A newly-conducted research has shown that only 5% of Media and Advertising professionals believe commercial research studies on digital advertising are of a good enough quality.

The research, which was conducted by Inskin Media and Research Now, was based on interviews with 220 industry professionals online. It found 57% of those interviewed felt the influence of the sales agenda of the company owning the research is the biggest obstacle to producing good quality research.

Nearly one in four (23%) generally disregard commercial research projects as nothing but marketing/sales tools while 19% consider them largely useless due to quality issues. While research agencies (scoring 4.0 out of 5) are regarded as producing the highest quality research, narrowly ahead of industry associations (3.9) and measurement/ad validation vendors (3.6), media sellers (3.1) rank last in terms of the perceived quality of research.

The research also found that 56% of the industry professionals interviewed most prefer to hear about the insights from research in face-to-face presentations, followed by infographics (45%), trade magazines / blog posts (37%) and webinars, which are the least favourite method (14%).

“The industry has been deluged by studies on digital advertising over the last decade, most of which is used as a Trojan horse to promote a sales agenda,” said Steve Doyle, Inskin Media’s chief commercial officer. “Unfortunately, most of it isn’t fit for purpose and it’s tended to tar everyone with the same brush. Paradoxically, it’s also created the problem of undermining genuine findings if the company doing the research has a commercial interest in proving them, so the results are mistakenly ignored when it comes to improving strategy and planning”

Inskin commissioned Research Now to understand advertising and media professionals’ attitudes to the quality of commercial research studies produced on online advertising between August and December 2017.