people were interviewed online in four days than researchers surveyed in the mall over two weeks.
Aside from a sense that online techniques would replace phone studies for many applications, there was a perception at the L.A. meeting that the Web would eventually improve and expand the research business in the same way the advent of telephone interviewing did during the 1960s and '70s.
"The most wonderful thing in this medium is that experimental [research] designs are going to become the standard not the exception," said Gordon Black, chairman and CEO of Harris Black, commenting on the ability of Web research to test multiple ways of finding out the answers to the same question - a practice that is prohibitively expensive in offline research. He added that online studies also allow the display of pictures that could eventually result in applications like multimedia interviewing and virtual-mall shopping tests.
The major market-research firms may have had no choice but to embrace the Web. For the past several years, some marketers have bypassed the firms, conducting online polls on their own. Meanwhile, smaller, Web-savvy research firms such as Greenfield Online, Digital Marketing Services and Milward Brown Interactive have stepped in to fill the gap left by major companies.
With consumer-packaged-goods researchers embracing Web-based techniques, the category is expected to boom. Digital Marketing Services' Gonier figured the online research business today to be only 1 percent of the $4 billion-dollar research industry. "I estimate that number will be 10 percent by 2001 and 20 percent by 2005," he said.
