Overview

A leading Chinese online advertising platform commissioned a global study of B2B advertisers to understand ad spend intentions and online platform experiences across its priority markets.

The study focused on two advertiser groups: local advertisers operating within each market and China-registered advertisers running cross-border campaigns into those markets. It was predominantly a quantitative research study, supported by follow-up interviews to validate respondent responses.

Fieldwork ran from June 1 to July 27 across three waves and nine languages, covering 13 international markets.

The challenge

The study required IDR to reach a highly specific audience. Only advertising and marketing decision-makers who first-hand ran campaigns and worked for qualifying companies could pass the screening process. A long termination chain meant most traffic was screened out before reaching a quota.

The quota structure added another layer of complexity. Respondents who passed the initial screening had to meet four hard quotas simultaneously: industry, platform objective, budget owner versus practitioner and agency versus in-house. Many respondents who qualified for the study were still over-quota on one dimension, causing available quota cells to narrow quickly and reducing the effective qualifying rate.

The client required every quota cell to remain open in every market, regardless of whether the relevant population existed locally. This required heavy custom recruitment and changes to the project scope during fieldwork, including a relaunch in Korea and a second scope in Japan.

The study also included a validation layer. A subset of the quantitative population was re-interviewed to re-check their responses, with audio recordings uploaded to the client as proof of respondent validity. This added an additional recruit-and-schedule process alongside the core sample requirements.

What we did

IDR recruited B2B advertising and marketing decision-makers across Canada, UK, Australia, Korea, Germany, Japan, France, Brazil, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and Mexico. A separate US sample of 300 completes was also run.

The team managed the four interconnected quota requirements across the markets while adapting recruitment activity as individual quota cells became harder to fill.

IDR also supported the qualitative validation process, recruiting and scheduling respondents for follow-up interviews and providing audio recordings to the client for verification.

As the project progressed, IDR participated in weekly client check-ins and continued working beyond the original deadline to deliver the full sample.

The outcome

IDR delivered:

• 1,831 completed surveys against an original target of 1,510
• 121% of the overall target, including the US sample
• Recruitment across 13 international markets and nine languages
• Three waves of fieldwork

Client feedback:
“What your team delivered on this study deserves more than a passing thank you. That is not a routine result, and I don't think it would have been achievable by many teams. What makes it more remarkable is the conditions you did it under. This was not a straightforward study, the screening criteria were narrow, the quota structure was unusually complex and several of the hardest requirements could not be relaxed at all. That turnaround is what got this study over the line. We have a second wave in prospect, and I very much hope we will be working together on it.” —  Assistant Manager, International Market Research Firm