Lumen wins twice at the MRS awards

Lumen won two gongs at the Market Research Society awards on Monday night: the Jeremy Bullmore Award for Creative Development Research, and the Research Live Award for Best Innovation. We were one of only a handful of agencies to win twice, and the only agency to win everything that we were entered for. It’s an astonishing achievement.

Both our papers were written in collaboration with Tesco. The creative development research paper detailed four years of continuous work optimising Tesco’s print advertising, which has led to simpler, more attention-grabbing ads, that drive significant media efficiencies.

The innovation award detailed the new POS pre-testing tool that we have developed for Tesco. It combines two innovations in one. Firstly, it uses the video editing skills of our friends at Mirriad to insert POS materials into a live film of a shopper journey. Secondly, it uses Lumen’s webcam eye tracking to test how attention-grabbing the POS is, at speed and scale.

And I don’t even think that this is the most innovative thing that we have done in 2019. We’re probably most proud of the work we have done to make eye tracking on mobile phones a reality. But that’s something that we could enter into next year’s awards.

Making this happen is a team affair – the full team of developers, analysts and consultants at Lumen – but also our sophisticated and challenging clients, such as the guys at Tesco. Without their interesting questions and high standards, we wouldn’t be where we are today, or where we want to be tomorrow.