Ever Wondered How Frost & Sullivan Write Such Crappy Reports?
Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief
Ever wondered how those jokers at Frost & Sullivan managed to write such inaccurate reports on the digital signage and digital out of home sectors?
It’s about to be writ again / As I ask you to focus on / Sailors fighting in the dance hall / Oh man! Look at those cavemen go / It’s the freakiest show…
It’s actually quite simple…
Name: Pablo Barreneche
Email: pablo.barreneche@frost.com
Interest: I have a general question
Message:I hope this e-mail finds you very well. Let me introduce myself. I am part of the ICT division for Frost & Sullivan (www.frost.com), a global research and consulting firm. Our main activity is the continuous monitoring and analysing of key trends across a wide range of industries, including ICT at a global level.
As a part of our ongoing research into the Digital Signage market, we are working on extending our 2011 market study, with the aim of getting a deeper understanding of market and industry dynamics in the key verticals of retail industry and hospitality.
In this context, we are interviewing a wide range of players throughout the Digital Signage ecosystem, including software vendors, hardware providers, network operators, media agencies, content creators and end-users.
I would very much like to have a brief discussion with you or any in-house expert. It would take approximately 30-40 minutes. We would obviously treat the discussion as confidential.
As a matter of gratitude for your participation, we will be happily to share with you the summary of our key findings.
If you accept, please could you indicate a time and date that are convenient for you? My colleagues and I will do our utmost to adjust to your certainly busy schedules. Your participation would be much appreciated.
King Regards,
Pablo Barreneche
…as all it involves really is bulk emails to various corporate websites pleading for 30-40 minutes of a vendors time! Half a dozen digital signage hardware and software vendors sent us this email above this week and last.
And lest anyone thinks we are being a little harsh let’s add just two things: –
- We know of several vendors who years ago were fed up with this ‘approach’ and who used to intentionally feed in bad data just to see how much unfiltered nonsense made it straight through (and the answer ‘almost all of it!!)
- These emails are generally to info@ and sales@ email addresses or addressed via web site feedback form. Mr Frosty doesn’t even appear to have a good database of who’s who in the industry
It’s a sad way to try and collect market intelligence and do (so-called) analysis but it’s sadder for all those who actually go out, buy this report and then believe what it says!
February 28th, 2012 at 16:09 @715
Absolute bollox, their market research is worse than useless. Same tactics to gather the information globally. Must be fun spoon feeding them useless numbers and data. If the paper was softer it would qualify as an ideal toilet paper.
February 28th, 2012 at 16:15 @719
I sent Pablo back a quote for four hours of consulting time. I’m sure I will see a PO shortly ;-]
February 28th, 2012 at 19:07 @838
Pablo Picasso? Surreal art? Must be a link there to Frosty and Sully!
February 29th, 2012 at 08:45 @406
Give them a break. They have experts fresh out of college you know
February 29th, 2012 at 09:59 @458
wow, how incredibly mean spirited and inappropriate. linking this to the poor guy’s linkedin profile?! wow, very vindictive. and besides, his email and the request were completely innocuous. perhaps more of your time should be spent improving your own business before trying to drag someone down and publicly embarrass him on a useless forum like this.
February 29th, 2012 at 10:47 @491
“a useless forum like this” meaning DailyDOOH actually has the pulse of the industry and knows who to talk to (and who not too talk to). If Mr Frosty and Ms Sully want to engage the likes of Pablo Barreneche who obviously knows nothing of the digital signage or DOOH industry to email blast corporate web sites in the hope of getting back useful market data it says a lot about the value of such F&S reports.
As Dave Haynes (another industry commentator of note) says above – consultants are available to help pull in and direct research efforts. All we see from F&S is the cheap option.
February 29th, 2012 at 13:28 @602
Not nice of Pablo to take his LinkedIn profile off of the public link 🙁
http://www.linkedin.com/in/pablobarreneche now reads…
An exact match for pablobarreneche could not be found.
LinkedIn users have access to advanced people search functionality, including search by last name only, find similar names, as well as search by company, industry and other keywords.
February 29th, 2012 at 13:46 @615
Harsh but painfully true.
Now dare anyone comment on the more oft quoted reports in our industry? How many of us are guilty of leveraging such dubious 3rd party market research to help convince customers and investors of DOOH’s potential? Are we not in a multi-billion dollar market? Does DOOH revenue include cinema advertising to get to such lofty greenbacks? Are we not the second fastest growing media market after the web? Or would that be mobile? At next week’s DSE will we be eating up reports about that DOOH that now include mobile and social media data – because our audiences after all, mobile and some are social.
The future of DOOH remains ever so seductive, but ever so illusive – and I can’t help thinking that part of that illusiveness is due to the fools gold rush that such marketing reports help to foster.
February 29th, 2012 at 16:47 @741
From Wikipedia’s definition of “crowdsourcing” – It is important to note that while there are many benefits of crowdsourcing, is not without criticism. Indeed, both within industry and academia, people have questioned the ethical validity of providing no compensation or small amounts of compensation to members of the crowd that contribute to tasks. In addition, others have suggested that the crowd is not equally suited to accomplish all types of tasks.
Sounds like most here are in agreement…