spark*insights

What do people retain, what do they filter out, and why? What has stopping power? What makes people think or act on an opinion they hold? We can help you unpack this and more.

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How do people learn about things, and how has that already changed?

Heralds and town criers were once the name of the game. Regular news publications appeared in the mid 1500’s in Venice. Radio news arrived 100 years ago and caused a major disruption in the print business. TV came along 70 years ago and changed most everything.

Until the Internet, which triggered a massive decline in daily newspaper readership. In the US 62 million subscribers dropped to 24 million in 30 years.

 

Today social media are a primary source of information for more and more people. Fashion, sports, culture, entertainment, social commentary constantly fill the pipe to our devices.

The average person might spend 7 hours a day looking at a screen, consuming on average 34 gigabytes a day, the equivalent of reading 100,000 words. Or scrolling for 94 hours on TikTok.

But we can still process more. Some estimates are that we can handle 74 gigabytes a day - the same as reading every article on Wikipedia 3.6 times.

7

hours a day

Time the average person spends on social media.

34

gigabytes a day

The equivalent of reading 100,000 words

 

So in a world where we are processing more information from more dynamic sources, many questions arise; What do people retain, what do they filter out, and why? What has stopping power? What makes people think twice about an opinion they hold? Or do something about that opinion?

spark*insights helps our clients answer
these simple, but challenging, questions.

 

We offer three core services:

 

Counsel

Led by Bruce Anderson (who has spent 40 years studying public opinion and helped build and lead several research enterprises - Decima, Harris Decima, Earnscliffe, Abacus Data) and Alex Kohut, we provide counsel about the way public opinion works, how people think, what persuades people, what motivates them and how to find them. Insights drawing on this experience are available to our clients, with or without any primary or secondary research.

Find It

In many cases, things our clients need to know, include information that is already available for use, somewhere. We find what’s out there, compile and analyze it, and turn it into advice our clients can use to improve their reputation or advocacy or marketing efforts.

Research It

We do all forms of custom research – from key stakeholder surveys to focus groups, to nationwide public opinion projects. A great deal of this work goes beyond what people think – to explore how they think, and how to shape a conversation and create some influence in the marketplace.