Lumen shortlisted for 2 MRS awards

Lumen Research has been shortlisted for two categories at this year’s MRS awards: the Jeremy Bullmore Prize for Creative Development Research and Best Innovation.

The creative development case study centres on our work for Tesco. Over the past four years, we have worked with the Tesco team to investigate the fundamental drivers of attention to advertising. We’ve used this deep understanding to gradually tweak and optimise both their creative and media buying. Each insight may be small, but the aggregation of marginal gains has had big results: Dave Brailsford would be proud.

The innovation award refers to our revolutionary new way of testing point of sale materials in context. The challenge is to find a way to present POS materials in context so that we can do eye tracking to understand if it is getting noticed. Simply inserting POS designs into static photos won’t cut it, and doing research in store once the POS is up is too late.

So, to answer the brief, we have combined two innovations for the price of one. Innovation 1: we use videos instead of static images. We video of a shopping trip shot from the perspective of the customer and then use Hollywood-style special effects from our friends at Mirriad to insert the different versions of POS materials into the film. It’s like magic. Innovation 2: we then use Lumen’s proprietary webcam eye tracking technology to conduct attention tests at scale using respondents’ own home computers. It’s quick and easy to do, at scale and across countries.

And it may not even be the most innovative thing that we have done this year. The thing that we are most proud of is our mobile eye tracking: perhaps we can enter that into the 2020 awards?

We’re up against some stiff competition in both categories. I am particularly interested in hearing what System 1 have been up to, and Ipsos seem to have a lot of finalists in the list, which must be a good sign. It’s taken an immense amount of creative thinking and hard work for us to get to get nominated twice – and I am sure that it’s been the same for all the other nominees.

It’s been a good year for Lumen in terms of recognition. We were voted one of the most innovative market research technologies in the world by GRIT, and our attention predictions were awarded for driving sales for British Gas at the Campaign Tech awards, and the POS pre-testing tool that we’ve been nominated for the MRS awards won in Brussels earlier in the year. Get your tickets to the gala event in Old Billingsgate on the Monday 2nd December to see is we can make it a full house.