April 2005 GMI Newsletter

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GMI Secures $13.2 Million in funding

Voyager Capital and FTV Capital Invest in GMI, Audino and Byunn join GMI Board

GMI has closed a $13.2 million venture capital funding deal co-led by Voyager Capital and FTV Capital. Tony Audino, managing director of Voyager Capital, and Eric Byunn, principal at FTVentures, will join GMI's board. "This investment is another significant milestone for GMI," said Rob Monster, chief executive officer of GMI.

"These resources will help us accelerate growth of our global online panel, and enable expanded development of our Net-MR software suite. We will continue to make proactive investments in our infrastructure, supporting our on-going high rate of growth and while continuing to attract industry-leading talent." - More...

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Dietmar Walter joins GMI from Gartner

GMI is delighted to welcome Dietmar Walter as Managing Director, Europe. Dietmar contributes significant experience in both the IT and market research industries. For the past four years, Dietmar has been a successful Global Account Manager for Gartner, the world leading IT research company. Dietmar has a track record of building relationships with senior executives of blue chip organizations and is responsible for impressive growth of Gartner's research and consulting services year after year.

Prior to Gartner, Dietmar served as Project Executive for Maritz Inc, a global marketing research firm specializing in integrated performance improvement and consumer market research services. While at Martitz, he implemented and managed two major market intelligence projects for IBM in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Italy.

Dietmar has lived and worked in Italy, Germany and England and is fluent in German, Italian and English. He holds an Economics degree from the University of Trento, Italy and an Executive MBA, awarded with distinction, from Oxford Brookes University. He also conducted original research at the University of Augsburg, Germany, about the restructuring and privatization of Eastern German companies after German reunification.

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New Weekly Omnibus launched

Due to the high demand for our monthly Omnibus, we are now offering the GMI 20 Omnibus to our clients every week. Representative samples of 1,000 are collected from 20 countries each Monday. Real-time results, with completes, are available in as little as 24 hours. Data is deliverable through GMI client portals or many other standard formats. It's a fast, accurate way to get immediate feedback about time-critical events and is ideally suited for:

• Crisis management tracking
• Price elasticity testing (Get immediate feedback about price changes, for example.)
• Advertising recall tests (Track the launch of new campaigns.)
• Global or country-specific brand or service awareness
• Consumer opinions (Track time-critical topics.)

NEW interactive Panel Mangement software demo is now available online
Thinking about launching a proprietary panel? Take our powerful new Panel Management Software for a spin. Our new interactive, animated demo walks you through the Net-MR software tools you'll need to build, incentivize, and maintain our own panel, for the most effective results.

Click here to see the demo now.

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What's in an ad? Answers!

GMI is rolling out a new ad campaign that illustrates how GMI solves some of the research issues you face today. Look for us in Marketing News, Quirks, Research, and Research World.

Our ads include:

Pure Sample
Do you need to buy sample for online surveys but you're wary of the quality? According to our research, you're not alone. Find out how GMI Global Panels achieve such high integrity, and why our sample – from 200 countries – can improve your research results.

Serving up the world on one platform
Looking for a single vendor solution for software, panels and services? GMI serves up the world on one platform, with one solution across the entire research work process from proposal to invoice.

Build a worldwide web of Market Intelligence
What if you could integrate all your customer, competitive, and market data, from all sources on one global platform. That's what the Net-MR platform is all about: enabling true global market intelligence.

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Who's new at GMI

Dalila Zerouki named Associate Sales Director, London.
Dalila will contribute nearly a decade of international marketing and sales experience. For the past five years, she has been in charge of new business development and account management in the financial sector for Casewise Systems, Ltd and Artemis International. She holds an MBA from the Pantheon Sorbonne, Paris and a brown belt in Judo.

Erik Samdahl joins the GMI marketing team as Web Designer.
With extensive programming, HTML and SQL experience, and a deep understanding of online marketing, Erik holds a business degree from Western Washington. In 1998, he created Movie-Source.com, a site focusing on current, wide-release films, which he has profitably managed ever since.

Kirsten Waham is GMI's new Inside Sales Representative.
For the last two years, she has served as Senior Sales Executive for BizXchange, in Seattle. She has also held numerous sales positions for Nordstrom.

Cassandra Voss, Marketing Assistant.
Cassandra brings her excellent sales and communication skills to GMI. Previously she managed a staff of 12 and assisted with promotion, advertising, and events for Tubs Seattle. She was also a Sales Associate for the Space Needle Corporation, and a Customer Service Representative for Dakotah Direct, a telemarketing firm.

Robert Crandall, Project Manager
Mr. Crandall is soon to graduate from the University of Puget Sound with a Bachelor of Arts in Communications. His previous job was held as an Intern for the City of Tacoma where he helped them with centralizing communication, streamlining processes and designing/publishing materials for both the city's website and other documents. Mr. Crandall has also presented two independent research papers at the Northwest Communication Association Conference in Idaho (2004).

Anna Cooper, Project Manager
After graduating from Bradford University, England with a BA in Interdisciplinary Human Studies, Ms. Cooper worked for Bradford & Bingley Building Society dealing with customer queries and complaints regarding Tessa & ISA Financial products for 1 year. She then moved to The Environment Agency, where she was technical support for internal staff using Video Conferencing. The large part of the job was involved in help desk support but she also became largely involved in promoting the Video Conference concept within the company.

Stefanie Mackenzie, Project Manager
Ms Mackenzie is fluent in German and English and prior to joining GMI, she spent 1.5 years working as a Global Project Manager for a World One Research. She took on various roles and responsibilities ranging from project management, account management and running the in-house translation agency to purchasing sample and administrating the incentives.

Tomoe Kita, Project Manager
Ms. Kita joins us from Reuters Australia. At Reuters, she dealt with the clients based in Japan every day for solving the client's problems or queries by phone and email. In addition, she was their Transaction product champion for 3 years and was their internal trainer for this product. She was also involved with their CRM project and helped the upgrade of CRM.

Myung (Ryan) Hong
Mr. Hong is a graduate of the Graduate University of Technology Sydney, where he received his Bachelor of Business and majored in International Business. After graduation, he went back to Korea to work for a small software company called Digital Fusion where his position was in International Marketing. He was then relocated to their San Jose office.

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Partner profile

Put TV Ads to the Test…Online with AskingMedia™

GMI's Net-MR survey tool licensed to integrate with award-winning online ad testing technology What do you get when you marry the consistency of well-crafted text surveys with many of the visual and interpersonal advantages of focus groups? Something completely new in online data collection – the ability to test a TV ad by delivering it to respondents' computers so they can react in real time, answer questions and follow a rational skip pattern. Toronto-based Delvinia Interactive's award-winning survey technology makes this possible. AskingMedia™, an advanced ad testing platform, was created by Delvinia to enable market researchers to collect targeted, geographically dispersed research sample in as little as 24 hours and test anything consumers will see or hear – TV commercials, DRTV, infomercials, movie trailers, virtual 3-D images of products under development, or radio jingles.

To provide a secure online ad testing solution, Delvinia selected Net-MR to integrate their AskingMedia™ platform with GMI's robust online survey technology. The integration allows AskingMedia™ to be completely modular, with the ability to be customized to support complex ad testing methodologies and offers functionality for panel management, project management, data collection, analysis, reporting as well as multi-lingual programming.

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Best practices

Respondents react well to broadband-based research approach
The technology for online, broadband ad testing is a reality. It marries the consistency of well-crafted telephone or internet scripts with the visual and interpersonal advantages of focus groups. This case history, reprinted with permission from the January issue of Quirks, compares traditional and new broadband testing techniques. In a controlled, broadband research experiment funded by a Canadian applied research grant, researchers compared traditional testing methodology to new online techniques using Nissan and Expedia.com television commercials. The two compared very favorably and the hard costs for one traditional focus group is about the same as a national online study... More...

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