"Understanding the consumer" is a more timeless title than just referring to the "digital consumer". In some countries, almost all consumers can already be considered digital; in some others the speed of technology adoption is exponential. It is only a matter of time before everything will become digital everywhere.

There are new ways to:

• Collect consumer data from the web or new devices such as smartphones and wearables
• Process consumer (bigger) data using GPUs and distributed processing in the cloud
• Annotate and analyse consumer data including unstructured data
• Visualise consumer data using the likes of Tableau and Spotfire dashboards
• Manage the insight process from discovery to action

Learning from the past and understanding the present are prerequisites for any organisation that wants to stay relevant in the future. Developing countries like Romania have the benefit of being able to observe versions of their future in more developed countries.

This presentation will discuss the evolution of consumer understanding with focus on opportunities that new technologies such as A.I. enable. With these technologies we can now access and analyse online text in any language, images posted on social media or even brand equity derived exclusively from online engagement of consumers. Connecting the dots was always a skill that distinguished the best researchers among us, and with all the data proliferation it is now almost impossible to do so without drastic change.

Captain's Log, Stardate 201810.18. A new species has started to populate the Earth 20 years ago, invading the bodies of human hosts. In the last few years, the members of these species have spread exponentially. They have Smart devices glued to their body, have short attention spans, like to be in control and are able to conceive things that no man has done before: using VR to eliminate pain or sending their 3D avatars to video calls with their bosses.

Much like the steam engine or the TV set, the internet is transforming the world as we know it. Some things have changed radically - like the speed with which information can be found, instant celebrity can be gained or how communication takes place. Other aspects remained the same.

In a world that still was, until a year ago, TV centric in terms of global advertising investments, how well do we know to communicate with this species, to earn their attention, hearts and minds? What old rules still appeal to the core human nature of it? Which new ones should we keep in mind, to avoid being shut out when we come to say hello?

Mining our 20 years' global experience on digital advertising research, combined with examples and case studies, we bring to you 7 ways in which we can maximize the chances that Digital Consumers stop and open up to conversation, don't interrupt our speech midway or look elsewhere. Engage!

"Europe can add €2.5 trillion to GDP in 2025 by focusing on digital intensity growth", stated a McKinsey report in 2016. Almost 2 years later, businesses realize that the marketplaces in which they have competed successfully in the past are disrupted due to digital innovations. Hence, they face a new set of competitive standards. Majority of executives responded to an IDC survey saying that consulting partners are not just important but critical to their businesses' digital transformation success.

The digital era has been on the rise and consumers have now evolved into digital personas. Social media and online mediums have become a treasure trove of opinions, unmet needs and critical feedback. Given that digital transformation is now a prerequisite, the focus switches towards the readiness of research frameworks to interrogate the colossal amount of structured and unstructured data available.

This submission aims to establish the importance of Online Listening and explore techniques of deep diving into world phenomena and rising trends. For companies doing business in this environment of information overload, any help to cut through the 'noise' and understand the implications for their businesses means the difference between success and failure!

Nearly half of the Romanian families consider themselves to be modern. But what's a modern family that makes it so desirable? What defines them, what's important to them? How are the roles shifting in this new cell of society? How do you address them to remain relevant? Join us in this journey of getting to know modern moms and dads, children as influencers and grandparents trying to adapt in this ever-changing environment.

Social media has fully entered the realm of media. It is no longer new media but only less traditional than others, and widely used by all kinds of audiences, not only the younger generation.

Knowing how to present brands in social media needs a deeper understanding of social media usage by different generations, and this is why we, at Mercury Research, set out to investigate social media habits across different generations.

It will not be long now until "the digital consumer" becomes, simply "he consumer", as the norm rather than the exceptional. As researchers and marketers, we ourselves need to forego the traditional vs. digital, offline vs. online dichotomies, as we adapt to our younger consumers or centennials (Generation Z), who only know an interconnected world. They lead a connected life, we connect the data and our research partners to consumers, while we are all (inter)connected in a world where digital is moving from emergent to mainstream. In a candid presentation, inspired by conversations around centennials and daily interactions with her "super leader" centennial daughter, Carmen explores the challenges that come with having digital as a methodology, subject of research and mind-set, using our yearly Kantar TNS Connected Life study across the globe, as well as drawing from our latest digital thinking in the Kantar network.

Session chair
Flaviu Bobb, VP Client & Business Development, Ipsos Interactive Services

Starting with payments made from anywhere and at any time and continuing with social networks and Selfie culture, smartphone entered in our lives and changed our way of living and seeing the world.

This is why, our study evaluates the major lifestyle changes caused by smartphone's presence.
Some of the questions to be answered:

• How often do users pay their bills using a smartphone?
• How often do they compare online with offline prices when buying offline?
• Do women text more while driving than men?
• How much popularity did Selfie culture gained among various age categories?
• How different is Romanian users' behaviour comparing to the neighbour countries?

The study was conducted online, on a sample of 3500, age between 18 and 65 y.o., respondents from the Daedalus Online Panel from 7 countries: Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Greece and Argentina.
Data collection took place between 15 August 2018 - 15 September 2018.

Festivals have become a favoured holiday destination for Gen Z and Millennial youths since delivering concentrated experiences and non-stop rhythm. Brands are increasingly seeing this emerging territory as an opportunity to define more meaningful brand-consumer interactions with notoriously blasé generations about traditional brand communication and living in a brand saturated world. Together with our clients we set out to discover how to approach brand activations in a festival setting and seize the occasion to understand the target group in one of the most representative contexts for the younger generation. But we wanted to take the project beyond a typical information-gathering research and amplify its impact within the client team by developing a tool to generate client-consumer engagement & empathy. The research program that we created relies on role playing to elicit pre-existing perceptions, expectations & stereotypes both on the client side and on the research team side. We then confronted this set of assumptions with the rich reality brought to light by digital and field ethnography to enliven and deepen our understanding of the target. In this presentation, we will describe our methodological approach and how it can be employed to address the specifics of the new digital generation.

We'll also illustrate our findings with actual study examples and discuss how this method has shaped BAT entertainment plan after 2 years of recurring research on Electric Castle Festival.

Understanding the digital consumer represents the main challenge for brands for the past years. The market research industry is constantly looking to reinvent itself in order to keep up with these challenges. Market Research Online Communities (MROC) represent a dedicated tool to help brands to understand the consumers in the digital era through its versatile approach.

Two years ago, Ursus Breweries has developed a MROC as the answer to the brand need for a consumer closeness tool. Since then, the MROC has grown organically, being an important asset in the decision-making process for multiple brands in the Ursus Breweries portfolio.

This presentation will focus on a case study: Ursus Retro- just one example of how Ursus Breweries managed to integrate MROC in the business routine.

Monica Marinescu, Managing Director WaveTree.Zero, partener exclusiv al Exact Business Solutions pentru dezvoltarea de Comunitati Online de Cercetare de Piata

The brave new world changes attitudes and thinking patterns, adjusts behaviours, transforms relationships, and diversifies experiences. The consumer of the new world is active, involved, demanding and in the same time vulnerable and dependent.

But what is the catalyst of the new world? What changes the structure and the various layers of the world we live in? Who is responsible for "reformatting" the way the digital consumer thinks, reacts and decides? Who imposes, in an increasingly pace, the reconfiguration of business models for brands to remain relevant?

The time has come for the market research industry to change the paradigm. What is the deadline for us to adapt? When do we need to start re-evaluating our way of working and the role we have in relationship with our business partners?

Starting from this context, we will talk about a new consumer insights engine that thanks to artificial intelligence is able to integrate, process, and statistically analyse real sales data and information about the consumer, declarative and passive. With SMART platforms that use this real sales and consumer data, we will be able to simulate live how our partners can have instant access, from anywhere, anywhere, to information, data, analysis and answers to their business questions - WHY, WHY, HOW - to help them make real-time decisions.

In this day and age of technology driving so much innovation in market research, all industry studies show that qualitative research remains mostly face to face and personal. Are we, qualitative researchers, lagging behind?

On a different note, we have this marvellous example of the board games, a low-tech industry competing with videogaming and some of the most advanced technologies available, and yet, living its golden age as we speak.

This paper is about what can qualitative research learn from the success of the board games industry in order to maintain its relevance in the people understanding business, digital or non-digital.

We live in a digital environment where the huge amounts information to process have left us in a state where we are more likely to simply wait for information to find us. It is a far more efficient use of time to cast a cognitive net over a quantity of random information than to go in search of something specific and find that it was not that interesting or useful after all. This leaves open a potentially new level of receptivity to new ideas, arguments, products and services.

Social media, therefore, as well as:

Turning us into digital bystanders
Creating a 'trust' economy
and
Spawning a new generation of Narcissists,

it has redefined 'doing nothing'. Siamack will explore this idea using personal and client research anecdotes, to deconstruct what doing nothing means and how brands can embrace it by understanding it through the lens of 'getting jobs done'.