Creating an Exciting Market Research Tech Company with Andrew Reid, Founder & CEO of Rival Technologies

[00:00:00] MRII Announcer: Welcome to MRII’s Insights and Innovators podcast, where we talk to top market research professionals to get their inside stories about innovative and enduring best practices. Today’s episode is sponsored by Sports Leisure Research Group. Sports Leisure Research Group provides leading sports, travel, and media brands with actionable, customized, marketing research driven insights.

[00:00:25] MRII Announcer: Now, here’s your host for today’s episode.

[00:00:28] Katie Gross: Welcome to today’s episode. entrepreneurial and inspirational families in market research. I’m Katie Gross, president of SUSY, and today I’m delighted to be joined by Andrew Reid, founder and CEO of Rival Technologies, and co founder and co CEO of The Rival Group.

[00:00:44] Katie Gross: What makes Andrew’s story particularly special is his family legacy in the industry. Andrew’s father, Angus Reid, is a well known name, and now Andrew runs a business with his sister. So Andrew, thank you for being here.

[00:00:55] Andrew Reid: Thanks so much for having me, Katie. Great to be here.

[00:00:57] Katie Gross: Awesome. Well, let’s get us started.

[00:00:59] Katie Gross: Although [00:01:00] you have market research quite literally in your blood, you actually came to the industry in a non traditional entrance. So tell us about that.

[00:01:06] Andrew Reid: Yeah, for sure. Uh, so instead of taking a, you know, more traditional approach post high school, I actually went to film school and at film school, I got immersed.

[00:01:16] Andrew Reid: This was back in the mid nineties. And so I got immersed in. In video editing and sound engineering and animation 2d and 3d and programming and a bunch of different, uh, technologies, some that were very much specifically around film and some just around new media. And that got me really fired up about, uh, the technology’s opportunity to really help tell stories and, and, and drive change.

[00:01:38] Andrew Reid: I was also very lucky that while I was there, you know, um, Microsoft Internet Explorer 1. 0 came out, uh, Macromedia bought a company called Future Splash, which would launch a technology called Flash, which for a period of time made a big impact on the industry. And so I did that and then went into, uh, advertising and spent some time in digital advertising.

[00:01:59] Andrew Reid: And again, [00:02:00] that really was also, uh, very innovative and really helped me I think learner of some fundamental things that I was able to bring to the market research world when, when I got into it.

[00:02:11] Katie Gross: Yeah, that kind of makes sense. So though a non traditional entrance, it does tie pretty nicely in.

[00:02:15] Andrew Reid: Yeah. I eventually had to take, uh, some night school accounting classes to learn how to read my books when I started my company.

[00:02:21] Andrew Reid: Cause I didn’t know, you know, what a ledger was and some other things that took a little while to figure out. Um, but, uh, yeah, it was, uh, it was definitely, you know, if I could do it all over again, I’d do it exactly the same. Cause it would end up being, um, uh, something that really fits. Uh, my style of learning and, uh, and, and an incredible experience.

[00:02:39] Katie Gross: I love that. I love that. And now, of course, you run Rival Technologies with your sister, Jennifer Reed. Um, and you worked with her at Vision Critical before. But before we get into kind of that story, as you know, Susie’s name comes from the famous fish song, Susie Greenberg. Where did the Rival name come from?

[00:02:56] Andrew Reid: Yeah, exactly. So, um, I’ll first [00:03:00] tell the story about Rival and then, and then, uh, get into the mechanics of the business a bit. But so it’s hard coming up with a name today. And there’s a lot of names that are taken, a lot of really great names. And I remember having this big, long list and I was doing what everyone does.

[00:03:12] Andrew Reid: You get the thesaurus out, you’re trying to figure out things that relate to market research. I was driving in my car and heard a DJ called rival consoles. And I thought that whole idea of, you know, DJs have two different consoles and sometimes you’ll have a music festival. You have a bunch of DJs that are almost kind of up against each other.

[00:03:29] Andrew Reid: And, uh, and I liked the music. And then the next day I ended up going, um, skiing with a bunch of friends. And it was one of those days where we just kept going faster and faster. And we were all saying like, if someone falls, they’re going to. Go to the hospital. This is pretty scary. We get down to the bottom of the hill and we were jumping up and down and giving each other high fives.

[00:03:46] Andrew Reid: And I had that realization that wow, this rivalry within our friends really brought out this extra gear that we didn’t have. And that really set me up to think, you know, actually, then two days later, I was at the gym working out beside some person I didn’t know. And we both got really [00:04:00] competitive. I didn’t even know what this person was.

[00:04:01] Andrew Reid: And we’re at the end, we high five each other. And we said, like, I don’t know you, but you brought out it. This rivalry within each other, and we were able to do more and produce more. And so that got me excited and thinking about that. Everyone has. A rivalry within themselves, within the people they care the most about, um, and then within their competitive set.

[00:04:19] Andrew Reid: And then I think about the clients and the brands we power and how important rivalry is to them. And so that really is what, uh, what, what came behind it. So this it’s, it’s a lot you can take from that word because it’s a pretty big word. Uh, but I like that it’s simple and, uh, and I do think it really does relate to our industry in a, in a pretty interesting way.

[00:04:39] Andrew Reid: Yeah. So my question would be, what would you have thought Rival would have maybe stood for when you heard the name?

[00:04:44] Katie Gross: Sibling rivalry. Oh,

[00:04:47] Andrew Reid: interesting, interesting.

[00:04:49] Katie Gross: Which definitely, first of all, I think having a personality, um, linked to your kind of brand is really important. Um, and we’ve all come from companies where we’ve called it [00:05:00] the market research something.

[00:05:01] Katie Gross: Um, you know, my CEO always jokes that if we called ourselves SurveyZenith, we would not have been the company we are today.

[00:05:07] Andrew Reid: Yeah, exactly, exactly. You gotta have some personality, you gotta bring that personality. Yeah. Yeah, and so. I mean, this time around, I started Rival, uh, in 2016, um, the day that I had my last day at Vision Critical, Alita.

[00:05:22] Andrew Reid: I actually left and started, uh, a company called VC Labs, which turned into Rival. And so, um, what’s Happened a lot with our family has been, I guess, both the times and the two companies that, that I’ve started, I’ve gotten into a point where my father and my sister look at me and go, Oh, I think you maybe you’re onto something that’s kind of interesting here.

[00:05:43] Andrew Reid: Um, someone was asking me some questions about the, having a family business. And I, my commentary was that I think, uh, No one would have nominated me necessarily to go out and start a company, but that’s, you know, when you’re an entrepreneur, you got so passionate about something, you go out and, you know, try and try [00:06:00] and get over that first hump of, do I have something that maybe has, like,

[00:06:04] Katie Gross: Yeah, for sure.

[00:06:06] Katie Gross: And so we’ve all watched Succession, and I’m sure that family dynamics are super interesting, um, when it comes into business. So how have you kind of navigated working, you know, with your sister, what you’ve learned from your father and kind of key lessons, and what kind of advantages, but also challenges does that come with?

[00:06:23] Andrew Reid: Yeah, lots there. Okay. Well, so I’m not, I’m not Kendall and my sister’s not ship. So we’ll start there. Um, and, uh, people, people have, I’ve, I’ve had it brought up a few times to us and, uh, and I always kind of laugh. So, uh, it’s, it is, it is, it is, uh, there is a lot of family business that are out there. And so for us, the dynamic works fairly well in that, um, Angus now is, uh, is 76.

[00:06:50] Andrew Reid: And so, uh, you know, when I started vision critical, uh, I was 23 and he was, you know, much younger than that. I’m 48 now. Uh, [00:07:00] and so having getting to a point where the minute that we realized that we sort of had something or that I, you know, built the first community that we had, um, and we had been doing a lot of interesting work in virtual reality.

[00:07:13] Andrew Reid: Uh, it was my sister that actually first met with me and said, you know, I do think you really are on to some really interesting things, um, that are, that are pretty exciting. And, uh, and then my father started coming around and saying, you know, I feel like this is like, some of this stuff is really the future of, of research.

[00:07:29] Andrew Reid: And so, and we had, we had, there’s sort of three parts of the first company, Vision Critical. There was a part that was doing virtual reality. So we were. Um, helping doing desegregate discrete choice modeling, but implementing it through these virtual stores, there was a side that was about visualizing the future of like how surveys work.

[00:07:48] Andrew Reid: And then there was the community side. And so, um, so yeah, it was, it was very, very, you know, at that point, I was at a point in my career where. I’d never been an entrepreneur [00:08:00] before. I’d never run a business before. So the minute we got to saying it was interesting, I was very happy to sort of move out of whatever seat I was in and fill that with someone that I trusted.

[00:08:09] Andrew Reid: So being able to have my sister come in who at the time had been running the IPSOS ISA panel and had been, uh, had experience in growing panels. And so this idea of like someone who understands recruitment. Who understands a bunch of pieces of round panels was really interesting. And Angus, who’s just, uh, a hard driving CEO entrepreneur himself, uh, was, um, was, was very, uh, you know, made it fairly easy for people to sort of fall into positions that made the most sense.

[00:08:38] Andrew Reid: And then, you know, I, and so with that, I always tried to. At the last company play whatever role I could that I felt I could add the most value in and so moving around from everything from product to marketing to sales to innovation and other areas. So that the dynamic was, you know, I think, again, it was like we had, it’s [00:09:00] like, it was more about people that you trust that will come in and do the job versus a sibling or a father or a parent.

[00:09:09] Andrew Reid: And we never really, you know, we. I think now we probably have more family meetings and we spend more time talking about what we, you know, where we think about the business going and, and roles that everybody wants to play. And so that’s evolved from that first part to where we are today. And now we’re at a point where, uh, you know, Angus doesn’t want to have an operational role in what we’re doing, but he wants to help guide.

[00:09:31] Andrew Reid: And when he sees he’s very good at reading the tea leaves and thinking about the future. And, uh, and that means two things. That’s also, you know, when do you react if there’s trouble ahead and when do you really lean in and those indicators, um, don’t always present themselves in the most obvious way. So he plays a really big role in, uh, in helping that science.

[00:09:52] Andrew Reid: It’s that little push where you, you know, things are going well and someone needs to push you into that next gear. And sometimes it is, you know, I remember you In [00:10:00] 2008 when, uh, we had that economic meltdown that, you know, we preemptively let a whole bunch of people go. The day that news came out, we ended up hiring almost all of them back.

[00:10:10] Andrew Reid: And I remember that being a hard day. But in hindsight, looking back and saying, wow, the courage to like, the minute this news comes out, say, let’s just make sure that we’re ahead of everything and that we’re not playing catch up. And even though I think a lot of other companies would’ve said, let’s wait and see what happens.

[00:10:26] Andrew Reid: Um, so. So a lot of great lessons and, um, and yeah, a very interesting dynamic where, again, it’s not, it’s, it’s a bit accidental how it’s happened, but, uh, but very excited to get a chance to work along your family and, you know, we’re pretty good about not screaming at each other, at least on a regular basis.

[00:10:46] Katie Gross: Very good to hear. We’ll come on to kind of topics around the industry itself, but the final question kind of on that family dynamic, how do you balance work life or is it all MR chat over? Easter and holidays and Christmas, et cetera. Yeah,

[00:10:59] Andrew Reid: I live in [00:11:00] Canada. We just finished Thanksgiving. We had Thanksgiving weekend, so we were just all together.

[00:11:03] Andrew Reid: And, uh, yeah, I think it’s, I think it’s taken some time to evolve it. I think we’re pretty good about understanding. I think it’s more about, uh, my wife, my brother in law, and my mother that are, they call themselves the outlaws sometimes. They, uh, they, they, uh, You know, it may suffer a little bit if we’re constantly talking about work and we all have little kids that will not little kids.

[00:11:25] Andrew Reid: We have kids. And so, um, yeah, it’s, um, I’d say, I think we manage it quite well. I think we’re good at being able to say that when we’re together for some family events, we need to actually be able to try and put a pin in it. Um, at the same time, it’s, you know, it’s interesting. The same dining room that you’re celebrating at is often the same dining room you’re having incredibly difficult conversations at, at different times.

[00:11:46] Andrew Reid: So you got to put on different hats when you walk in the door.

[00:11:49] Katie Gross: Yeah. Super interesting. So let’s dive into the industry, uh, today. What kind of keeps you excited about working in insights?[00:12:00]

[00:12:00] Andrew Reid: Yeah, I mean, I just love where we’re at right now. I think it’s, this is a very exciting time. I remember when the big data thing started happening in research and having that hot for a hot minute, feeling like, are we all going to get replaced by big data? No, one’s going to have to ask questions cause you can, you can measure and monitor so much.

[00:12:16] Andrew Reid: And that wasn’t true at all. And I think that every

[00:12:18] Katie Gross: year that comes up, it

[00:12:20] Andrew Reid: does. And it’s, and so I think that, um, That we’re going to see the insights role really grow in popularity in a lot of ways. One thing I’m really excited about is, uh, this is maybe unpopular. It’s this idea of breaking the fourth wall of market research of using the insights that you have as a core element of targeting and personalization.

[00:12:42] Andrew Reid: And I think that brands have an opportunity. You know, if you learn something about me from a survey, then you send me an email two days later with an offer. If you can link those conversations. Then you can start to make me feel like I matter and you’re tracking who I am. I’m incredibly frustrated when I look in my email and it’s amazing how [00:13:00] it’s not like there’s, I don’t know if you find, I don’t see that there’s any brands that seem to get everyone has the same problem where they’re just sort of spraying the hose around.

[00:13:07] Andrew Reid: And I think that there’s this interplay of. Of attitudinal data of my prep, my stated preferences and my attitudes and opinions and how you leverage that and how you talk to me as a marketer and how you market to me. And I think that that we’re going to see much more entanglement of how we learn from people and sell to them and learn from them and sell to them and educate them and how we get together.

[00:13:30] Andrew Reid: So. For me, I feel like, um, feel like insights are here for a long time. Maybe Neuralink is going to, uh, change the insights game because you’re just going to be analyzing some feed that comes off the back of your neck. Um, that’s a scary thing. That doesn’t seem like that would sense that sounded like something out of Star Trek, but now it seems like something that’s probably six or seven years away.

[00:13:54] Andrew Reid: So, um. I don’t think like I said, I don’t think it’s going to go away. I think that the more [00:14:00] the world gets complicated, the more we do have to really be curious and lean in and talk to people and ask them and because things are happening so fast. It’s not like you can, you know, run a segmentation and then assume that You’re good for the next 10 years.

[00:14:13] Andrew Reid: You can’t build a persona and then put it on the shelf all these things you need to constantly be uh, rethinking and retooling and and and talking to people because um our Information coming at us is so significant that that everyone’s I think, um shifting their preferences on a frequent basis. So yeah, it’s a very, very exciting times and it’s great to see all these AI innovations, all these new companies coming up, you know, I feel like competition, the more people that are in our space and that I said are in my backyard, the better for the industry.

[00:14:46] Andrew Reid: Um, and it’s just going to make us all more competitive and deliver, I think better products and services to our customers.

[00:14:53] Katie Gross: Yeah, back to that name, Rival, for sure.

[00:14:56] Andrew Reid: What

[00:14:56] Katie Gross: do you think some of the challenges we’re going to be facing or are [00:15:00] facing right now, particularly on the kind of tech and panel side?

[00:15:03] Katie Gross: Obviously you mentioned your sister, Brandon Panels, for a long time. I came from the panel industry myself. What kind of challenges are you seeing right now?

[00:15:10] Andrew Reid: Yeah, there’s, I think there’s, the, the obvious one is this whole issue with fraud in our industry and in a world where, um, you know, where we have so many programmatic ways to be able to find someone and pay 72 cents to get them to answer five minutes worth of questions or three minutes worth of questions, of course you’re gonna have a lot of fraud and that, and that’s gonna get harder and harder to detect.

[00:15:32] Andrew Reid: So, yeah. Um, I, I, I’m it’s, it’s, it’s funny to see you when you look at, I spent a lot of time looking at marketing from other suppliers and there’s so many people that are even going back to like an old fashioned approach of how they think about recruitment and managing their panels because they feel like that approach is going to give them less fraud.

[00:15:50] Andrew Reid: So I think fraud is a huge, obviously a huge piece. I think that’s, um yeah. We’re going to see AI come in and take this bottom part of the [00:16:00] market where you’ve got almost the non researchers wanting to do research or that entry. And I think there’s going to be an issue with, you know, are you people going to get a bunch of false positives?

[00:16:10] Andrew Reid: Um, you know, there’s not a lot of checks and balances that are going on there. So, um, I think that’s going to be interesting to watch. Um, uh, and then, you know, I think the, um, Just the, the tooling that people have. Um, I think we’ve been operating in the same, this is sort of a mode. If you go and talk to a journeyman market researcher, who’s been a market researcher for the last 20 years.

[00:16:36] Andrew Reid: I think what’s interesting is how they get the job done. Hasn’t really evolved that much. The tools they’re using are slightly different. And so I think there’s some questions about just. How we approach thinking about a project and field and tab and all these different elements that I think we can start to re imagine in some really exciting ways.

[00:16:57] Katie Gross: Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

[00:16:59] Andrew Reid: And

[00:16:59] Katie Gross: I could talk [00:17:00] to you for hours, but it has been a real pleasure hearing the insights and kind of stories from running a family business to market research. But before we wrap, is there anything exciting coming up from Rival Technologies that you’d like our listeners to keep an eye out for?

[00:17:13] Andrew Reid: Well, I think like everyone, we’re, we’re, um, the whole AI space is very exciting and having done, I guess one thing I was going to say, even when we were talking about things to watch out for is this whole world of security and compliance. But, you know, we’re at a point where everyone is so concerned about the things happening and bad actors that there’s a lot of red tape around that.

[00:17:32] Andrew Reid: And maybe that’s a good thing because that’s going to create some guardrails around. Um, some of these, these new innovations that are coming out. So for us, um, yeah, we’ve got a bunch of, or sort of in tandem, we’ve been building a bunch of core functionality that’s, um, that’s, that I feel like our, our customers have been asking for, uh, different kinds of community health dashboards, uh, more advanced reporting, more automated reporting, and at the same time, we’re [00:18:00] rolling a lot of exciting things in AI.

[00:18:01] Andrew Reid: So, um, everything from. Um, we’ve got, um, a thing called thoughtfulness scores that we’re launching very soon. Um, that really helps to look at, uh, open end responses and look at how thoughtful that response is. If I ask you, you know, how was this meeting and you just say, good, well, I probably need to unpack that a little bit more, but if you gave me a really smart, uh, verbose response, I don’t need to ask you more questions.

[00:18:26] Andrew Reid: And so much more intelligent ways to think about things like AI based probing. Um, a lot of cool work with video, um, everything from being able to have dynamic show rules to being able to ask closed ended questions inside of videos. So it’s moving so fast that right now it’s less about how big your team is.

[00:18:43] Andrew Reid: And that’s what’s so exciting. What you’re specing, how you’re specing it, and how you’re going about building it, you know? Yeah. Just we’re building things now in two weeks that we used to have to build in six months. Um, and in some cases we’re building things over a weekend that used to take, you know, two months.

[00:18:58] Andrew Reid: So, uh, so [00:19:00] lots more to come, but those are a couple little sneak peeks.

[00:19:02] Katie Gross: That’s super exciting. Well, Andrew, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much.

[00:19:07] Andrew Reid: Thanks, Katie. It’s been fun. Take care.

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