Part 5: How the Industry Overall can Collaborate

Review part 4 here.

What about the industry at large?  All this great advice works, but what can be done to hold these bad actors responsible?  We need to agree on whom and how each are responsible? Or, even better, how can each of us help the cause? 

It starts with those external to our industry: social media (Google/YouTube, etc., Facebook) and Gray market proxy services (services like Smartproxy, Bright Data and GeoSurf).  

Here’s a good start to a few key players in the process:  

• The Fraudster.  We can’t just amuse ourselves with their blatant disregard for the law or our industry tenants. Mr. Dave (Bangladesh) is producing a monthly average of 15 videos with 3000 views each for a total of over 5 hours of content.  How do we commit to notifying the right authorities (platforms, law enforcement, etc.) that he is propagating fraud?   

• Sample Suppliers and Exchanges.  We believe supply chain economics adds risk. Often quietly, exchanges started paying on a cost per click basis to networks tied to their platforms.  We believe there should be transparency on HOW traffic is generated into the engines.  Clearly, a network that gets paid for any click, will have an incentive to inflate clicks, irrespective how that occurs.  We’ve seen this before in AdTech. 
• Market Research Firms.  Become active in protecting your surveys.  You wouldn’t log into your laptop without a virus protection, so why expose your clients’ work to these threats?

OpinionRoute built a tech suite for Market Research Firms that works with any vendor and any survey tool to give transparent access to real-time vendor risk for Fraud.  This comes with analytics to help MR firms make more strategic purchase decisions.  

• Industry Associations. Lastly, in the context of helping, the industry associations can activate their membership and assist with legal issues.  Top Industry Association leaders have shared they are more than willing to help.  We, as their membership, need to let them know we want to support their actions, work directly with authorities and platforms to chase down bad actors, and activate a movement that harnesses the power of our intentions as an industry.  

While all of this slowly moves forward, we’ll keep doing our part aggressively.  

If you would like help with your survey data quality with the OpinionRoute ID Suite initiative, reach out here or to me directly. While I will promise you, I’ll attempt to sell you our ID Suite, I can also promise to help you level-up your survey data quality and in the end, you can do your part in a broader Industry Collaboration.

If you would like help with your survey data quality with the OpinionRoute ID Suite initiative, reach out here.