaker 1: try to try to sell me. And how many people
Speaker 1: work at SIVEN Civic Science? Um? I think? And are
Speaker 1: they all in Pittsburgh? All in way of one person
Speaker 1: in New York? Okay? So what kind of companies uh,
Speaker 1: by your data? Um, pretty broad, large ones, primarily very
Speaker 1: bigger sort of fortune five hundred types of enterprises. Consumer
Speaker 1: facing companies were really strong and tech and telcom, media, banking, healthcare, restaurant,
Speaker 1: and some retail. Okay, we were talking off camera, and
Speaker 1: these are all household name the names you think they are,
Speaker 1: they are, but let's assume point of discussion. Telcom Okay,
Speaker 1: it is a very competitive marketplace. Everyone already has a smartphone.
Speaker 1: There are four competitors in the United States. What you
Speaker 1: be able to tell a telecom company, Uh, there's going
Speaker 1: to be a mix of things about attitudes towards their
Speaker 1: specific company and their specific products. There's going to be
Speaker 1: a mix of things about trends within their category. So
Speaker 1: which of their competitors and maybe are more vulnerable than
Speaker 1: others at a given point in time. And then the
Speaker 1: more valuable stuff we do tends to look at how
Speaker 1: various larger consumer trends and macro forces are affecting consumers
Speaker 1: and how that relates to what mobile carriers they're going
Speaker 1: to use, and and and um, how much of their
Speaker 1: plan they're going to use. One thing we learned was
Speaker 1: really fascinating pre and post election was the composition of
Speaker 1: the people who were likely to switch mobile carriers changed
Speaker 1: very dramatically from the summer of two thousand sixteen through
Speaker 1: the summer. And what did your research tell you, Um,
Speaker 1: Democrats were more likely to switch mobile carriers after the
Speaker 1: election than they were before because they, UM, I switched
Speaker 1: my mobile carrier generally to get a better financial deal, right,
Speaker 1: and so it tends to correlate with my personal financial
Speaker 1: situation or my consumer confidence. And so once um, Donald
Speaker 1: Trump was elected, these people, UM, a lot of Democrats
Speaker 1: began to have a bleaker view of the economy and said,
Speaker 1: you know what, I better go find a better deal
Speaker 1: for myself. And we saw a higher rate of switchers
Speaker 1: among Democrats during that period of time as opposed to
Speaker 1: the summer before when they tended to be more likely
Speaker 1: to be Republicans. Now, sitting here as a lay person,
Speaker 1: one could say, also Sprint was offering comprehensive plans with
Speaker 1: very cheaper free phones. T Mobile was very cheap, So
Speaker 1: one might say, really it was plans were so cheap
Speaker 1: people were incentivized for that reason as opposed to consumer confidence. Well,
Speaker 1: but still there's I chase a cheaper opportunity when I'm
Speaker 1: looking when I have a less positive view of my
Speaker 1: personal finances. So I would whether there was cause and
Speaker 1: effect there or whether those companies were smart enough to
Speaker 1: capitalize them what they knew was coming, which was more
Speaker 1: price sensitivity in their core markets. UM. Hard to tell. Okay, Now,
Speaker 1: many all these companies do use consumer research, but there's
Speaker 1: a school of thought that research will tell you where
Speaker 1: you've been, but it won't tell you where you're going. Oh,
Speaker 1: that's the big part of our ethos as we focus
Speaker 1: on looking through the windshield. So how do you do that? UM?
Speaker 1: We look a lot at patterns and trends in this
Speaker 1: history of data now that we have UM, those trends
Speaker 1: tend to have a trajectory that we can look two months,
Speaker 1: six months out and see where they're headed. We ask
Speaker 1: a lot of questions that are forward looking of people.
Speaker 1: What are your intentions? How likely you to do something
Speaker 1: in the future. Um, there's ample backward looking data that
Speaker 1: credit card companies have and people on the web have
Speaker 1: based on things I clicked on yesterday and bought yesterday.
Speaker 1: We don't we don't need to augment that information. We
Speaker 1: focus on where are people going to be spending their
Speaker 1: money next week or next month. But you look famously,
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs did no consumer research, and he would come
Speaker 1: up with products that people literally hadn't heard of, I
Speaker 1: didn't think they needed, and then would clamor for good,
Speaker 1: good work if you can get it. Okay, So he's
Speaker 1: an anomaly. He's the outline absolutely. Okay. Yeah, how about
Speaker 1: Elon Musk probably of that ilk. But I think those
Speaker 1: people are the exceptions, not the rule. Okay. So where's
Speaker 1: it going? Well, Um, it's a mix of exciting and
Speaker 1: terrifying all at once. Um, we are seeing some amazing
Speaker 1: see changes right now, a lot of things related. UM.
Speaker 1: I don't think we fully appreciate yet the impact that
Speaker 1: social media will have on our culture forever. I think
Speaker 1: we intuitively get some of it, but I don't think
Speaker 1: we're going to be able to diagnose any of that
Speaker 1: for decades. But one of the things that that that
Speaker 1: we notice a lot in our data is and and
Speaker 1: everyone kind of can relate to this, is that because
Speaker 1: I'm this kind of curated version of myself on social media,
Speaker 1: I use social media as a way to make myself
Speaker 1: look funnier and smarter and a better parent and more
Speaker 1: adventurous and a better eater. And I think about that
Speaker 1: consciously or not when I choose what to share, where
Speaker 1: to check in. Uh. The flip side of that is
Speaker 1: I have a high disincentive to say anything that is unpopular.
Speaker 1: And so we see and it goes back to the
Speaker 1: common I made earlier about the election. People who believed
Speaker 1: it was unpopular to support Donald Trump in two thousand
Speaker 1: and sixteen just didn't talk about it, but they showed
Speaker 1: up on election day and did. Now we're seeing it's
Speaker 1: a little more um. People are a little bolder about
Speaker 1: their support now than they were in But what's happening
Speaker 1: is unpopular opinions tend to be suppressed on social media,
Speaker 1: and so we have a sense of consensus that doesn't
Speaker 1: really exist. But yes, if if, if you remember the
Speaker 1: summer of two thousand and fifteen, UM when the Supreme
Speaker 1: Court was ruling on gay marriage, it was a very
Speaker 1: popular thing to have this rainbow tinted profile picture as
Speaker 1: a as a solidarity. Right around that same summer, the
Speaker 1: South Carolina State Legislature was being was debating taking the
Speaker 1: Confederate flag down from over the state Capitol building. There
Speaker 1: were no equivalent Confederate flag filters over anybody's profile pictures,
Speaker 1: which is kind of surprising to me because I grew
Speaker 1: up in a pretty rural part of Pennsylvania, where I
Speaker 1: know lots of gun toting, right wing evangelical Christian types.
Speaker 1: You'd think that I would have an equal number of
Speaker 1: rainbow printed tinted profile pictures and Confederate flag ones. But
Speaker 1: I didn't, um because once Facebook had become a wash
Speaker 1: with those rainbow filters, everybody who believed otherwise had a
Speaker 1: significant disincentive from saying anything to the contrary because they
Speaker 1: knew they'd be open to attack. So narratives that emerge
Speaker 1: on social media and take take hold are very, very
Speaker 1: difficult to change, and the impact that has on the
Speaker 1: popularity of music, the popularity of brands and fashion. It's
Speaker 1: it's almost a measurable today. Okay, Just so I understand
Speaker 1: it is is it a skewed view of reality or
Speaker 1: does it change reality? Or both both? I mean, I
Speaker 1: think I think what we're what what what I'm suggesting
Speaker 1: is that when we look back on this period of
Speaker 1: history that it will have changed reality. Um. Well, I'm
Speaker 1: a big believer that the reason the younger generation is
Speaker 1: not as racist and gay marriage is accepted because they
Speaker 1: saw a rainbow of colors and uh, different choices on
Speaker 1: MTV and MTV dominated. So are we saying the same
Speaker 1: thing that social media will ultimately affect what people believe?
Speaker 1: There's no question about it. I think that it is.
Speaker 1: Once a wave of popular opinion washes over, it moves people. Um,
Speaker 1: it gets them to reconsider their points of view. Some
Speaker 1: it gets others to really stig their heels in. So
Speaker 1: what what are we learning with the backlash against Facebook
Speaker 1: and social media presently? Well, there's a lot of technical
Speaker 1: reasons for some of that that I don't think Facebook
Speaker 1: should be blamed for. Um, this has all been happening
Speaker 1: so fast, nobody, It's not like everybody saw it coming
Speaker 1: and told Facebook to prepare itself. This was a whole
Speaker 1: new frontier for them. I think they can fix it.
Speaker 1: I think what we're learning about from the election through
Speaker 1: now is what and and social media is driving a
Speaker 1: lot of this, which is this incessant kind of tribalism
Speaker 1: in America that we have where um I want to
Speaker 1: and it's and it's affecting UM this or what we
Speaker 1: call sort of the stay at home economy as well,
Speaker 1: people don't want to go out in public as much
Speaker 1: as that. We have a question that we track in
Speaker 1: our database, which is do you would you say that
Speaker 1: you want to go out, that you're going out more
Speaker 1: or less than you did six months ago? Thirty three
Speaker 1: percent of people and the last time we looked at
Speaker 1: the state of a few weeks ago said that they're
Speaker 1: going out in public, want to go out in public
Speaker 1: less than they did six months ago. Why every time
Speaker 1: there's a shooting, one person says or more people say,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to go out today, I'm just gonna
Speaker 1: stay home. And and we've made it super easy for
Speaker 1: people to stay home. And we're controlling our surroundings, were
Speaker 1: curating the people that were around in in two thousand
Speaker 1: and fifteen, we had at we have a question that says,
Speaker 1: do you generally like to be around people a lot?
Speaker 1: It's very simple question. Percent of people in two thousand
Speaker 1: fifteen said yes, I like to be around people a lot.
Speaker 1: Today that number so it's about a decline in that
Speaker 1: and that and that, and that doesn't seem like a
Speaker 1: huge number or might. But what it's telling us is
Speaker 1: people are saying, I don't want to go out and
Speaker 1: sit in a restaurant and run a risk of sitting
Speaker 1: next to somebody who's ranting on about some political issue
Speaker 1: I disagree with. I'm going to stay at my home
Speaker 1: where I've where I've curated my friend group on social media,
Speaker 1: I've curated the media that I'm going to read and watch,
Speaker 1: and I want to create a safe nest around myself.
Speaker 1: And I think social media has helped to propagate a
Speaker 1: lot of that. And so projecting five years out as
Speaker 1: opposed to three months, do you have a thought on that? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it's gonna continue to play out that way.
Speaker 1: I think we're going to have UM. I think people
Speaker 1: are a large portion of people are inherently introverted, but
Speaker 1: it was always hard to be an introvert um. Now
Speaker 1: I can have everything delivered to my doorstep. I never
Speaker 1: have to the shop. I never have to leave to
Speaker 1: see a movie. I actually and what happened. What's happening
Speaker 1: is the commercial marketplace is moving towards those people were making.
Speaker 1: We're saying, if you don't want to leave your house,
Speaker 1: you never have to. UM. Companies are vying to own
Speaker 1: my quote unquote ecosystem. They want to have my internet,
Speaker 1: my cell phone, my content, my They want my refrigerator
Speaker 1: to talk to my doorbell, to my smartphone, to my
Speaker 1: watch on my hand, and the companies are all fighting
Speaker 1: to own that so that when I choose to stay
Speaker 1: home and never leave, I'm only using one company. And
Speaker 1: I think maybe five years from now that peaks and saturates,
Speaker 1: but we're far from that. Stay right there. We'll be
Speaker 1: back with more of my conversation with John Dick, an
Speaker 1: expert on pulling an analytics right here on the Bob
Speaker 1: Left Sets podcast. You're listening to the Bob Left Sets
Speaker 1: podcast recorded here in Venice, California, at the tune In Studios.
Speaker 1: Each week, I interview a new guest that dive into
Speaker 1: their backgrounds, their career, current events and everything in between.
Speaker 1: If you like the podcast, subscribe, review the show, and
Speaker 1: check out earlier episodes. You can hear them all on
Speaker 1: tune in, Apple Podcasts, or your podcast player of choice.
Speaker 1: And now more with John Dick. In light of gun tragedies,
Speaker 1: Have you done any research on that that tells us
Speaker 1: really were what America thinks? Um, And nothing that would
Speaker 1: surprise you. UM. I think a lot of people and
Speaker 1: this is not just our date. I think most of
Speaker 1: the most data that you would see would say that
Speaker 1: the majority of Americans, UM, support some stricter interpretation of,
Speaker 1: if not if not stricter gun laws, stricter interpretation of
Speaker 1: the gun laws that we have today. UM. But the
Speaker 1: political environment is such that people don't want to give
Speaker 1: any ground. One of the one of the unfortunate consequences
Speaker 1: of tribalism isn't so much just that I want to
Speaker 1: kind of organize only with people who agree with me
Speaker 1: and believe me. But I start finding myself distrusting everybody else.
Speaker 1: And that's that's the part of this kind socio cultural
Speaker 1: shift that scares us when we look at our data. Okay,
Speaker 1: tell my audience, certain things you've learned that are counterintuitive. Um, well,
Speaker 1: there's certainly I felt that it was counterintuitive that we
Speaker 1: see this trend towards introversion among people, because I thought
Speaker 1: we tended to be more likely to be so I
Speaker 1: thought we were more social beings than we really are. UM.
Speaker 1: I don't think most of us ultimately want to be UM,
Speaker 1: So that that kind of surprised me. Um. We see
Speaker 1: relationships between things that I wouldn't have expected a few
Speaker 1: years ago when restaurants spending started to decline in the US,
Speaker 1: and it was kind of inexplicable at the time. Traditionally,
Speaker 1: for for decades and decades, UM, restaurant spending is really
Speaker 1: closely correlated to fuel prices, and because it's disposable income
Speaker 1: and and and fuel prices affects everybody. If I have
Speaker 1: a couple extra if I live in a rural town
Speaker 1: in middle middle part of Pennsylvania, or I live in
Speaker 1: a big city and drive a car, one of the
Speaker 1: first things that I can notice in my bank account
Speaker 1: as if I'm spending less money on gas and so Historically,
Speaker 1: restaurant spending was very closely aligned with shifts and fuel prices,
Speaker 1: but two years ago, restaurant spending was going down on
Speaker 1: fuel prices were not going up. And we found in
Speaker 1: our data, which is part of the benefit of being
Speaker 1: able to study all of these things at once, is
Speaker 1: that it turned out was very heavily correlated with how
Speaker 1: much people were experiencing increases experiencing increases in their health
Speaker 1: insurance premiums, that that was beginning to chip away more
Speaker 1: at disposed healthcare costs were beginning to chip away at
Speaker 1: disposable income at a faster rate than fuel prices were,
Speaker 1: and that had never happened. How do you find that, Well,
Speaker 1: because we're studying all of this stuff at once, we
Speaker 1: look at all these lines on a chart to see
Speaker 1: how they which one leads, one lags the other, How
Speaker 1: related are they, does one seem to be a cause
Speaker 1: of another, or do they just tend to follow or lead?
Speaker 1: And it was pretty evident to us in looking at
Speaker 1: two So we have two questions, say, um, it's actually
Speaker 1: more complicated that, but imagine. And one question is would
Speaker 1: you say you're spending more or less to eat out?
Speaker 1: And another one is would you say you're spending more
Speaker 1: or less on your health care? And we looked at
Speaker 1: the people who answered yes to those two questions, they
Speaker 1: were closely aligned to one another. Okay, but sometimes there
Speaker 1: can be false correlations. Yeah, but that's just I mean,
Speaker 1: really smart statisticians know how to fare at that stuff out.
Speaker 1: How do you do it? Well? You test them, Um,
Speaker 1: you continue to see if they if they continue to
Speaker 1: play out over time, You ask questions different ways to
Speaker 1: see if it's maybe just an error in the way
Speaker 1: a person is interpreting the question. Um, we're we're certainly
Speaker 1: mindful of that. We have a it's called a false
Speaker 1: detection procedure that we use and it's essentially a coefficient
Speaker 1: that we use to measure whether whether there's a false
Speaker 1: positive in our data. Wow, no, wonder you have the
Speaker 1: cardig email and people involved. Yeah that's so. Did you
Speaker 1: learn anything else about health care? Um? Well no, I
Speaker 1: mean it's a mess. Um. I think that we're we
Speaker 1: saw a period of choice that hadn't existed before because
Speaker 1: the Affordable Care Act and a lot of that's uncertain
Speaker 1: right now. So it's a healthcare is a gray area
Speaker 1: at the moment because we don't know what the future
Speaker 1: of it's going to look like. Okay, so you're working
Speaker 1: with Fortune five companies, how would they find you? Um?
Speaker 1: They're either referred to us by somebody else we already
Speaker 1: work with. We publish a lot of information. You mentioned
Speaker 1: a little email that we do every Saturday morning that
Speaker 1: finds its way into the hands of leaders. We don't
Speaker 1: really have. We have a very very very small salesforce.
Speaker 1: We're not the kind of company that's trying to um
Speaker 1: barge our way into your office to demo something for you.
Speaker 1: We typically, UM, somebody typically reaches out to us and says, hey,
Speaker 1: I saw this study you published about this thing, and
Speaker 1: I'd really like to understand how it affects my business.
Speaker 1: And that's usually where a business. Okay, so I hire you.
Speaker 1: Let's say I'm a software company. What will you do
Speaker 1: for me? Well, first thing we have to do is
Speaker 1: understand your business. How do you do that? UM? We
Speaker 1: just spend time together. We do. We have what's called
Speaker 1: a discovery process and a solution design process, which sounds
Speaker 1: very bureaucratic, but it's just simply a process of us learning,
Speaker 1: really what your blind spots are as a business, what
Speaker 1: do you and and no one never knows what those
Speaker 1: are in the first conversation because they don't think they
Speaker 1: have any UM. So we we start to. We challenge
Speaker 1: some of that, We ask what they know, and we
Speaker 1: try to push back and we get a sense of
Speaker 1: all right, where can we fill in some blanks about
Speaker 1: their business? I told you earlier one of the unintuitive
Speaker 1: things for me is that UM our our biggest clients
Speaker 1: UM are companies that you would think don't need any
Speaker 1: more data. I told you we have sort of one
Speaker 1: open square on the tech Giant Bingo card of our business.
Speaker 1: That that, but all the others we have, And you
Speaker 1: would think I would mention the names of those companies
Speaker 1: and you'd say, well, I thought they already knew everything
Speaker 1: about everyone. But what fascinates me about them is that,
Speaker 1: and I think was what's a fundamental truth is the
Speaker 1: more data those businesses have, the more questions they have,
Speaker 1: the more things they don't know. And I think the
Speaker 1: reason they've become the giants they are is because they
Speaker 1: continue to be inquisitive and they continue to look under
Speaker 1: rocks for the next big insight, and those tend to
Speaker 1: be our best clients. So let's say you're a big
Speaker 1: Silicon Valley company which is collecting reams of data constantly,
Speaker 1: what would you literally provide UM context? Sometimes UM a
Speaker 1: lot of the data that those companies have tells you what,
Speaker 1: but they may not necessarily answer the why, and you
Speaker 1: can answer that, yeah, they Our our specialty is the
Speaker 1: why and the what next? Where do we think this
Speaker 1: is going? Let's talk specifically about the music business. Sure,
Speaker 1: what have you learned about the music business in your research? Um,
Speaker 1: it's in a interesting stage of of cannibalization. That doesn't
Speaker 1: people aren't listening to music more, um, cannibalization. So there's
Speaker 1: a it's it's something of a zero sum game for
Speaker 1: the players in the space. There. There aren't more hours
Speaker 1: in the day. There aren't more people listening to music
Speaker 1: than listen to it twenty years ago. So the fact
Speaker 1: that music is more accessible people are or not listening
Speaker 1: to more music there does not appear to be any
Speaker 1: evidence of that, or at least new people listening to
Speaker 1: music who aren't listening to it a lot before. And
Speaker 1: so with all of the providers coming into the marketplace,
Speaker 1: they are fighting over a finite pool of and now
Speaker 1: it's a large pool, don't get me wrong, but but
Speaker 1: there's it's finite, and there's not room for there's certainly
Speaker 1: a room for, you know, multiple providers, but only to
Speaker 1: the extent that they are dividing up our attention. I
Speaker 1: think we will see some consolidation, and I don't mean
Speaker 1: necessarily from a business standpoint, Um, one company buying another necessarily.
Speaker 1: But I think we will see more and more music
Speaker 1: listeners gravitating the single sources of music than well. I
Speaker 1: believe that for different ways we live in a we
Speaker 1: will live in a winter and losery economy. Across the board,
Speaker 1: we have incommittee, quality, etcetera. You want to go where
Speaker 1: your friends are, and let's do successful companies have sixty
Speaker 1: plus percent market You're online the roll click away, right,
Speaker 1: and I think, well, that's a part of the virtuous circle. Um,
Speaker 1: it's easier, but it's also desirable. Um. One of the
Speaker 1: same thing with the kind of the at home tech ecosystem.
Speaker 1: If I have fewer passwords I have to remember, if
Speaker 1: your tech support people I have to call, fewer interfaces
Speaker 1: I have to learn. I mean, that's that's a highly
Speaker 1: that's as desirable to me as my refrigerator talking to
Speaker 1: my doorbell would be. Just the simplicity and the convenience
Speaker 1: of it. I think that's all driving. Um, it's driving
Speaker 1: what will what we expect to be a rapid pace
Speaker 1: of consolidation, particularly in all media, but music in particular. Okay,
Speaker 1: so there, let's assume there'll be fewer places that you
Speaker 1: would ultimately gravitate to listen to music, or they have
Speaker 1: larger market share. What about the acts themselves, Well, we
Speaker 1: we don't need our data to tell anyone and you're
Speaker 1: you know this better than we do that. It's just
Speaker 1: much much easier for people to record at right. Um,
Speaker 1: it's happening at an almost immeasurable pace because I can
Speaker 1: just take a quick video of myself and slap it
Speaker 1: on YouTube. Um. I think we are because of a
Speaker 1: lot of the trends we see in social media. Um,
Speaker 1: we see why. I know you have some thoughts on virality. Um,
Speaker 1: things can go from small to big very fast, but
Speaker 1: they can also go from big small very fast with
Speaker 1: a misstep. And I think the adoption curve of of everything,
Speaker 1: including music is truncated. So it's happening much faster than
Speaker 1: it did years ago because there's fewer barriers to entry.
Speaker 1: The adoption curve. What is that, Well, it's it's the
Speaker 1: extent to which Um, there are people out there who
Speaker 1: will try everything. There are music fans who will listen
Speaker 1: to every single artist they hear about, and then we
Speaker 1: call those an early adopter. Um, there's a second phase
Speaker 1: group of people will call a market maven in our terminology,
Speaker 1: which is I try it and then I tell everyone
Speaker 1: about it, and I go to social media and I say,
Speaker 1: look at these songs I listened to check out this
Speaker 1: band that I like. And those people have a lot
Speaker 1: of power today. My sister is one of those people
Speaker 1: in music. When she tells me about a band a
Speaker 1: year later there at the Grammys, you know she's always
Speaker 1: been that way. But UM, there's a third group of
Speaker 1: people then, who wait for those market maven's to tell
Speaker 1: them what to think. They don't want to make decisions
Speaker 1: for themselves and not doing a ton of their own research,
Speaker 1: going and reading reviews or any of that. They wait
Speaker 1: for those friends they have like I do with my
Speaker 1: sister who says, oh, you should go check out this
Speaker 1: band because I don't have time to follow music. Now
Speaker 1: with an overwhelming number of marketing messages, is the percentages
Speaker 1: of early adopters, market maven's and passive listeners have those
Speaker 1: numbers changed percentage wise? Not really? Um, it's a in fact,
Speaker 1: we're working on a study on this right now. It's
Speaker 1: it's remarkably consistent the percentage of people that fall into
Speaker 1: those buckets. But what's happening is the progression from one
Speaker 1: group to the next is happening much faster because the
Speaker 1: connectivity between the early adopter to the market may even
Speaker 1: to the lemmings who wait for those market mayven's to
Speaker 1: tell them what to do. We're just much closer to
Speaker 1: each other than we everywhere before. So every time I
Speaker 1: turn on Facebook, there's the likelihood of my sister posting
Speaker 1: some song that she just listened to that inspires me
Speaker 1: to listen to it that I where five years ago
Speaker 1: I had to wait for to call me on the
Speaker 1: phone to do that. Yes, but also I would argue
Speaker 1: that there's so many messages that it is harder to
Speaker 1: get somebody to click or harder to pass on your
Speaker 1: information today from a marketing standpoint, Sure, so that's why
Speaker 1: social media is so powerful, because I don't know what
Speaker 1: else to trust. But if my sister tells me, that's different,
Speaker 1: and that's a hard thing for brands and marketers to
Speaker 1: get their head around the power of the influencer, which
Speaker 1: isn't necessary and I don't mean in a YouTube influencer
Speaker 1: as much as I mean somebody in my social network
Speaker 1: who I trust. One thing that we've seen in our
Speaker 1: data indisputably over the last four or five years, we
Speaker 1: track things like which of these kinds of advertising has
Speaker 1: the most influence over your purchase decisions TV, radio, print, whatever.
Speaker 1: One of the lines on that chart is comments and
Speaker 1: recommendations from my friends on social media, and that line
Speaker 1: has climbed and climbed. It has its surpassed television for
Speaker 1: the first time two summers ago and has stayed there.
Speaker 1: So I trust because I don't know what other media
Speaker 1: to trust, and that's actually getting worse right. We can't
Speaker 1: discern fake news from real news anymore. So the only
Speaker 1: thing I can trust is what my sister tells me.
Speaker 1: So what is the future of advertising? I think what
Speaker 1: we're seeing and what we're telling our clients is that
Speaker 1: they have to understand that adoption curve, and they have
Speaker 1: to understand that the way you communicate to an early
Speaker 1: adopter is different than the way you communicate to a
Speaker 1: market maven, which is different too than a way you
Speaker 1: communicate to that third tier. To what degree your people
Speaker 1: just tuning out advertising completely. Oh a lot. UM. I
Speaker 1: think you've seen the advent of UM so called native
Speaker 1: advertising in the last five or six years. So it's
Speaker 1: advertising masquerading is a news article. UM. Advertising has to
Speaker 1: be a lot less obtrusive in my life or intrusive. UM.
Speaker 1: And what you're seeing is brands focused on creating more
Speaker 1: of an ongoing connection with somebody so they don't feel
Speaker 1: like I'm being advert ties to all the time. It's
Speaker 1: it's a much more subtle process than it was twenty
Speaker 1: years ago. Okay, we'll return to this conversation with John Dick,
Speaker 1: CEO of Civic Science in a moment. This is Bob
Speaker 1: left Up. So I'm a writer and you could read
Speaker 1: me at left Steps dot com if you haven't noticed already.
Speaker 1: I love getting a person story. I like to know
Speaker 1: what makes them tick, specifically as it relates to successful
Speaker 1: people who are changing the game in their respective field.
Speaker 1: I'm eager to get to the bottom of it on
Speaker 1: this show and that same thing, and I'd like to
Speaker 1: invite you to attend my music media summit in Santa
Speaker 1: Barbara the last weekend in April. It's gonna be a
Speaker 1: great way to connect with the movers and shakers in
Speaker 1: the world of tech and music. Go to Music Media
Speaker 1: Summit dot com for tickets and more information. And now
Speaker 1: more with John Dick. Let's go back to uh lessons
Speaker 1: you've learned. You were telling me earlier that you learned
Speaker 1: that Android users correlate with more heart problems. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean those are those are the kind of fun and
Speaker 1: quirky but often useful things in our data. When you
Speaker 1: study hundred thousand different questions that have been answered a
Speaker 1: billion times, you find relationships between stuff that, Yes, if
Speaker 1: you have an Android phone, you're more likely to have
Speaker 1: a history of heart disease in your family. That is
Speaker 1: not causality. That doesn't mean if you switch phones you
Speaker 1: won't have heart disease. It means that people who have
Speaker 1: the types of people who have Android phones are the
Speaker 1: types of people who tend to have a higher rate
Speaker 1: of heart disease in their family. And there's income and
Speaker 1: and other kinds of proxy reasons for that, which makes
Speaker 1: lots of sense when you explain it. But if I'm
Speaker 1: a marketer at a pharmaceutical company, that's a pretty useful
Speaker 1: discovery to find in a database that that relationship exists.
Speaker 1: One of our absolute favorites is um, there is a
Speaker 1: staggering correlation between how much people like Gary Busey and
Speaker 1: how much they like Kia cars. Never been able to
Speaker 1: explain it, but but I can tell you. I can
Speaker 1: tell you five or six years ago that that little
Speaker 1: bit of information formed the catalyst of a television campaign
Speaker 1: for a regional network of Keya dealerships Star and Gary Boucy.
Speaker 1: I did that works? It worked like a charm. Wow. Okay,
Speaker 1: a little bit more. How did you find that correlation?
Speaker 1: Same thing? So we just have these really smart people
Speaker 1: in smart technology that crawls around and all of this
Speaker 1: data all the time and looks for those kinds of things.
Speaker 1: The kind of unexpected insight that one of our kind
Speaker 1: of marketing sticks is that we answer questions you never
Speaker 1: thought to ask. Okay, so do you go further and
Speaker 1: try to get Okay, Gary Busey, he has kind of
Speaker 1: an irreverence gear, gives a shit about life. And if
Speaker 1: you're driving the Kia Squirrel car, it's kind of an
Speaker 1: ugly car, but you're sort of saying the same thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, we get at we eventually you find the why.
Speaker 1: And as I mentioned, I think That's the kind of
Speaker 1: the gray space we're trying to fill in the world
Speaker 1: is why is that true? So finding that it's true
Speaker 1: is one thing. Understanding why it's true is another. Because
Speaker 1: the advertising or marketing or product decisions that that inspire
Speaker 1: have to be They can't just be Oh, I don't
Speaker 1: know why, but we're gonna do it anyway. We have
Speaker 1: to help them understand why. Okay, so you're on a roll.
Speaker 1: Now tell us some more things you've learned in the data.
Speaker 1: Oh geez, you know there are things that millennials are
Speaker 1: more likely to pick rock and rock paper scissors than
Speaker 1: other generations. Yeah, I'm trying to think. What what do
Speaker 1: we learn from that? Well, you can learn how to
Speaker 1: take money off of millennials at rock paper scissors. Yes, Uh,
Speaker 1: that one's kind of trite. Um. Lots of what I mentioned,
Speaker 1: the healthcare and restaurants spending, those are the more serious
Speaker 1: kinds of useful, impactful, well, irrelevant of whether it's counterintuitive.
Speaker 1: What other things might want to learn? What if someone
Speaker 1: is an iPhone owner? What did you learn about iPhone owners? Well?
Speaker 1: I can't touch that one. What I can say is, um,
Speaker 1: we find one of my favorite areas of studies height.
Speaker 1: There is a there are tons and tons of correlations
Speaker 1: in our data tied to whether somebody is taller or
Speaker 1: shorter than their peer group or people their age and gender.
Speaker 1: There's there's and there's sociological reasons why that's true. But
Speaker 1: taller people have different brand preferences, they have different media
Speaker 1: consumption habits than shorter people do. And why is that? So?
Speaker 1: We know over history taller people, generally when they were younger,
Speaker 1: were better at physical sports than others. They tended to
Speaker 1: that bread some confidence that manifests itself in the classroom
Speaker 1: that um maybe helped the tall person stand out saying
Speaker 1: a job interview or an admissions interview for a college.
Speaker 1: And you do that millions and millions and billions of
Speaker 1: times over human history. And there are certain um proclivities
Speaker 1: that tall people have that short people don't, and vice versa.
Speaker 1: And it's not always benefiting the tall people, by the way. UM.
Speaker 1: But but we have a question in our database that
Speaker 1: essentially is like are you taller shorter? And people answer
Speaker 1: that question because they want to know how they compare
Speaker 1: to other tall people and other short people. But when
Speaker 1: we've asked that question, hundreds of thousands of times and
Speaker 1: studied millions of things about people based on their height.
Speaker 1: We find that there are indisputable relationships between your height
Speaker 1: and your consumer behavior. For example, can you remember any
Speaker 1: specific correlations. Um, Yeah, some of them are funny, I mean,
Speaker 1: very obvious ones. Shorter people are less likely to go
Speaker 1: see live music because they can't they can't see it.
Speaker 1: I think they see your answer. That's probably your answer. Actually,
Speaker 1: the way we the insight was that shorter people were
Speaker 1: actually more likely to watch access concerts on television. Now,
Speaker 1: in the music business, we've gone to so called, you know,
Speaker 1: festival seating in that the people stand. I personally hate it.
Speaker 1: I remember the old days when there was a seat
Speaker 1: at the fill More East. Now the live companies would
Speaker 1: tell you they can only put in certain number of
Speaker 1: people because of fire marshal rules. That's a bunch of crap.
Speaker 1: They squeeze more people in if they're standing. But would
Speaker 1: their business be increased if they had seats and the
Speaker 1: short people could see One would think yeah, I mean certainly.
Speaker 1: If is an extent to which there's a person choosing
Speaker 1: not to buy a ticket to a concert because they
Speaker 1: don't feel like they're going to be able to see
Speaker 1: well enough when they get there. That's what seemed to
Speaker 1: me to be a pretty obvious measure for them to take. Wow,
Speaker 1: that's very stimulating. Let's go to the reverse. Okay, No,
Speaker 1: it really is, because I think this goes back to
Speaker 1: your point that you're advising or working with household named companies,
Speaker 1: Silicon Valley companies. We think of all the data, but
Speaker 1: their insights. I mean, there's a lot of there's this
Speaker 1: is something I have a lot of institutional beliefs that
Speaker 1: I don't think are true, and the data can help
Speaker 1: prove otherwise we are. There are certainly truisms um that
Speaker 1: have at least evolved, if not are inherently untrue. UM
Speaker 1: Like what really putting me on the spots some of
Speaker 1: these No, I mean, I'll I'll think of um, well,
Speaker 1: we don't millennials today, so hate you know, I feel
Speaker 1: like I talked about it all them all the time,
Speaker 1: because that's so much of what our clients want to
Speaker 1: know about. But this sort of trend towards introversion among
Speaker 1: consumers is really being driven by a millennial population. They're
Speaker 1: going to bed earlier, they're waking up earlier, they're drinking
Speaker 1: less um. There are lots of trends about young people
Speaker 1: today that UM and younger, I mean young could be
Speaker 1: anywhere from you know, thirty five and under that UM
Speaker 1: are perceived to be a function of them their generation. Oh,
Speaker 1: millennials are aren't going to drive cars because millennials, well, uh,
Speaker 1: we want to draw distinction between what's a generation and
Speaker 1: what's a life stage phenomenon. So, yeah, twenty four year
Speaker 1: olds don't want to drive cars. I don't want to
Speaker 1: drive a car when I was twenty four either, But
Speaker 1: but all of a sudden, you grow up and you
Speaker 1: have kids and you've got to truck them around a
Speaker 1: soccer practice. Guess what, Millennials are starting to buy cars.
Speaker 1: There was this, There were you know, gloom and doom
Speaker 1: stories ten years ago that the auto manufacturers were screwed
Speaker 1: because millennials were just going to take uber and ride
Speaker 1: public transportation everywhere they went, and it's just not true.
Speaker 1: We had a call a few years ago from the
Speaker 1: director of a very large zoo who called to ask
Speaker 1: why millennials weren't coming to the zoo. Now this might
Speaker 1: have been longer six seven years ago. They were freaking
Speaker 1: out because millennials weren't coming to the zoo, And I said,
Speaker 1: year olds ever come to the zoo? Right? You know?
Speaker 1: We we want to draw these these sort of hyperbolic
Speaker 1: conclusions about things that quote unquote millennials are doing today.
Speaker 1: But there were twenty two year old millennials. I mean,
Speaker 1: so millennials technically what roughly eighteen to thirty four today?
Speaker 1: I think of the life stages that encompasses. I could
Speaker 1: be twenty two, smoking pots, sitting on my parents couch,
Speaker 1: or I could be thirty three with two kids and
Speaker 1: a mortgage and two cars in my garage. And so
Speaker 1: to make some blanket statements about what's definitively millennial versus
Speaker 1: definitively gen X versus baby boomers, A, it's a okay,
Speaker 1: but let's go on a broad scale. In what ways
Speaker 1: are millennials different from the generations they proceeded them? Well,
Speaker 1: certainly digital connectivity and media consumption are absolutely true. Um,
Speaker 1: these these these phenomena of the stay at home economy
Speaker 1: and the the tribalism I mentioned before. Whether they're causing
Speaker 1: it or whether they will be the first generation to
Speaker 1: live fully within the confines of that, I don't know,
Speaker 1: but it's certainly going to be the latter. They are
Speaker 1: definitely going to be. They are driving a an era
Speaker 1: of UM people staying in echo chambers, UM confining themselves
Speaker 1: to a smaller group of people that they can curate
Speaker 1: and can same thing with their media consumption. But you
Speaker 1: can't open a major publication without people either selling or
Speaker 1: analyzing ways to interact with millennials. Like especially millennials. You know,
Speaker 1: you can't say anything negative to them. They're gonna cry,
Speaker 1: They're gonna quit. Is that all horseshit or is that true?
Speaker 1: I think that's a little overblown. I mean, most of
Speaker 1: the people in my company fit the bill, fit the
Speaker 1: deaf and isation of a millennial, and I don't find
Speaker 1: that to be true at all. I think those are
Speaker 1: those are fun stories for people to tell. I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't have the gloomy view of, you know, millennials
Speaker 1: killing the fabric of America or that will you read
Speaker 1: a lot of I don't. It's I think it's overblown. UM.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you another another thing that's that's maybe a
Speaker 1: truism that we can dispel is that one of the
Speaker 1: this is a huge sort of shifted topic. One of
Speaker 1: the biggest fallacies in the world today is that Donald
Speaker 1: Trump uses Twitter to talk to the American people. The
Speaker 1: American people are not on Twitter. Of Americans at most
Speaker 1: are on Twitter, even of his voters, give or take.
Speaker 1: He is using Twitter to talk to the media who
Speaker 1: carry his message to their little tribes of people who
Speaker 1: read it, and so he doesn't care. And it's actually
Speaker 1: quite brilliant. I'd have to tip my hat to the
Speaker 1: way he's he's he's he handles it. I mean, he
Speaker 1: tweets at three o'clock in the morning because he knows
Speaker 1: he's setting the media landscape for the He's telling the
Speaker 1: media what they're going to talk about that day. And
Speaker 1: he doesn't care what CNN says about him because his
Speaker 1: followers aren't watching CNN anyway. People don't trust information anymore.
Speaker 1: They trust the distributors of that information. And so Donald
Speaker 1: Trump seeds has ferry dust into Twitter, and those publications
Speaker 1: run it to their individual tribes of readers. One um
Speaker 1: one of the more profound trends that we see today
Speaker 1: is even as even as consumption of every other form
Speaker 1: of media is in decline, television ratings or down, sports
Speaker 1: or down, newspaper readership is down radio listening is down.
Speaker 1: The one thing that is skyrocketing is the readership of
Speaker 1: political blogs political content online, which is a is a
Speaker 1: harbinger of an ill future for so called objective media outlets,
Speaker 1: because I don't want objective media. I want media that
Speaker 1: affirms my existing beliefs and I and now there's so
Speaker 1: much variety out there that I can go find it,
Speaker 1: and it tends to be a blog who isn't trying
Speaker 1: to appeal to the masses. UM that can tell me
Speaker 1: exactly what I want to hear every time I click
Speaker 1: on the web page. And Donald Trump has come along
Speaker 1: in an era where he's benefiting from that immensely. Um So,
Speaker 1: so he puts out his UM two morning tweets and
Speaker 1: it's carried directly to the people he wanted wants to
Speaker 1: carry it. Is he you believe he's consciously doing that?
Speaker 1: I mean I think so. I think he knows that
Speaker 1: he's communicating to his supporters through UM through the megaphones
Speaker 1: of the media outlets that support him. What is your
Speaker 1: research told you about the mid term elections? Well, uh,
Speaker 1: funny you should ask that, because just today I was
Speaker 1: reading some report on some of our data that is
Speaker 1: speaking of um, we're seeing after sixteen months of very
Speaker 1: positive growth and consumer sentiment, we've started to see over
Speaker 1: the last month of fairly significant decline consumer confidence, economics sense,
Speaker 1: people's attitudes or the job market and their personal finances,
Speaker 1: and the out for the U s economy seems to
Speaker 1: have peaked and is now beginning to slide. Um donivity
Speaker 1: flawed as to why that is. Um, Well, I think
Speaker 1: there was an artificial high in the first place. There
Speaker 1: was a lot of sizzle, not a whole lot of
Speaker 1: steak in terms of there was just optimism for optimism's sake.
Speaker 1: There was a large sector of the US consumer population
Speaker 1: who just believed things would get better. They tended to
Speaker 1: be Republicans and the people who voted for Donald Trump
Speaker 1: in the first place, even though they maybe not necessarily
Speaker 1: had any reason to feel that way. Um. And so
Speaker 1: we're next Tuesday in my hometown. There's a very significant
Speaker 1: mid term special congressional election that the President's going there
Speaker 1: on Saturday. Joe Biden was there yesterday, and I'm we're
Speaker 1: not in the political prognostication business, but there's reason to
Speaker 1: believe that this downturn in consumer sentiment because we do
Speaker 1: know that that effects election cycles could have an impact
Speaker 1: as as soon as next Tuesday on on a very
Speaker 1: important it's a razor thin margin in that election, and
Speaker 1: that could be the kind of downturn that might tip
Speaker 1: it in the favor of the Democrat and Trump himself.
Speaker 1: Now we read about his approval rating constantly. Is that
Speaker 1: worth anything? Sure? I think so? I mean, is it
Speaker 1: accurate the aggregate of If you take and one thing
Speaker 1: we admire a lot about Nate Silver is he does
Speaker 1: take into consideration a lot of different sources, and if
Speaker 1: you normalize for the biases of one versus the other,
Speaker 1: and those numbers, his approval numbers are fairly consistent. Um,
Speaker 1: what matters more is whether who shows up to vote.
Speaker 1: His approval ratings have haven't barged much at all. And
Speaker 1: and and frankly, you know, there's what I think. The
Speaker 1: estimate is about thirty of US adults actually voted for him.
Speaker 1: If you can take into consideration the the people who
Speaker 1: are registered to vote, in the portion that actually came
Speaker 1: out and voted for him, we're talking about just over
Speaker 1: one third of the entire US population. And that's roughly
Speaker 1: give or take three or four points at a time,
Speaker 1: that people who still approve of him, And so public
Speaker 1: approval doesn't mean anything unless people vote, and we know
Speaker 1: that they don't. And and the biggest problem that posters
Speaker 1: have isn't can I measure public opinion? It's can I
Speaker 1: predict who's going to turn out on election day? Okay,
Speaker 1: we talked about millennials. What have we learned about baby boomers? Well,
Speaker 1: I have to um putting my personal points of view
Speaker 1: aside on that. Um, you consider yourself a gen x er.
Speaker 1: I'm a gen xer. So should we start when we
Speaker 1: learned about gen xers? Yeah? I mean, UM, conventional wisdom
Speaker 1: would be there are a smaller bulge than the baby boomers.
Speaker 1: They were in the wake of the baby boomers. They
Speaker 1: feel on some level they missed out on woodstock in
Speaker 1: the heyday, and they feel that the baby boomers raped
Speaker 1: in pillage to their detriment. I think the latter is true.
Speaker 1: I'm not necessarily sure. We feel feel like we missed
Speaker 1: out on much. Um. I think we feel like we're
Speaker 1: being we're responsible to clean up one group's mess to
Speaker 1: make things better for another group, and we're not going
Speaker 1: to get a benefit from either of them. That is
Speaker 1: not a data that is a purely that is a
Speaker 1: pure a subjective point of view of my own on
Speaker 1: on the subject um. But we do see um. So
Speaker 1: bringing it back to data, we see low we see
Speaker 1: much lower divorce rates among gen xers. We see um
Speaker 1: uh if you look at sort of declines in crime
Speaker 1: rates over the last twenty years in the US. I'm
Speaker 1: not saying that we're a more virtuous generation. We just
Speaker 1: maybe didn't have as much time to to We're we're
Speaker 1: all very busy. Um. What we do see one of
Speaker 1: the biggest trends in the in the that's being driven
Speaker 1: by gen X is the shift in um gender roles
Speaker 1: in the family. Household responsibilities are shifting more and more
Speaker 1: towards women, and men aren't picking up the slack um.
Speaker 1: And that doesn't mean you know, uh, women are making
Speaker 1: more larger household decisions about real estate, banking, things that
Speaker 1: used to be kind of traditionally male decisions. Women are
Speaker 1: making more of those decisions than they did in the past,
Speaker 1: and men aren't doing much more. I mean, there are
Speaker 1: men doing more cooking and more grocery shopping, but they're
Speaker 1: not doing it at a rate that outweighs the increased
Speaker 1: responsibility women are taking on in households. Um. I've we
Speaker 1: have a piece that we wrote a couple of years
Speaker 1: ago that still gets circulated around a lot, and it
Speaker 1: was entitled women are getting a terrible deal because of that. Um,
Speaker 1: you've got multi um spouse working or multi partner working households.
Speaker 1: Women are bringing our while still making less money than
Speaker 1: men overall, are starting to make more money and carrying
Speaker 1: as much responsibility for households, and men are starting to
Speaker 1: be to be free riders a little bit more than
Speaker 1: we were before. And to the degree you've researched this,
Speaker 1: what about the me too movement? Um, we don't. We
Speaker 1: don't research that very much. Um, because it's unresearchable. Your
Speaker 1: clients don't demand it now, I mean we don't, just
Speaker 1: you know, we we don't. A lot of the not
Speaker 1: all the research we do is because clients demanded a
Speaker 1: lot of our clients say go research what's important and
Speaker 1: come back and tell us the truth. You know, we are.
Speaker 1: We are out there searching for truth and then we
Speaker 1: share it with the people we think can benefit from
Speaker 1: the knowledge. And I think the me too movement is
Speaker 1: a is somewhat related to this topic of of male
Speaker 1: entitlement that that is pervasive or has been pervasive for years.
Speaker 1: I think that's starting to lift. I just don't think
Speaker 1: there's a whole lot we can add to the discussion
Speaker 1: about it. Um it's a huge problem. It's wrong, it's um.
Speaker 1: There's just not a lot of nuance that any data
Speaker 1: is going to say about um, how right or wrong
Speaker 1: or how wrong it is. Okay, so what about baby boomers?
Speaker 1: You remember any insights on the baby boomers? Well, I
Speaker 1: mean yes, Um, so baby boomers are much closer to
Speaker 1: their kids than generations before them, and that has a
Speaker 1: lot of effect on how they're making decisions about their
Speaker 1: health care and and everything from their consumer decisions. We
Speaker 1: work with a number of healthcare companies who sell devices.
Speaker 1: I'll use an example of like a sleep apnea company.
Speaker 1: They have a sleep at the machine. So for years
Speaker 1: and years and years, you would advertise to the person
Speaker 1: who suffered from sleep apnea, Well should you really or
Speaker 1: should you advertise to the spouse who lives with the
Speaker 1: person sleep apnea? And so we've seen that shift, of course.
Speaker 1: But but but across other areas of healthcare, when it
Speaker 1: comes to medical devices, like say, say maybe not sleep
Speaker 1: apnea where I can't sleep because the person beside me
Speaker 1: is snoring. But other ailments like COPD or what have you. UM,
Speaker 1: the the millennial is of significant influence over the baby
Speaker 1: boomers decisions, and they're because they're closer than they were before.
Speaker 1: So we are challenging our our clients to think a
Speaker 1: lot about UM advertising or influencing baby boomers by influencing
Speaker 1: the people who influence them. And and that is a
Speaker 1: trend that we've seen shift quite a bit. So ironically,
Speaker 1: because baby boomers think they know everything, they don't. Well,
Speaker 1: they may still think they do, but they are influenced
Speaker 1: by other things. They are they are, and a lot
Speaker 1: of it is driven by the closeness of the relationships
Speaker 1: they've maintained with their kids, which is a very good thing.
Speaker 1: By the way, UM that there is UM they're they're
Speaker 1: either reliant on their younger children or they've just had
Speaker 1: a closer relationship through as their kids got older. And
Speaker 1: when you hear the stories of the millennials who are still,
Speaker 1: you know, living in their parents houses, there's one of
Speaker 1: the positive ends of that is the relationships between them
Speaker 1: tend to be pretty good, pretty strong. Okay, we'll return
Speaker 1: to this conversation with John Dick, CEO of Civic Science,
Speaker 1: in a moment. Hi, this is Bob left sense. My
Speaker 1: guests come to the tune In studios in Venice, California
Speaker 1: to have these conversations with me. And if you ever
Speaker 1: want to see what they look like where we take
Speaker 1: the show, check out the photos and videos search at
Speaker 1: tune In on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. And now more
Speaker 1: with CEO of Civic Science, John Dick, And what about
Speaker 1: more macro trends. Who you mentioned cars? What is the
Speaker 1: future of audibobiles because we read all the time in
Speaker 1: the straight media that you know, autonomous driving is coming,
Speaker 1: I think, okay, so that's definitely something we studied very closely.
Speaker 1: The vast majority of people are still very scared about
Speaker 1: autonomous vehicles, particularly women, do not want to get in
Speaker 1: a car that's driving itself. By the same time, and
Speaker 1: we see things slip overnight, like we heard we heard
Speaker 1: digital photography was gonna place film for at least ten years,
Speaker 1: and then with the space of twelve months, seemed like
Speaker 1: film disappeared and digital came upon us. So a lot
Speaker 1: of people are fearful, but then when the product comes
Speaker 1: in their influences like a O. Well, you know that
Speaker 1: no one was online that all of a sudden, for
Speaker 1: a couple of years, everyone was buying a computer just
Speaker 1: to get online. So I'm just when people are fearful
Speaker 1: of something, could the switch be faster than it used
Speaker 1: to be? It could be, but it also, in the
Speaker 1: case of autonomous vehicles, could go the other direction to
Speaker 1: it only takes one hacker and some eastern block country
Speaker 1: to take over a bunch of cars with a computer
Speaker 1: and drive them into a crowd of people that no
Speaker 1: one's ever gonna want to get into a driver less
Speaker 1: vehicle for twenty years. I think that there's there's enough
Speaker 1: fear and and skepticism about autonomous vehicles and artificial intelligence
Speaker 1: in general that a couple of bad pr nightmares for
Speaker 1: one of those cars doing what it's not supposed to
Speaker 1: could kill it. Um there's no reason to believe that
Speaker 1: will happen, but it's you could certainly foresee a situation
Speaker 1: where whatever momentum driverless cars are gaining could be stopped
Speaker 1: in its tracks. I think it's more likely we'll see
Speaker 1: an evolution towards autonomous vehicles like we see evolution toward
Speaker 1: alternative fuels um our alternative energy UM. You've got huge
Speaker 1: infrastructure in the automobile industry and the fuel industry that
Speaker 1: are going to slow a lot of that progress down UM.
Speaker 1: And then you've got a lot of people who are
Speaker 1: just skeptical about or or simply uncomfortable with the idea
Speaker 1: of being in a car that they can't control. So
Speaker 1: I don't expect it to be an overnight thing, And
Speaker 1: there's nothing in our evidence. The evidence in our data
Speaker 1: is that the percentage of people who are comfortable with
Speaker 1: a driverless car has not grown much in the last
Speaker 1: two years. It's the same group of people. I vastly
Speaker 1: disagree with this, okay, just because I think that's what
Speaker 1: people believe. But I think when you know, we have
Speaker 1: the Tesla accident in Florida where the guy crashed into
Speaker 1: a car, these stories are really amplified. And of course
Speaker 1: we're talking about the pace of changes more quickly. It
Speaker 1: happens more quickly these days. But if you go back
Speaker 1: to even in the commercial jet age in the sixties,
Speaker 1: they did not have the flight control that they have today,
Speaker 1: and they had accidents. Okay, people were fearful. They're still
Speaker 1: fearful today, even the odds of having an accident are
Speaker 1: really low, but the barrier to entry to getting a
Speaker 1: ticket because deregulation in in airlines, there's a there's a
Speaker 1: lot of things that may not be directly applicable. But
Speaker 1: when the person next door gets a car or can
Speaker 1: even better, can call up a car like Uber, and
Speaker 1: you don't have to own a car, you don't have
Speaker 1: to have a garage. I think the pace of change
Speaker 1: happens very quickly. I mean I look at this like
Speaker 1: the Internet. Most of the public was not Internet savvy,
Speaker 1: and over the course of one to five years, everybody
Speaker 1: was Internet savvy. So I'm not sure I agree with that.
Speaker 1: What about climate change? You learn anything with climate change?
Speaker 1: It's not something we study a lot um. People are
Speaker 1: pretty setting their mindsets about that. We don't see a
Speaker 1: lot of change. I will go back, so I appreciate
Speaker 1: your your argument on the drive and let me let
Speaker 1: me say that I'll be the first person to call
Speaker 1: that driverless car to come pick me up. So I'm
Speaker 1: hoping it comes as fast as possible because I could
Speaker 1: do away with my car in a second, and I
Speaker 1: think there's a chance that that could happen. All I'm
Speaker 1: saying is there's also a chance you could go the
Speaker 1: other direction pretty quickly. But I guess what I'm saying
Speaker 1: is something it's irrelevant of driverless cars. One to what
Speaker 1: degree our stories being amplified that ultimately have no impact. Okay,
Speaker 1: there was a story back when these portals used to
Speaker 1: be of much greater impact. I think it was on Yahoo.
Speaker 1: They had a big thing saying tongue splitting was a
Speaker 1: big thing. Okay, well, you literally split the end of
Speaker 1: your tongue whatever. In reality, there were fewer than I believe,
Speaker 1: certainly a few of the ten. I think it was
Speaker 1: fewer than five people who'd ever done. There wasn't really
Speaker 1: a trend, but people were writing about it. It's sort
Speaker 1: of the flip side of the uh. People with unpopular opinions,
Speaker 1: we're not putting them on social media so that these
Speaker 1: stories that are amplified. This is something that's changed in
Speaker 1: the Internet. There used to be something called a turntable hit. Well,
Speaker 1: all the gatekeepers they were going to bang something and
Speaker 1: it makes it looks like it's popular, but the public
Speaker 1: isn't buying it. Now we can see whether the public
Speaker 1: buys so I see. I mean, I think the New
Speaker 1: York Times is the best we've got. I don't want
Speaker 1: to make it right about right or left. It's just
Speaker 1: that they have boots on the ground and in all
Speaker 1: these places other people don't. Okay, but now more than ever,
Speaker 1: the mainstream media will prints. I'm not talking about printing
Speaker 1: hard news. Okay, there was a war here, that's something different.
Speaker 1: But when they print softer news, I think it has
Speaker 1: less impact and less accuracy than it ever did before.
Speaker 1: That's indisputable, and it's and it's getting worse by the day. Uh.
Speaker 1: Two weeks ago, people were I had half dozen friends
Speaker 1: of mine on social media shared a story about the
Speaker 1: the idea that the students in Parkland were what were
Speaker 1: the crisis actors? That meant there were a hundred and
Speaker 1: seventeen thousand The one article that I saw had been
Speaker 1: shared a hundred and seventeen thousand times. The average Facebook
Speaker 1: user has three hundred and sixty eight friends. That means
Speaker 1: roughly what thirty seven some million people saw that article
Speaker 1: from a friend, leading them to believe it was true. Right,
Speaker 1: So it doesn't. So so that the scale at which
Speaker 1: misinformation can spread is is and we and we will
Speaker 1: retract from that as consumers because we're gonna only get
Speaker 1: burned by that so many times. So you're absolutely right.
Speaker 1: I think that's happening, and and I think it will
Speaker 1: take five misguided stories about bad driverless cars probably could
Speaker 1: spoil some group of people. Um but but uh, the
Speaker 1: pace of misinformation, I don't know where that ends. By
Speaker 1: the way, if I hope that people wise up and
Speaker 1: become more scrutinizing and what they believe, but maybe they won't.
Speaker 1: I don't believe people. You know, it's interesting you're selling
Speaker 1: that an analysis. I don't believe the average person has
Speaker 1: the power of analysis. Oh no, That's why I was
Speaker 1: saying earlier. I think one of the biggest challenges we
Speaker 1: face as an erosion of trust of data. We talked
Speaker 1: so much about big data and data science and all
Speaker 1: of that, but I think the average consumer distrusts numbers
Speaker 1: because based on who puts those numbers in front of them. Um.
Speaker 1: We I mentioned to you earlier when we were talking
Speaker 1: that we were we've been approached from by media outlets
Speaker 1: about sort of publishing or syndicating our numbers, and we
Speaker 1: just won't do it because all of a sudden, we
Speaker 1: lose we we we inherit the perception of bias that
Speaker 1: those outlets have if they put their names. But the irony,
Speaker 1: and I'm sure you're hearing it anyway, is people believe
Speaker 1: you're biased anyway. True, true, But I can sleep better
Speaker 1: at night if I have some control over well, I know.
Speaker 1: I mean, I I write about Spotify, and every day
Speaker 1: I get people said, well, you're on the payroll. I'm
Speaker 1: not on the perrol. It never took a cent. Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm not saying therefore the opposite is gonna hapen to
Speaker 1: take the money. But even if you are literally white clean,
Speaker 1: these days, people believe you're not. Oh, I mean, we'll
Speaker 1: we'll write, we'll put one blog post out about a topic,
Speaker 1: and on our Facebook page will be in the same
Speaker 1: by one person accused of being a right wing hill
Speaker 1: and on the next comment will be a left wing ship.
Speaker 1: I mean it. People will find the story they want
Speaker 1: to find if your data doesn't precisely affirm their existing belief.
Speaker 1: What's a sad state of affairs? I mean, I grew
Speaker 1: up an inner where there were many fewer media outlets
Speaker 1: and you could agree on the facts. You can't even
Speaker 1: agree on the facts, and even no you cannot know
Speaker 1: and it's hard to give it. So any other macro
Speaker 1: trends that you can give us. You're talking about, uh,
Speaker 1: the cocooning, which ironically is what Faith cop popcorns at
Speaker 1: a few decades back. But now we have the ability
Speaker 1: with all these instat cart and Netflix to do that.
Speaker 1: Any other macro trends in the public. Well, So I
Speaker 1: mentioned the the the true, the aspirational nature of social
Speaker 1: media and what that's doing. UM. The impact that's having
Speaker 1: on brands I think is pretty dramatic in terms of UM.
Speaker 1: I was on a I gave a talk at a
Speaker 1: conference of about a year ago as a beauty industry conference,
Speaker 1: and I sat with a woman who was an executive
Speaker 1: of a big beauty company, and she was telling a
Speaker 1: story about how the night before she had driven her son.
Speaker 1: She was taking her son. That we were in New York.
Speaker 1: She was taking her son to soccer practice, and I
Speaker 1: picture her in her land Rover in Westchester, right, and
Speaker 1: he hadn't eaten dinner yet, so she drove him through
Speaker 1: the drive through at a fast food restaurant to get
Speaker 1: him some burgers. And she gets to the soccer fields
Speaker 1: and all the suburban Westchester moms were standing there, and
Speaker 1: she has a panic attack that these moms are going
Speaker 1: to see that she'd taken her son of this fast
Speaker 1: So she's telling the story and we're all laughing, but
Speaker 1: she she stands up and she's shoving the stuff in
Speaker 1: her bag so that moms won't see it. And so
Speaker 1: we've been materialists are since one person had a nicer
Speaker 1: loincloth than the other. Right, it's going back as much
Speaker 1: as you know, as far back as you can go.
Speaker 1: Janis Joplin wrote about it in nineteen seventy and um,
Speaker 1: but we've never had the tools to or the purse,
Speaker 1: or the fear that ever that are that are purchase
Speaker 1: and consumption decisions were on public display like they are now.
Speaker 1: And this was a case of a woman driving to
Speaker 1: a parking lot with food in her car. But with
Speaker 1: the cameras and the social media and the sharing and
Speaker 1: the posting and all that, the decisions that I make
Speaker 1: about where I eat and where I buy are are
Speaker 1: on public display and subject to scrutiny like they've never
Speaker 1: been before. So we've always had guilty pleasures, and I
Speaker 1: might I may choose not to eat at a particular
Speaker 1: fast food restaurant because it's unhealthy for me. But if
Speaker 1: I do, I just don't post about it or brag
Speaker 1: about it. But what about that woman who next time
Speaker 1: her son hasn't eaten dinner, she actively chooses not to
Speaker 1: go to that fast food restaurant because of the potential
Speaker 1: trauma of being seen taking her son there. And now
Speaker 1: that that bit very large fast food restaurant has lost
Speaker 1: a customer or at least a visit, and think about
Speaker 1: how often that might be happening at the scale. And
Speaker 1: you look at some of these large brands, the Blue Chips,
Speaker 1: CpG companies and others who have There are a lot
Speaker 1: of reasons they can they can explain some of the
Speaker 1: declines that they've had, But that has to be a
Speaker 1: big part of it is that it's just not cool
Speaker 1: to go there. It's not as cool to eat there.
Speaker 1: It's and I think that's going to affect music as well.
Speaker 1: I think I think being able to brag about the
Speaker 1: concert I was at and that's always been there, but
Speaker 1: it's never been amplified the way that it is now.
Speaker 1: Staying with the same thing, because this crosses bombs, we
Speaker 1: learn that acquisition is down and experiences are up, especially
Speaker 1: amongst millennials. Is your data absolutely very true? Yes, UM,
Speaker 1: wanting to experience restaurant spending is down, but the types
Speaker 1: of restaurants that people are choosing to eat at are
Speaker 1: more experiential, So certain types of restaurants are doing well.
Speaker 1: UM travel is certainly up. It's making it. It's a
Speaker 1: it's quite a big blind spot for UM the FED
Speaker 1: in terms of forecasting consumer spending because a lot of
Speaker 1: those categories aren't measured by a lot of the federal
Speaker 1: resources in terms of UM. You know, it's not store
Speaker 1: receipts from Target and Walmart anymore. There's money being spent
Speaker 1: somewhere that's not as visible, and that is a that
Speaker 1: is a that is a fundamentally true trend. And it's
Speaker 1: not just millennials. It's happening in gen X as well. Okay,
Speaker 1: so if someone wants to check you out, they can
Speaker 1: listen to this podcast. Is there anywhere they can go
Speaker 1: online to see some of your data other than your quizzes? Uh,
Speaker 1: Civic science dot com. Pretty straightforward, UM, anybody who would
Speaker 1: like to UM. You mentioned earlier that little Saturday email
Speaker 1: that I send out. It is it's kind of invitation
Speaker 1: only but it is a it is a an awesome
Speaker 1: list of people who read it and if anybody would
Speaker 1: like to be added to that, they would could reach
Speaker 1: out to you maybe to do that, but otherwise, UM yes,
Speaker 1: Civic Science dot com and um, we write a lot.
Speaker 1: It's um our blog is is a lot of content
Speaker 1: every week, new things were studying, trends worth finding. Um.
Speaker 1: We do have some partnerships with some media outlets that
Speaker 1: take our information and give it a spotlight for us.
Speaker 1: But um, yeah, they can certainly reach out to us
Speaker 1: if they want to be added to any of the
Speaker 1: distribution lists of these kind of things that we're writing about.
Speaker 1: And once again we haven't mentioned the names of the
Speaker 1: company that employ Civic Science, but I know those names
Speaker 1: and believe me, they're all the alphabet soup that you
Speaker 1: believe they are. So once again, John Dick, CEO of
Speaker 1: Civic Science, thanks so much for being here on the
Speaker 1: Bob Left Sets Podcast. It was my pleasure, Bob, thank you.
Speaker 1: That wraps up this week's episode of the Bob Left
Speaker 1: Sets Podcast, recorded here at Venice, California at the tune
Speaker 1: In Studios. I hope you enjoyed this fascinating conversation with
Speaker 1: the CEO of Civic Science John Dick, about market analytics,
Speaker 1: the future of tech, the music industry, and consumer habits.
Speaker 1: As always, I welcome your feedback. Email me at Bob
Speaker 1: at left sets dot com.