Why Survey Data Still Powers the World’s Biggest Decisions with Michael Ramlet of Morning Consult

Let's talk about the people that buy your information, the people that need this real-time insight.

Who are some of, kind of, your target audiences when you think about Morning-- as-- who, uh, basically purchase Morning Consult?

Yeah, so it's obviously gone a long ways from being $30,000 in angel capital in a room in Eastern Market today, well over hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

We work with about a quarter of the Global 2000 companies.

Nice.

So incredible diversity across sectors.

I think what makes us unique in the industry is we're also incredibly diverse across functions, so it's not just the insights buyer, it's also we're marketing or comms, it's also government affairs, public affairs, the strategy function, the finance function.

In large part 'cause I think we took a pretty broad view to what is survey research.

You know, a lot of folks think about it in the context of, like, political polling, or they might think about it in the context of, like, corporate market research.

The majority of economic data that's used is actually survey based, and that was also an area where I think we were keenly interested in things like consumer confidence, consumer spending, labor force participation.

And so what it meant was that could serve a more diverse corporate base.

But then our fastest growing client base right now actually is in professional services and financial services, so we work with most of the large global management consulting firms, communications firms, advertising firms, and then the majority of the world's central banks rely on the data.

We work with the World Bank, the IMF.

It is astounding to us the degree to which you're expecting policymakers like the Fed to make decisions, and for years, they were relying on the same technology that was used in the '40s.

And so for us, like, the Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index is a good example.

We do, instead of 600 interviews, 600 interviews once a month with a three-week reporting lag, we do over 6,000 a day on those questions in the United States.

And then Michigan's only in the US.

We do a daily 24,000 interviews then in 42 international markets.

So it's great because every day when we wake up, we know we're gonna do at least 30,000 interviews.

This year we'll do about 20 million total interviews.

But I think that dynamic, it makes it really interesting and exciting to wake up every day, 'cause you just don't know what kind of problem you're gonna work on.

Yeah.

And when you first started and evangelized this need, obviously the need was there, and you got clients to buy into it.

But did you find resistance in terms of people buying into the concept?

I, I don't think I'm gonna be on the Christmas card list for Kantar, Ipsos, or anybody anytime soon in the industry.