Blog/Company

2024 is wrapping up, and what a year it’s been!

We launched Focaldata AI, revolutionising consumer research for brands like Estée Lauder and Virgin Media O2. Our work earned recognition with an MRS award nomination and a spot in the 2024 Upscale cohort. We also delivered impactful political and social research, from rapid UK election insights to a landmark study of the UK's ethnic minority population with King’s College London. On the team front, we nearly doubled in size, welcoming insight veterans like Marco Pasqualina and Nick Graham. Exciting roles are still open – come join us!

The year in numbers

Ushering in a new era of AI-driven insights

Major brands are pushing to embed AI into their businesses – nowhere more so than in market research. This year, Focaldata took a bold step forward with the launch of Focaldata AI, our end-to-end platform for consumer insight research. For insights professionals, the struggle is real: endless requests, clashing priorities, and weeks of email ping-pong before the research even begins. Focaldata AI changes all that.

Users come to our platform with just a seed of an idea, and our expert AI co-worker helps transform that idea into a high-quality brief and discussion guide, runs AI-moderated interviews at massive scale, and delivers actionable insights – all within hours, not days. We’ve partnered with leading brands like Estée Lauder, Virgin Media O2, Westwood One and Edgewell to transform their research processes, delivering high-quality insights faster than ever.

On another note, the Market Research Society invited me to contribute to their third report on generative AI. In my piece, I examined the evolution of the field – from basic automation to end-to-end, AI-driven research solutions – and shared my thoughts on what’s coming next.

It’s great to be recognised for our hard work! This quarter, we were shortlisted for the MRS award ‘Innovation of the Year’ for Focaldata AI after a ‘dragon’s den’-style pitch and joined the 2024 Upscale cohort, supporting ambitious UK scale-ups.

It’s an exciting time, and we can’t wait to see what lies ahead!

‍Punching above our weight with groundbreaking political research

2024 was a year of seismic political moments. Our UK election analysis – published less than 36 hours after the polls closed – has become the go-to bibliography of that July evening. If you haven’t read it yet, check it out here.

In October, we released our once-in-a-decade study on the UK’s ethnic minority population, conducted in collaboration with King’s College London. Despite the challenges often associated with this type of research, months of fieldwork on our platform resulted in a robust dataset of 4,000 individuals – work we’re incredibly proud of. John-Burn Murdoch from the Financial Times described it as “groundbreaking.”

We’re proud to have partnered with amazing clients doing impactful work in social and political research. This year, we supported the Social Market Foundation on innovative studies of young people’s attitudes towards work, worked with Centre for Cities on hybrid working and commuting patterns, and collaborated with Onward on their in-depth 140-page analysis of the UK General Election.

If we missed the chance to work together this year, let’s fix that in the New Year –book some time with our team here.

Welcoming new talent to the team

This year, we’ve nearly doubled our team, bringing on talented researchers, engineers, advisors, designers, and operations specialists to support our growth.

Marco Pasqualina joins as Managing Director, bringing leadership experience as CRO at Mediaprobe and Feedback Loop and SVP of Sales at Toluna. Natasha Nussbaum is our new Head of Product, previously leading AI product development at Apple, Credit Kudos, and ChAI. Lloyd Allen will join as VP of Engineering in 2024. Leading our Consumer Research team is Vincent Blaney, with over 20 years of experience working with global brands like Unilever, Coca-Cola, and Disney.

We’re also excited to welcome Nick Graham to the Focaldata family as an adviser! As an insights industry veteran, Nick brings a wealth of experience to our team. Recently named one of the Insights 250 by ESOMAR, he began his career in advertising and brand strategy, then spent nearly a decade at PepsiCo, leading insights for their US and Global Beverages units. Looking for your next challenge? Check out our live opportunities.

Lastly, you may have noticed we’ve revamped our website plus moved into a brand-new office! We’re all set and ready to go full steam ahead in 2025.

That’s a wrap on 2024! If you’d like to stay in the loop with Focaldata, consider subscribing to our newsletter. We share industry insights and updates on our journey building our AI-powered, end-to-end research platform.