RESEARCH LIVE

Murphy (pictured) had recently joined MEL Research as a researcher and previously was research director at Verian Group in Brussels, with other prior roles including spells at York Consulting LLP, Family Kids & Youth and DJS Research. MEL Research said that Murphy would bring experience in complex evaluations for government, cultural and third-sector organisations, including developing evaluation frameworks and performance measures that help organisations make evidence-based decisions.

UK – Ipsos has appointed Caolan Ward as managing director of its Northern Ireland team. Ipsos Northern Ireland, based in Belfast, delivers research and evaluation in a range of policy areas, working with government, public bodies and major organisations. Ward joins the company from the financial services industry. During his career, he has led the development and delivery of major campaigns and strategic initiatives across research, policy, public affairs and stakeholder engagement.

The tender will adopt a modular approach, which will allow participants to bid for specific components of the measurement service or the complete end-to-end process. Independent consultancy Pure X Media has been employed to support the tender, with the company having specialist knowledge of audience measurement tender processes and cross media measurement. The request for proposal process will run throughout the second half of 2026, with a decision expected in the first quarter of 2027.

US – Consumer insights platform Zappi has launched a predictive advertising testing tool focused on social video advertisements. The tool, called Amplify AI, is trained on data from customer surveys and uses machine learning and synthetic respondents to predict consumer reactions to advertising. Amplify AI will be released in the US and UK and includes an Amplify Hub, which is a connected workspace that brings together advertising insights for teams to access during campaign development.

The findings are based on a quantitative survey of 200 senior brand-side decision-makers responsible for selecting and managing agency relationships, with marketing budgets of between £1m and £250m, and 20 in-depth interviews with chief marketing officers, senior marketers, agency leaders and industry commentators. There is a disconnect between what clients currently perceive they are getting from their agencies and what they see as valuable, the research found.

Higson has nine years of experience in research, most recently working in brand strategy and customer insight roles at Definition and Brand Vista. In addition, Higson brings skills in brand tracking, customer segmentation, concept testing and early-stage brand development, as well as experience in sectors such as leisure, transport, finance, education, construction and pharmaceuticals.

US – Customer intelligence business Voxpopme has launched early access to a service to allow users to query their organisation’s internal research repositories from AI platforms such as Claude and ChatGPT. The service allows users to connect AI assistants to the Voxpopme platform, with any model context protocol (MCP) compatible tool able to be linked.

The acquisition will add Converlens’ analytics technology to Open Point’s range of tools focused on community engagement and stakeholder relationship management. The two organisations have worked together previously, and the acquisition will help bring engagement, relationship management and insights capabilities together under a single platform provider.

US – Experience management firm Qualtrics has promoted Ken Hoang to senior vice-president of product. Hoang (pictured) will lead Qualtrics’ product management and design departments and help build platforms to support the company’s work in AI. Before taking up his new role, Hoang was vice-president of product management, having joined Qualtrics earlier this year. Other prior roles include at IBM, Oracle NetSuite, Siperian and Inference.

The tool, called Focus Groups, is based on StatSocial’s PeopleGraph and Knowledge tool, which uses behavioural data from around 150 million US adults to provide responses to questions from researchers. Focus Groups uses digital twins to allow users to converse with the data, with the information from each study cohort used to create personas that can be questioned by research teams, weighted to allow users to know how many buyers each persona speaks for.