Latest / Responsibly Different™ / Know Before You Go: Building Smarter Media Through Research
Transcript
- 0:12David Gogel: Welcome to Fireside, a responsibly different podcast where we spark candid conversations about media investments and the strategies shaping the way we connect.
- 0:33Chris Marine: Welcome back to Fireside.
- 0:35Chris Marine: I'm Chris Marine and I'm joined by my colleague at Campfire Consulting, David Gogel.
- 0:39Chris Marine: Before we get into today's episode, I'm going to ask for a quick favor Give this responsibly different channel a follow.
- 0:45Chris Marine: It helps these stories and conversations reach more people, and when we educate folks about the true value of our media ecosystem, real change becomes possible for our culture, both locally and globally.
- 0:57Chris Marine: Now today, we're sitting down with Anastasia Lasky from Ground Control Research, who's doing some seriously smart work, helping brands go way deeper than just demographics or surface level personas.
- 1:09Chris Marine: If you've ever been about to launch a campaign and found yourself wondering are we even talking to the right people, this is the conversation for you.
- 1:17Chris Marine: We're unpacking why foundational research often gets skipped, how AI is speeding things up without losing the human element, and what it really takes to understand your audience in a meaningful, actionable way before you drop a penny into paid media.
- 1:31Chris Marine: So let's jump into our conversation with Anastasia Lasky from Ground Control Research.
- 1:41David Gogel: Okay, this is going to be a good one.
- 1:43David Gogel: We are excited to chat.
- 1:45David Gogel: This is going to be a wide ranging conversation.
- 1:49David Gogel: But we're so excited to hear about the work that you're doing because in our world media strategy, research plays a really critical role.
- 1:58David Gogel: But you know better than most that for a lot of clients it's been out of reach for a long time.
- 2:04David Gogel: So you know, we're hoping to really unpack during this conversation the work that you've been doing, how clients can leverage your platform to do research kind of in more efficient and cost-effective ways, and we're hoping to talk about the role that media strategy and research play together.
- 2:21David Gogel: So with that, can you give us a little bit of background on what you're building and kind of your background and how you got into?
- 2:26Anastassia Laskey: it.
- 2:26Anastassia Laskey: Yeah, thank you, david, and thank you Chris for having me here.
- 2:29Anastassia Laskey: I'm Anastasia Lasky.
- 2:31Anastassia Laskey: I'm the founder and president of Ground Control Research and what we do all day is we help brands to really understand who is your customer, what makes them tick, what's going to make them buy and what should your strategy be based on that information.
- 2:46Anastassia Laskey: And we're really focused on helping companies apply insight to their strategy.
- 2:53Anastassia Laskey: And what that does is it creates a much more, let's just say, a more cost-effective media approach, if we were to put it in sort of your context and it really just creates a lot of flow ease and increased revenue and increased margin, oftentimes too, for our clients.
- 3:08Anastassia Laskey: So I think you know, with that, with that context being said, david, I'll pick up on something you just said which is, historically, this kind of work, the work that I do, has been out of reach for a lot of brands, and maybe it's good to talk just high level about why.
- 3:22Anastassia Laskey: And then we can dig into sort of where things going, or at least where is ground control going and what am I doing with clients.
- 3:28Anastassia Laskey: So you know, historically, the main drivers of costs for clients to do actual like comprehensive, foundational research into who should my target market be.
- 3:39Anastassia Laskey: Once I figure that out, what matters to them Like?
- 3:42Anastassia Laskey: What do I do?
- 3:42Anastassia Laskey: How would that shape my strategy?
- 3:44Anastassia Laskey: How could I talk to them better?
- 3:45Anastassia Laskey: All of that good stuff.
- 3:46Anastassia Laskey: That has historically been a really, really cost-intensive process because the cost to talk to people has been high and the cost to take what a market researcher or market research firm learns from those people that they talk to has been really, really high.
- 4:05Anastassia Laskey: It's been a very manual process for literally like the last 50 years.
- 4:09Anastassia Laskey: You know it's gotten a little bit better with the aid of like computing and stuff like that, but there has not been a tool until now that could help you look at, let's say, 10 conversations that a person had for an hour with each person and go through that and uncover patterns and recognize what the trends are and format that into something that a business person could use to drive strategy, for example.
- 4:31Anastassia Laskey: Now we have this cool thing called AI, which is kind of a buzzword, as we know, but where I'm going and where I see really great market research going whether that's DIY research that clients do themselves or with their in-house teams, whether it's work that agencies do, or whether they partner with someone like my firm.
- 4:48Anastassia Laskey: It's really about how do we use AI to aid those human workflows and make sure, of course, we don't want hallucinations, we don't want false data, we don't want incorrect things.
- 4:57Anastassia Laskey: But we can really use AI and some of the powers of large language models to cut through the cost burden and therefore give clients access to something they never had access to before.
- 5:08David Gogel: Yeah, no, that makes that really makes sense and tracks with the conversations we're having with clients.
- 5:13David Gogel: I think the other piece that's important to talk about is not only the cost, but also the time right.
- 5:18David Gogel: Often, when we're when we're thinking about planning, we don't have the time for this drawn out process, and so can you talk to us a little bit about how you've been able to cut down on the timeline for this research as well?
- 5:30Anastassia Laskey: Yeah, absolutely.
- 5:31Anastassia Laskey: You know I come from the startup world so I kind of have an atypical background in that.
- 5:36Anastassia Laskey: You know, I started in like we'll call it a big market research firm and then I went right into like being on the team of a really scrappy startup and the number one point of feedback I got back then 10, 15 years ago was we can't take six weeks to do this.
- 5:49Anastassia Laskey: Like we have a board meeting next week, we have a partner conversation tomorrow, like how can we make this faster?
- 5:56Anastassia Laskey: And so when I started Ground Control, it was all about like with again the tools we had at the time, like how could we make this as fast as possible?
- 6:09Anastassia Laskey: Frankly, the type of foundational insights, work that we're talking about, you know most clients, if they didn't work with ground control, it would have taken them 12 weeks, 18 weeks, two quarters, to kind of get that done.
- 6:15Anastassia Laskey: With our like super speed process, even though it's a manual process, it was like four weeks, four to six weeks.
- 6:22Anastassia Laskey: Right Now with using AI to aid the workflows, again, we're taking that human element out.
- 6:28Anastassia Laskey: In certain places we're still having a lot of human supervision, but we're being really thoughtful about that in our process so we can cut that down to about two weeks, so sometimes less actually.
- 6:38Anastassia Laskey: So it just depends.
- 6:39Anastassia Laskey: Does is?
- 6:40Anastassia Laskey: It allows clients to come into a strategy process and they're not actually having to add timeline to that process to incorporate or account for the research.
- 6:50Anastassia Laskey: It's just part of that strategy development process, which would take a few weeks anyway.
- 6:54Anastassia Laskey: Right, because you've got to go through rounds of iteration and learning and sharing and all that.
- 6:59David Gogel: Yeah, can you talk to us about some of the entry points here?
- 7:01David Gogel: I mean we, so we're, we're as you.
- 7:03David Gogel: Of course, you're aware and people listening are aware we're a media strategy agency, right, but I think your work probably has a number of entry points.
- 7:11David Gogel: Can you talk to us a little bit about what those typically look like and kind of what the deliverables are?
- 7:15Anastassia Laskey: Yeah, absolutely.
- 7:16Anastassia Laskey: You know, media strategy or I would say, actually like to make it more broadly, a little more broad is like when, when organizations are trying a new type of media for the first time, like they're about to invest in paid media for the first time, that's like a really common use case, because what worked in digital or what worked in sort of the organic methods they were doing to get to the scale that they're at, we don't actually have any data that tells us that they've been talking to the right customer or that, like, who they want to target in media is the right target.
- 7:45Anastassia Laskey: Like we have no idea truly.
- 7:47Anastassia Laskey: Like in a factual sense, we might have ideas about it but we don't actually know.
- 7:50Anastassia Laskey: So that's like a really common one.
- 7:52Anastassia Laskey: Another common time when I work with clients on this type of work is when they're repositioning or rebranding or they kind of know internally they have some sort of internal data that like sort of like what got us here isn't going to get us to that next stage of growth.
- 8:09Anastassia Laskey: So it's really about we're at a plateau or we're feeling like we need some exponential growth or a bigger growth jump, and they're looking at everything they're saying and doing.
- 8:17Anastassia Laskey: We come in and help them start with basically a playbook and we say, hey, like this is who you should be looking at, who you should be talking to, what you should be saying in a general way, and let them build their strategy and their big growth jump on that, and then again I'm just kind of giving you umbrella kind of things Like the other common one is whether it's a pre-launch company or whether it's an organization that is an established organization but they're launching something new or they're trying to like, like if they're a consumer brand they're trying to sell into, like a retailer or something like that.
- 8:47Anastassia Laskey: Anywhere where a brand needs to really tell a story to an outside party that shows that they know what they're talking about, about their own brand, that's when we really step in to help them get that foundation.
- 8:58Chris Marine: I love that idea too, that helping people kind of get to that next phase of growth, because a lot of the times we'll talk with folks, obviously we're helping them think about how to amplify their story.
- 9:08Chris Marine: But we talked a lot about purpose.
- 9:10Chris Marine: And like in a world full of sameness today, like how actually getting down to your core purpose is really important.
- 9:16Chris Marine: So I'd imagine through this research you have some really interesting stories of like how you actually got past people thinking about those traditional four P's of marketing and really going deeper as a brand.
- 9:27Anastassia Laskey: Yeah for sure.
- 9:28Anastassia Laskey: And like, when we work with companies, like it is all about, like, I view my work as, like a translator, I'm here to help take what is the mission, the purpose, the values, the vision that the organization has and translate that into, like here's how you talk about this with this audience, right, like let's get specific and precise about who is that audience, and then how do we speak their language?
- 9:48Anastassia Laskey: It's not that we need to change for them, we don't need to become a different company, but we need to speak in their language.
- 9:54Anastassia Laskey: I mean, I can give you an example from my personal life this morning.
- 9:56Anastassia Laskey: One of my friends is a doctor.
- 9:57Anastassia Laskey: He speaks a totally different type of language and communication than I do.
- 10:02Anastassia Laskey: I'm a marketer and a market researcher.
- 10:05Anastassia Laskey: Sparing you a long story, I essentially said I think you're a detractor, which to me is a marketing term.
- 10:11Anastassia Laskey: I might say you're a promoter, you're a detractor, you're neutral, right, like that's common for me to say.
- 10:15Anastassia Laskey: He thought this morning that I was insulting him.
- 10:20Anastassia Laskey: He's like, did you mean to?
- 10:21Anastassia Laskey: Like were you offended?
- 10:22Anastassia Laskey: And then you like made this jab at me and I was like, oh no, I'm so sorry.
- 10:26Anastassia Laskey: Like I just was speaking a different language than you were speaking English, but we're speaking a different language, right, and I think one of the big challenges that companies have as they scale and this is what I've seen over and over is that the language that they originally used to get that first kind of product market fit, or that first cohort of customers, was really resonant to a very, very small and specific target market.
- 10:48Anastassia Laskey: And that's great.
- 10:50Anastassia Laskey: We love those loyal people.
- 10:51Anastassia Laskey: We don't want to alienate them, but to get that like next big jump of growth, it's a different target or it's an expanded target, and they have a different set of things that matter to them emotionally and in language.
- 11:04Anastassia Laskey: So we can help them basically figure out what should you be talking about with that bigger audience?
- 11:09Chris Marine: Yeah, you just answered one of my questions.
- 11:11Chris Marine: I was going to ask something along those lines which is like what are some of the misconceptions about audience segmentation?
- 11:17Chris Marine: Yeah, you kind of just answered there.
- 11:19Chris Marine: Yeah, for sure.
- 11:21Anastassia Laskey: Yeah, for sure, yeah, and I would say, chris, like you know, one of the kind of things I've seen a lot, especially in those scaling brands, is, like this fear, which I totally get, and it's a loyalty to like I don't want to alienate my current customers, right, and I don't want to not be true to who.
- 11:37Anastassia Laskey: I am Right and I'm 100% with you.
- 11:40Anastassia Laskey: We shouldn't do either of those things, but we can't just have that be the pervasive thinking.
- 11:45Anastassia Laskey: We have to also have some, I would say, more, more expanded thinking, more growth minded thinking of OK, if we're going to say that, that's our sure we're not going to do those things.
- 11:54Anastassia Laskey: What else are we going to do, though?
- 11:55Anastassia Laskey: Like, how are we going to identify a market that is aligned to us and who we are, and identify the language, and identify that segment or those segments, and put together a plan to actually expand?
- 12:06Anastassia Laskey: It's not enough to just say I want to expand, I want to invest in media, but I don't want to do all these other things.
- 12:12Anastassia Laskey: Right?
- 12:12Anastassia Laskey: That's not a plan, that's like constraint, right?
- 12:16Chris Marine: And that's gambling.
- 12:16Chris Marine: That's what we show people all the time it's like, if you don't have anything outside of, like, I just want to throw money at a thing.
- 12:21Chris Marine: We're like, then you're going to throw money at a thing Like investing in media is investing in people.
- 12:26Anastassia Laskey: Exactly.
- 12:27Chris Marine: We talk a lot about it.
- 12:28Chris Marine: It's like investing in people means time.
- 12:31Chris Marine: That means different fronts where you need to put energy towards communicating.
- 12:35Chris Marine: Yeah, for sure.
- 12:36Chris Marine: So that's really important.
- 12:37Chris Marine: Call out you made yeah.
- 12:38Anastassia Laskey: And I think like just to build on that real quick.
- 12:40Anastassia Laskey: And then, yeah, and I think like just to build on that real quick.
- 12:54Anastassia Laskey: And then, david, I think you have something to say.
- 12:56Anastassia Laskey: But, like you know, one of the biggest barriers that I hear from clients about wanting to do research is they're like a fraction, like a so tiny of an amount in making sure that who you're broadcasting that to and what you're saying is right, like it's actually going to produce a result.
- 13:14Anastassia Laskey: I was like, do you just not like to have like a high, like ROAS?
- 13:17Anastassia Laskey: Like what is the thinking?
- 13:18Anastassia Laskey: There's no thinking there, right?
- 13:20Anastassia Laskey: But again, I think the disconnect I'm not trying to insult clients, clients I think the disconnect is the way clients think about budget.
- 13:26Anastassia Laskey: Like they just like they think about things in a very like you know, sometimes it's a little bit like blinders on way of like, oh, the media budget is for media, it's not for like, making sure the media is in the right direction and then with the right content.
- 13:39Anastassia Laskey: You know, but that's kind of like what I would like to change.
- 13:42Anastassia Laskey: Or I continue to see clients who succeed, they change their point of view on that right, and that's why we love partnering with you.
- 13:49David Gogel: Yeah, you just touched on something really important right, which is that there's tons of operational leverage in the system now because of AI and because of technology, and something that we're talking to clients a lot about is how do we take some of that operational leverage and apply it to test and learn and iterate and optimize faster so that way we can do more interesting and dynamic things?
- 14:12David Gogel: So do you have a sense of where you think the market is going?
- 14:17David Gogel: Do you think that people are going to do more of these micro cycles, where, where they're like doing research, playing, optimizing, scaling or do you think people are going to do larger research projects?
- 14:27David Gogel: Where do you see all this going?
- 14:30Anastassia Laskey: Yeah, for sure.
- 14:30Anastassia Laskey: So I think I'll say where I think the market is right now with market like, with market research specifically.
- 14:36Anastassia Laskey: I think people generally are using AI as a tool, but they don't have any sort of a methodology or like a plan behind it, right, it's kind of like I use AI like my Google search, or I say I use this tool called deep research, but I don't actually have a deep methodology that I'm using to make sure that what it comes back with is correct, right.
- 14:57Anastassia Laskey: So I think that's where we are now.
- 14:59Anastassia Laskey: It's kind of that like early stage confusion, chaos like, and then some people are getting bad results and some people are getting better results, right, and it's not really standard.
- 15:08Anastassia Laskey: What I think you know people leading the industry like myself who have embraced AI can do is we can say, hey, like this is this is actually like the five things you really do have to know about your market, and you have to make sure they're facts and not fiction, and you have to make sure they're specific and precise, not general you know AI kind of generality nonsense, right.
- 15:28Anastassia Laskey: And I think that over time or I hope that over time research and insight can kind of move into this like place where I'm trying to go of AI as a tool to speed up a workflow and the use of a methodology that already exists and is grounded in science and art and creativity and all of the things that had to happen, you know, to produce consultative result for clients, which is what you know I'm here to do.
- 15:53Chris Marine: I think that's so important using the AI for process to your point to be able to speed up and make that a really clean process, but not losing the human-centered approach to what actually drives people in our culture forward.
- 16:07Anastassia Laskey: Yeah, for example, like you know again, I'm just trying to make it a little tangible for any listeners here Like you know, when we use AI in our telemetry service, which is sort of our foundational insights service for consumer brands, there's a survey template that exists.
- 16:22Anastassia Laskey: I wrote that survey.
- 16:23Anastassia Laskey: I wrote that survey using 15 years of experience like driving, like exponential growth with, you know, high performing companies.
- 16:33Anastassia Laskey: Right, I know what needs to be in it.
- 16:35Anastassia Laskey: Ai doesn't know what needs to be in it.
- 16:37Anastassia Laskey: I could ask AI can you write me a survey to help me understand my customers?
- 16:40Anastassia Laskey: And it will give me something.
- 16:42Anastassia Laskey: But that's not where I need to be using AI.
- 16:45Anastassia Laskey: What I use AI for is we get inputs from our clients and our partners.
- 16:50Anastassia Laskey: That is like this is the category that we're in, this is this, this is that all these inputs, and we use AI to help us generate updates to parts of the survey template, right, to make it custom, and that's how we could do a custom survey super fast.
- 17:02Anastassia Laskey: Does that make sense?
- 17:03Anastassia Laskey: So that's where I think you know people who want to make sure that what they're creating is correct and useful will do you know?
- 17:11David Gogel: Yeah, I think that's so important to really focus on, because I think when people, if people were just listening to the start of this conversation, they would think, okay, you're using AI to create the framework and that's not the case, right, you're using AI to analyze faster.
- 17:28David Gogel: You're you're using, like you know, deep research methodologies that have been developed over kind of you know what I mean more than a decade of experience, to create a framework and then you're using, you know, a research methodology to create insights, but using AI to process that information faster at scale, so that way it's more accessible for brands.
- 17:47David Gogel: And again, as you know, we use tools like Global Web Index, right, to like understand audience, kind of audience behaviors around media consumption or brand discovery, right, but that is that's very, very helpful for us directionally to know where to go, but it isn't a substitute for a deep understanding of kind of human, human ideas around a specific thing, which is the work that you're doing.
- 18:09David Gogel: And so, just to kind of bridge these two worlds for folks, can you talk a little bit about how, like, how are you often seeing people use your research in practice?
- 18:18David Gogel: I mean, we touched on it at a high level, but can you double click in and really give an example of like how this comes to life for clients.
- 18:25Anastassia Laskey: Yeah, Like.
- 18:25Anastassia Laskey: Do you mean?
- 18:25Anastassia Laskey: Like using sort of the results of the services on their?
- 18:29David Gogel: business.
- 18:30David Gogel: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think it's important to paint a really clear picture there, for sure, yeah.
- 18:33Anastassia Laskey: Yeah, yeah, I think it's important to paint a really clear picture there, for sure, yeah, so, like for consumer brands, you know, the number one thing that that comes, that people come away with at our clients is is my target market?
- 18:42Anastassia Laskey: That I think I should have?
- 18:43Anastassia Laskey: Is it correct?
- 18:43Anastassia Laskey: Like statistically not like I woo wooed my way into like a brainstorming session, which those are great, right, but like statistically, we thought it was going to be parents of a certain type and actually we found that it is this other type of parent, right, or whatever.
- 19:00Anastassia Laskey: Again, I'm just making something up.
- 19:02Anastassia Laskey: That is like the number one grounding fact, because all of your marketing, all of it, all of your strategy, frankly, as a company, has to be built around knowing who in the world you are talking to, like who is your best customer.
- 19:13Anastassia Laskey: So that's kind of the foundational data point insight that we can give.
- 19:19Anastassia Laskey: And then what we do a little bit differently is we don't just say, oh, it's this.
- 19:22Anastassia Laskey: We don't just say, oh, it's a sentence of who, this is right.
- 19:25Anastassia Laskey: We create sort of a playbook that says and for that group of people, here's all of the purchase drivers and the category that you operate in, here's what they actually think about your brand.
- 19:36Anastassia Laskey: Here's how you can differentiate versus your competitors among that group of people.
- 19:41Anastassia Laskey: Here is a persona that we created for you based on everything we learned about this group of people and your category and everything that's happening, sort of in their worlds, right.
- 19:51Anastassia Laskey: So we're making it come to life and we're making it very actionable and tangible, with the goal of not just saying, well, here you go, toss it over the fence, this is your target market, but here's how you as a company, your specific brand, your specific product, how you can actually capture that market or more of that market, depending on whether you're currently marketing to them or not.
- 20:11Anastassia Laskey: And that, I would say, is like sort of the very practical, like tactical output is.
- 20:17Anastassia Laskey: It is like a playbook.
- 20:18Anastassia Laskey: It's like go do these things, because this is what's going to drive your next you know, I don't know million, couple million, 10 million, 20 million, a hundred million dollars of growth, whatever you want, right.
- 20:28Anastassia Laskey: And we kind of we also get those sort of inputs from our clients to like where are they trying to get to?
- 20:32Anastassia Laskey: And we use that to contextualize the work that we do.
- 20:35Chris Marine: Yeah, One last question for you.
- 20:39Chris Marine: This has been amazing and we're going to have to have you come back for a part two, part three, part four.
- 20:44Anastassia Laskey: Yeah, regular guests Happy to help.
- 20:47Chris Marine: With the quickly evolving landscape of the world and we could like to use David's terminology, double click into that many different ways, but, like I, like to leave people with hope.
- 20:58Chris Marine: What's giving you hope and waking you up?
- 21:01Chris Marine: Inspired every day.
- 21:03Anastassia Laskey: Yeah, I think that I am really inspired.
- 21:08Anastassia Laskey: I'm inspired by AI because, like for me as an individual, like this has been like a huge unlock for me, because I think it gives, it's given me, a lot of agency as a person.
- 21:17Anastassia Laskey: If I don't know something, I don't have to Google, search and wonder did I search the right terms.
- 21:21Anastassia Laskey: I literally can just be like I don't understand this thing Right and I can get education Right, and I think, like AI is bringing a democratization of information, but also it's teaching people how to apply that information, which is so core, to like what I want to do and how I see the world as developing more positively.
- 21:39Anastassia Laskey: So I'm not going to say there are no downsides or risks to AI.
- 21:42Anastassia Laskey: I think we need controls.
- 21:43Anastassia Laskey: I'm not trying to be like an optimist with no constraint here, but I think that if we all can use whatever tool whether it's AI, whether it's a creative tool, whether it's something that we're passionate about to sort of have more agency and control over what impact we're trying to make, like, I think that's a great thing.
- 22:03Anastassia Laskey: So that's my optimism for you, chris.
- 22:06Chris Marine: I love that Well, thanks for joining us around the fire.
- 22:09Chris Marine: Again, you're going to have to come back.
- 22:10Chris Marine: Yeah, definitely need a part two.
- 22:11David Gogel: Thank you guys.
- 22:11David Gogel: Again, you're going to have to come back.
- 22:12Chris Marine: Definitely need a part two Thank you guys.
- 22:17Chris Marine: Well, that's a wrap on this episode of Fireside.
- 22:19Chris Marine: Big thanks to Anastasia for joining us and making the case that research doesn't have to be slow or out of reach and when done right, it can unlock smarter strategy, more efficient media and way better creative.
- 22:31Chris Marine: If you want to learn more about ground control research or insights engine telemetry, or explore more of Ana's work, check out the show notes.
- 22:38Chris Marine: We've got everything linked up.
- 22:39Chris Marine: You can also reach out to us here at Campfire.
- 22:42Chris Marine: Ana is one of our vetted partners and we're always happy to talk about how this kind of research can be integrated into your media approach so you can reach your audience with intention and care.
- 22:52Chris Marine: And if you liked this episode, don't forget to follow, share with a friend, a colleague, or drop us a line.
- 22:58Chris Marine: We'd love to know what's keeping you curious.
- 23:00Chris Marine: Until next time, keep tending to the fire of positive change.