by Irene Kowalenko

Last week, I had the chance to attend ESOMAR’s Shopping Experience Seminar in beautiful and sunny Amsterdam to exchange with other passionate Insights professionals on the changes the retail sector is undergoing and how we can better address the challenges manufacturers, retailers, and shoppers are facing.

By Julie Patra, ESOMAR 

In an era where everything is evolving so fast and shoppers are faced with an abundance of choices, how can brands stay ahead of the game and compete when everything is moving so fast? Some say big data is the holy grail. But big data comes with complexity. How can unstructured data from various sources be analysed and interpreted? What are the challenges faced by retailers and clients?  These issues were discussed during the ESOMAR Shopping Experience seminar 6 June in Amsterdam.

By Kim Smouter

Why a scan, either conducted by ESOMAR or someone else is key to getting GDPR right

We are now officially living in a GDPR world, after years of negotiations and a two-year ‘transition’ period, the EU GDPR (or General Data Protection Regulation if you’d rather call it by its full name) entered into force in May. Its arrival was heralded with a flurry of emails of all shapes and sizes reaching the inbox of people from the four corners of the world. Thanks to that flurry of emails, if you didn’t know about GDPR before May, your inbox certainly told you about it in the meantime! But, if one looks carefully at all the emails, one can also see patent misunderstandings of the legal requirements to secure consent which has to be informed, unambiguous, freely given, and affirmed by a clear action. The wide variety of emails with an equal diversity of calls to actions (opt-in, opt-out, only opt-in if you want something changed…), some might say companies missed the plot or at least followed less than informed advice! So, whilst the reality might be that there is more awareness than ever before about the EU GDPR’s existence, to say that we all understand what exactly it entails is a whole other enchilada, or cookie, or whatever national dish is best placed at the end of this sentence.

By Sean Dunn (originally published on Nepa)

On April 17 the UK House of Lords Committee on Political Polling and Digital Media released a report on polling in the United Kingdom.  The Committee took action in response to what it perceived as polling errors in two UK general elections and in the Brexit referendum. 

While you can read the full report here, we asked Adam Philllps, who has chaired the ESOMAR Professional Standards and the Legal and Government Affairs Committees, to give us his assessment of what the report means.