How Sony Music use always-on Video Research as an alternative to online Research Communities

In this presentation, Sony Music showcase how they are using Indeemo and always-on video research as an alternative to traditional online research communities.  

Transcript :

Hello everyone and thank you for having us. I'm James, Head of Insight at Sony Music Entertainment, which is part of the Central Agency Style division at the heart of Sony Music called 4th Floor Creative.

Hi everybody. I'm Eugene Murphy and I'm the Founder and CEO of Indeemo. So to start with today, I'd like to share some of our learnings over the past 12 months and certainly over the past three years since we've been fortunate enough to sponsor this great event. So what I believe is driving a lot of the changes we're experiencing right now in the demand for digital ethnography and there's a number of factors in that.

So the first one is digital transformation. Every business that's created from this point onwards I believe would be partially if not entirely digital in nature. And what that basically means is that every customer journey will certainly be Omnichannel and it's really hard to understand humans and people, products and experiences in different contexts. And I think digital ethnography is a really powerful methodology to solve that problem.

The second thing that's happening is basically with Gen Z and Gen Alpha now coming true. What you have is you have a digital by default demographic that's used to having everything on demand. And really the pressure that's putting on brands to provide seamless, personalised experiences in every context is immense. So it's driving a lot of the research and design budget that we're seeing right now.

And the third thing that we're all aware of with ChatGPT and everything that's going on at the moment is kind of a sense of the accelerating rate of change. So change is just absolutely becoming exponential. And from a research and design perspective, it's actually impossible to keep up. So that's the context that we're seeing in our conversations with customers at the moment.

Now how does that manifest itself? So you know, customer closeness is trending. If you're in a kind of consumer or kind of insights market research type business or focus, if you're in UX and designer CX, really the ambition now is continuous discovery. The need to be constantly connected to your customer in the context of everyday life. Clients and brands are looking for lean and agile approaches. They want to be scrappy. They want to be nimble. They're looking for faster turnarounds. So you know, they want rich, contextual qual insights at the speed of quant. They want it at less cost than it was last year because budgets have been cut and nobody knows what's going to be happening for the next 6 to 12 months. So that's what we're hearing in our sales funnel right now.

So just to put a frame on this, what that really means is that clients are looking for rich in the moment contextual insights and they want them faster and they want them continuously and that's kind of the topic of this conversation here with James here today. Now I believe this is a very exciting opportunity for digital ethnography. I believe it allows us to evolve the concept of digital ethnography massively, right?

So what we're hearing now, an increasing percentage of our clients are referring to Indeemo and digital ethnography as an alternative to traditional research communities, which is very interesting and very exciting. And I think what's driving that basically is the need for these rich contextual insights. They're looking for mobile first approaches and they're looking for a way to be relevant and connected to Gen Z primarily.

But they need to be able to do this remotely because of hybrid work and they need to be able to do this continuously. So the recipe here is pretty much as follows - and James will go into it - But essentially you're recruiting as you always do. You're screening as you always do. But instead of just running an intensive one or two weeks study, what you're doing is you're running a panel over a period of two to three months. So that kind of relaxes the research, It chills things out. It makes it less intensive, it makes it actually easier to manage. 

The secret to success really is to establish a regular cadence so you'll have a task or an activity once a week or, you may check in with an interview once a month, for example. This allows you to be constantly connected, to have a panel of genuine, authentic recruited participants engageable through video and smartphones. This allows you to be always on, always connected to the customer. And if something pops up, basically it allows you to be agile and nimble and scrappy and flexible and you can pop up a task in minutes and you can have insights tomorrow instead of six weeks time.


So that's the context of the evolution of digital ethnography as we see it in the past year. I think it's very, very exciting and offers an opportunity to, as I say, be always on, be constantly connected basically, and to be able to offer your stakeholders and your customers the rich insights they need to kind of figure out this accelerating change that we're all experiencing right now. So with that in mind, I'll hand you over to James, who's going to take you through the exciting research that he and his team are doing at Sony Music Entertainment.

Before we jump into it, just a little bit of context about Sony Music upfront. The record labels under Sony nurtured some of music's most iconic artists and produced some of the most influential recordings of all time, some of which are showing in the reel here, with a huge breadth of visionary creators in our roster, from international superstars to developing artists. And therefore, our role in the Insight team is to help our labels best understand our artists current and potential audiences so they can connect with them in the most effective and creative ways possible. And from our position at the intersection of music, entertainment and technology, we also have a role in forming the business about consumer behaviours across various music touch points.

So in the past, we've used Indeemo to run more traditionally structured digital ethnography and UX type projects, exploring how people use and navigate streaming services like Spotify, how they browse and select content to engage with on platforms like YouTube, and how they interact with new forms of music hardware like voice speakers. And obviously, as we all know, the power of digital ethnography and platforms like Indeemo is that we can capture such real moments like this family here, all with very diverse music tastes, suddenly trying to negotiate the boundaries of having a speaker in a shared space that everyone could control.

So through some of those previous projects, we've illuminated and provided a lot of context to changes in our industry and changes in consumption. But as great as those projects were, our main focus isn't really on technology. It's on people. So with those interesting and successful projects under our belts, we're quite curious and motivated to get closer to our audiences rather than the devices and technology they're using.

So to zoom out for a minute, it's worth saying that we have a segmentation at Sony that breaks down the whole market based on people's passion for music, from the most engaged fanatics through to enthusiasts, casuals and indifference. And then we break those groups further down into sub segments.

But as a big quantitative study, obviously this can only take us so far. As Eugene mentioned in the past we've explored more traditional communities to take us deeper. But music is such an emotional medium with lots of nuance around discovery and engagement, but those communities always felt like they were missing a lot of richness. So we really sort of began to explore what kind of process could we put in place, what kind of methodology could we employ and what was the tool set for that that would really deliver richness and spades.

And we also knew that we needed that process and that tool set to work for young audiences because we knew from our quant data that there was one particular cohort that is really vital to the lifeblood of our business, and we're thinking about launching and developing new artists - Gen Z Fanatics! There are our heaviest streamers, the most vocal about new artists, and their endorsement means a lot to their less fanatic friends and the media.

So our quant data and previous panel gave us an understanding of a lot of what's but very few why's. We knew what Gen Z liked and what they engaged with, for example, but not why. Why did certain artists connect so well? Why did they behave in certain ways, and why were certain genres captioning their imagination more than others? So in 2019, we decided to start an audience closeness program with the intention of bringing Sony staff beyond the Insight team closer to the world of Gen Z in a more ongoing fashion instead of a traditional community. We made the bedrock of the program Indeemo and digital ethnography.

We needed to be propelled deep into these Gen Z lives to almost be beside them for the music moments that matter to the most. We collaborated with the amazing team at The Mix and we generated an audience closeness program called Pave. Here's a teaser of the 1st edition which was focused on Gen Z UK rap fanatics. Given that this is an audience closeness program, we jumped into it without too many research questions or hypotheses on purpose. We wanted to let the lives of our audiences reflect in the Ethnography and guide the topics we explored, and once armed with the themes that matter to our respondents, we brought them together in person for members of the Sony team to Co create a Zine reflecting their views and impressions of the UK rap scene.

We ended up with a really powerful zine that showcased all the learnings and perspectives we picked up from the ethnographic phase, something our respondents were also really proud to have contributed to. In fact, we stopped even calling them respondents and started referring to them as contributors instead. And as this was an audience closeness program, it was only logical that we held a Zine launch event, bringing even more members and Sony labels together with our contributors.

We set up various workstations at the event, from a big screen playing music videos to an area with mini tablets where contributors and Sony Staff could collaborate on playlists, to a big blank canvas where contributors create their own Muriel. So to reflect that, we had a community of around 30 Gen Z fanatics that joined us for six weeks of digital ethnography. They were doing roughly 2 tasks per week and this acted as the raw and the real - a personal view into their lives at home and out and about, all focused on topics that matter to them.

And we're able to use that as the base layer of the overall program to identify the themes that we took into a Zine workshop. The workshop united our research contributors and Sony stakeholders around facilitated activities and discussions that gave the contributors a chance to bond and even greater agency over what they wanted to share in turn making that part of the process with more meaning for them.

Finally, we launched the zine communal event with fun activities that were designed to celebrate the process and facilitate audience closeness for our Sony stakeholders. What we also realised though, was because it was digital, the ethnographic stage was actually a way to foster audience closeness for the business at scale. As long as we could place all the amazing content our contributors shared in an interesting context, our stakeholders could truly immerse in like we had. We decided to take our findings online and set up an internal Instagram page and become the home to everything related to Pay. And little did we know at the time that that hub would become increasingly important as we turned our attention to the next order of business Pave 2.

As we started to think about Pave 2 in early 2020, we couldn't have predicted what would happen next. Only about a month after our Zine launch event and the set up of our internal Pave Instagram page Covid hit and we got sent into lockdown. We've just started an audience closeness program in the age of social distancing. Emboldened by the success of our digital ethnography phase on Pave 1, we proceeded with Pave 2. Undeterred, knowing that with the world in flux and pretty much the whole business working from home, the closeness directly into the lives of our vital audiences was even more important than ever. We decided to focus Pave 2 on members of Gen Z that were facing diverse lockdown experiences from all over the country.

So whether that was people finishing college or going into their first year of uni, or working as key workers once again, we recruited around 30 contributors, but decided this time to extend our field work to 8 weeks. We asked them to be creative with all of the post options Indeemo had to offer, using it to keep a diary of their lives during this turbulent time. We decided on a flexible diary format because one of the things that we learned from Pave 1 was that contributors could see their previous posts on the platform and that had the inadvertent benefit of helping them to reflect on their own behaviours and feelings.

The Sony team were learning about their lives, but the contributors were learning about themselves too. It almost made it kind of this great cycle. It was research on steroids. We dropped one fairly open-ended prompt into Indeemo each week too, mainly focused on it being a place for us just to get that intimate, in the moment and self reflective view into our audience as well. And instead of first checking email each morning, most of the insight team would start our work days with a view like this, checking Indeemo to maintain that closeness to our key audience. Despite lockdown affecting all of our day-to-day lives in pretty much real time, we were able to feed insights into the business. We could see how much more time was being spent in various gaming environments, for example, and also to see the longing from our contributors that were really missing the gig experience.

As a result of that, Sony facilitated various in-game concerts knowing that we could bring a touch of that concert experience to people when they were stuck at home. As our contributors watched and reviewed artists' live streams from home, we also built up a series of engagement tactics for our artists going live on platforms like Instagram. This always on community style approach also allowed us to get straight to the heart of questions that were important to the business.

We saw previously nascent platform TikTok explode in front of our very eyes and we had an immediate route via the audience closeness community into why it was capturing so much attention. We could see the what in other data sources, but this process allowed us to immediately get to those why’s. We could ship those super timely findings, perspectives and videos to bring them to life from our contributors straight to the company via our internal Pave Instagram page, dropping our stakeholders straight into their worlds and their audiences to get their take on events in their own words.

And when topics like TikTok bubbled up, we can build on top of our ethnographic base there with paid rounds. These were contributor roundtable panels, live streamed to the company with all of the ethnographic learnings and built up knowledge of our contributors as a great foundation to frame and guide that discussion.

And in true Pave fashion, we Co created the Zine with our contributors that really showcased our learnings. We could see through the Indeemo Diaries and ethnography that contributors were unsurprisingly restless during lockdown, and in response, we invited them to make optional incentivised contributions to Zine, and they can be more deep, creative, and considered on the topics that matter to them.

Again, the process and the platform they were going through meant they were also building on learnings they had forged about their own lives and behaviours as they've documented them over the course of that longitudinal research. We received collages, photo journals and essays, and we collated all of those into a printed Zine, A Zine that we were able to share with the business, of course, but also with contributors themselves as a bit of a momentum of the journey they've been on and even something they can add to their CV or portfolios as a collaborative project with Sony.

So that's Pave audience closeness program and Gen Z journey powered by digital ethnography, a journey that's ongoing as we're just socialising the learnings from Pave 3, which is focused on representation and we're thinking about Pave 4. Who knows where that will take us.Thank you very much and looking forward to answering any questions.