Welcome to Ad Age Datacenter Weekly, our data-obsessed newsletter for marketing and media professionals.

How marketers can ask consumers the right questions

“It turns out that most people are pretty bad at thinking in hypotheticals,” MIT Professor Adam Berinsky writes in an Ad Age guest post titled “DIY market research—a guide to asking the right questions.” To adjust to that reality, he suggests that marketers designing consumer surveys leverage something called conjoint analysis.

The details: “Conjoint analysis is a survey technique in which respondents are asked to choose between multiple options. For instance, a smartphone maker might present several different feature sets at the same price point and ask customers which build they would be most likely to buy.”

Essential context: “Ask customers whether they want their living space to be larger, less expensive or better located, and they’re likely to say yes. But by asking questions that force people to think in terms of trade-offs, companies can quickly get a better sense of what their customers truly value.”

Keep reading here to learn more about five other approaches that can “help marketers write survey questions that yield actionable data.”

Macroeconomic news and data in a nutshell

• “Jobless claims subside after Thanksgiving pop and give off good vibes for U.S. economy,” MarketWatch reports

• “Fed lowers rates but sees fewer cuts next year due to stubbornly high inflation,” per Reuters

• “What Fed Rate Moves Mean for Your Finances,” from The New York Times

• “Homebuyer demand for mortgages jumped 6%, as interest rates fell to the lowest level in over a month,” CNBC reports

Key stats about creator/influencer marketing in 2024

Influencer marketing platform CreatorIQ is out with new data that offers a big-picture view of the intersection between the creator economy and brand campaigns in 2024. Five key findings:

• Instagram still rules. CreatorIQ says the Meta-owned platform was part of 91% of all the customer campaigns it tracked this year—across a total of 1.7 million brand posts.

• Instagram still outpaces TikTok when it comes to brands’ influencer-focused campaigns that leverage short-form video. CreatorIQ tallied approximately 520,000 influencer-led brand campaigns on Instagram Reels, followed by TikTok with 398,000 and Alphabet-owned YouTube Shorts with 94,000.

• Multichannel social campaigns are the norm. CreatorIQ says that 60% of the brand influencer campaigns it tracked this year included more than one social media channel.

• Brands are turning to creators/influencers for multiple campaigns. CreatorIQ says that of all the creators/influencers it tracks, 40% were a part of multiple campaigns for given brands. This signals that brands are increasingly seeing value in “long-term relationships vs. one-off collaborations,” according to CreatorIQ.

• Engagement rate is getting prioritized over follower count. CreatorIQ keeps an eye on how brands seek out creators/influencers, including the types of filters deployed in searches. Interestingly, across 2024, just 2.4% of searches applied a filter related to follower count, but 7.9% did include a filter for engagement rate—which CreatorIQ says signals “a shift in how brands assess creator value.”

Also read: Creator and influencer trends to know about right now

How Ad Age ranks the world’s biggest advertisers

Ad Age World’s Largest Advertisers 2024 ranks the top 100 global advertisers and includes in-depth profiles of 50 of the top spenders. Total spending for the 100 biggest advertisers rose 4.9% in 2023, with increases at 68 marketers.

To dive in, start with our “big picture” post here.

Truthset’s new product helps data providers weed out bad data files

“Truthset, known for providing accuracy scoring for data providers, with often discouraging results, is rolling out a new product to help make things better,” Ad Age’s Jack Neff reports.

The details: “Truthset is launching a ‘Record-Level Transparency’ product that aims to let data providers identify lower-quality files and sequester them based on the company’s quality scores.”

Essential context: “Typically data files with records of varying quality are lumped together, sourced, priced and used as if they’re all of equal value. Truthset’s RLT will allow data providers to pinpoint accuracy problems and eliminate the lowest-scoring files, estimated by the company at under 10% of the records of most providers.”

Read more here: Tracking media measurement uncertainty

Just briefly

• “Dutch watchdog fines Netflix for not properly informing customers about data use,” per Reuters

• “Facebook owner hit with 251 million euros in fines for 2018 data breach,” The Associated Press reports

• “The Artist Exposing the Data We Leave Online,” from The New Yorker

• “How to properly wipe your laptop data before getting rid of it,” from PCWorld

The newsletter is brought to you by Ad Age Datacenter, the industry’s most authoritative source of competitive intel and home to the Ad Age Leading National Advertisers, the Ad Age Agency Report: World’s Biggest Agency Companies and other exclusive data-driven reports. Access or subscribe to Ad Age Datacenter at AdAge.com/Datacenter.

Ad Age Datacenter is Bradley Johnson and Joy R. Lee.