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Eight Defendants Indicted in International Conspiracy to Bill $10 Million for Fraudulent Market Survey Data...
That's the title of the April 15, 2025 press release from the US Department of Justice. Faked data. Lots of faked data from market research companies Op4G and Slice. The leaders of these companies "recruited people they called “ants”, who pretended to be legitimate survey takers but instead were paid a nominal fee for completing surveys that produced fraudulent market research data" according to the DOJ.
There are a host of problems in market research and faked data is only one of them. Most legitimate firms assess data quality before analyzing it. For example, if several questions in a row are answered 1,1,1,1,... this suggests people are not seriously answering questions. Or, they just are rating a bunch of questions with a low value. Or, they have been asked an impossible-to-answer question, for example, "How much do you like this ad?" Geez, compared to what?
Years ago I tried collecting data from Amazon's Mechanical Turk panel. The data quality was terrible as survey takers were paid pennies per question and mostly came from India and nearby developing countries in Asia. But, this leads to a larger issue--why would anyone ever trust survey data?
We founded Immersion to solve the three core problems with survey data. The first is the lack of an objective anchor when collecting ordinal data. Your seven might be my four. Instead, Immersion measures what the brain values. The change in Immersion from an individual’s neurophysiologic baseline is comparable across individuals. The neuroelectrical activity that Immersion measures comes from the evolutionarily oldest parts of the brain and is therefore strongly conserved across individuals so that the data are not only comparable but are meaningful. Moreover, Immersion data is measured every second and the Immersion platform shows users exactly how to improve marketing and customer experiences second-by-second.
The second problem Immersion solves is getting data from real people the way they really experience events, including all the typical distractions of real life that are excluded from sterile neuroscience laboratory studies. Guess what--life is full of distractions and to obtain actionable data, one needs to measure brain activity the way people really live. By collecting data from Immersion's free SIX app, which hundreds of thousands of people use every day to measure and improve emotional fitness, Immersion built the world's largest neuroscience panel. The neurologic value of events and content are immediately obtained from anyone using the SIX app. SIX even generates a QR code so nonusers can immediately download the app and share their brain activity. It is that fast and easy to know the true value of an experience.
The final problem Immersion solves is prediction. Immersion was developed with funding from the US Department of Defense and other government agencies to do a single thing: accurately predict behavior. Immersion convolves neural signals in a complex way to maximize predictive accuracy. This is something surveys cannot do and no other neuroscience modality was designed to do.
Immersion is the Value Measurement company. What is valued is what is acted on. This is why Immersion predicts market behaviors with 85-99% accuracy--consistently, across a large variety of experiences. Do a survey to see what people say. But, when you want to create extraordinary experiences that move markets, you need Immersion.