13mins

 STARRING 

• Praveen Gupta, Director and co-founder, Cross-Tab

On a recent trip to India we were keen to learn a bit more about the state of the research industry there and were pleased when Praveen Gupta invited us over to Cross-Tab’s Bangalore office for a chat.

Must admit that not having been to India for a long, long time, we didn’t know what to expect in terms of the state of development there. You hear about a sub-continent that is home to both extreme poverty and some of the most technologically advanced organisations in the world as a result of churning out probably more science graduates than anywhere else on earth.

Bangalore is one of three cities, alongside fellow southern cities Hyderabad and Chennai, vying for the super high tech crown. There’s an incredible buzz as you travel down surprisingly modern streets from the airport. We later learn that the local mayor did this strategically to give the impression that all of Bangalore was like that whereas this is only the case for certain ‘key routes’.

We got to know about Cross-Tab when we wrote about them hiring a global CEO from Microsoft (Kumar Mehta, a former top executive there). Cross-Tab’s claim to fame is both as a pioneer in MR outsourcing and, apparently, “the only full service online research agency in India”.

In this short chat with Praveen, a co-founder and modern-day Indian entrepreneur, we hear about…

• MR outsourcing (and how this accidentally became one of their strengths)
• Online research in India
• The middle class
• The super rich
• Indian entrepreneurism
• The market for MR
• Future challenges
• Blog mining

The full chat with Praveen was quite a bit longer and highly informative and stimulating. We’d like to thank him again for the warm hospitality.

10mins | Produced @ AQR Trends ‘07 | More podcasts in this series

 STARRING 

• William Higham, Next Big Thing
• Alison Fydler, Joint MD and co-founder, Firefish

Of all the trends discussed during the AQR Trends ‘07 conference, the one William talks about here could be one of the most significant, in our humble opinion. He suggests that age-based targeting is becoming significantly less relevant across many categories. For example, grey folks exhibit teen-like behaviour (eg. still into hedonism and rock ‘n roll) and vice versa (teens exhibiting social responsibility and an interest in politics).

Listen to William as he chats with Alison from the award-winning Firefish, about the wider implications of William’s theories. Interesting tidbit about Alison and William: we randomly paired them up for this chat but little did we know that the two already knew each other from years ago as they were growing up!

BTW, references to ‘Oliver’ are to Oliver James who spoke before this chat took place, and he spoke about his new book, ‘Affluenza’.

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 EXCLUSIVE  Mark Jones of Lastminute.com talks about evolving their B2B offering to allow partner brands to take advantage of their infrastructure and content relationships. Flemming Ostergaard talks about how it took LEGO’s worsening financial performance to wake them up to the importance of directly connecting with kids through ethnography. And Michael Spang talks about the challenges involved in regionalising the Kodak global corporate website to make it more relevant and useful

 STARRING 

• Mark Jones, MD, Lastminute.com
• Flemming Ostergaard, Director Global Innovation & Marketing, LEGO
• Michael Spang, Eastman Kodak

Recorded live at the Euro MR Event 2006

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