IA Laureates

Reg Baker has been involved with surveys in one form or another for over for 50 years, long enough to have once tabulated survey data using an IBM card sorter. Fortunately, that was short-lived and with the introduction of SPSS in 1968 he moved online, enabling him to keep body and soul together while in graduate school by analyzing survey data for faculty in political science, sociology, economics, geography, and even history on his way to earning his PhD. In 1979, he went to work at DUALabs, a now defunct DC-based non-profit that documented and distributed data from the 1960 and 1970 Censuses, and public use files on behalf of a variety of other government agencies. In 1984, he joined the National Opinion Research Center (now simply NORC) at the University of Chicago as Director of Systems Development, eventually becoming Vice President for Research Services. While at NORC he was fortunate to work with a team of world class survey methodologists on the design and execution of large, complex, government-funded multi-year surveys. He also oversaw the migration of the NORC national field staff from paper and pencil data collection to CAPI and established the organization’s first CATI centers. Reg moved from academic survey research to market research in 1995 when he joined Market Strategies International (now Escalent) as COO. Over his 17-year career there he oversaw the company’s transition to online and became an active contributor to industry debates on a broad set of issues about technology and evolving methods, their use and misuse. He became a frequent presenter at industry conferences, published numerous articles, reports, and chapters in books, and in 2007 began blogging as The Survey Geek. This also was a time when he became active in a variety of industry associations including AAPOR, CASRO, and ESOMAR  After his retirement from Market Strategies in 2012, he took on a number of part-time positions and consulting assignments. He taught in the Masters in Market Research Program at Michigan State University. He consulted with the Census Bureau. He served for four years as Executive Director of the Market Research Institute International and currently is ESOMAR’s Regional Ambassador to North America and a consultant to that association’s Professional Standards Committee. He and his wife, Pat, live in Ann Arbor, MI along with Archie, their “terrier mix” rescue dog.

Simon founded Cambiar in 2004 to provide strategic assistance to research and insight companies as they face rapid and fundamental change. With 40 years of guiding and managing international organizations of various sizes and stages, Simon’s advice and counsel has helped many companies increase their value – to stakeholders, investors and clients. He is an acknowledged industry leader, author and conference speaker. In addition to his role at Cambiar, Simon is also a Fellow of the Market Research Society, Chairman and Laureate of the Insights Association and Editor-in-Chief of Research World, ESOMAR’s global magazine. He holds an MA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford University, UK, and has done post-graduate studies at both Columbia and Harvard business schools in Change Management and Strategic Management.

Simon founded Cambiar in 2004 to provide strategic assistance to research and insight companies as they face rapid and fundamental change. With 40 years of guiding and managing international organizations of various sizes and stages, Simon’s advice and counsel has helped many companies increase their value – to stakeholders, investors and clients. He is an acknowledged industry leader, author and conference speaker. In addition to his role at Cambiar, Simon is also a Fellow of the Market Research Society, Chairman and Laureate of the Insights Association and Editor-in-Chief of Research World, ESOMAR’s global magazine. He holds an MA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford University, UK, and has done post-graduate studies at both Columbia and Harvard business schools in Change Management and Strategic Management.

Steve has been in the marketing research industry for over 35 years, starting his career as a project manager and then working his way up to lead Schlesinger Group for the past 25 years. As a leader within his company, Steve has created the strategy and vision for Schlesinger Group as the world’s leading data collection company. He served for 8 years on the board of the then Marketing Research Association, finishing his tenure as the Secretary of the Board. He is a founding member of the Insights Association CEO Summit and continues his involvement, co-chairing the events. Steve is also founding member of Marketing Research Education Foundation. Steve is an active member of Insights Association, AMA, ESOMAR & PMRG. He was presented the MRA (Insights Association) Honorary Lifetime Member award in 2015, in recognition of a commitment of outstanding individual service to the Association and the marketing research profession. Steve serves on the board of directors of Inspire.com, the board of directors of HR Acuity, the advisory board of Brrrn, the advisory board of The University of Vermont Foundation and the Advisory Board of Michigan State University Master of Science in Marketing Research Program. Steve is a graduate of the University of Vermont with a Bachelor’s of Science in Biochemistry. His numerous passions include innovation and technology as well as tennis, golf and travel. ..

Dyna is the Managing Director of the consumer, tech, and telecom practice at Escalent. As a leader of leaders, it's her purpose to supercharge people to achieve more. She has a propensity for action and is on a quest to advise and inspire insights leaders across the world. Over the course of her career, Dyna has been on the executive team of multiple venture/private equity backed start-ups, including two that she co-founded herself. On this journey, she's experienced an IPO, scaled a company, and been through two acquisitions. She also co-founded the WIRexec Leadership Summit to promote collaboration among other female executives in her industry. Through it all, she has been a hands-on leader with a strength for building teams. More specifically, she can grow sales, improve client services, and create new solutions for enterprise brands. Above and beyond, Dyna believes in diversity and inclusions as well as providing mentorship to young women. Dyna and her partner, Darin Jackson live in Northern California. They love to mountain bike, snow ski, boogie board, and do yoga when they’re not busy sorting drama between their two teenage girls, teenage boy exchange student, and rambunctious Frenchie named Matcha.

Dan Coates is president & co-founder of Ypulse, a leading authority on youth. With degrees in English Literature and Management Systems Science, his passion is in humanizing data, bringing the hopes, dreams, and passions of young consumers to life. Ypulse produces award-winning research, surveying more than 250,000 tweens, teens and young adults annually in order to drive understanding between brands and young consumers. Google, Facebook, Spotify & Viacom are but a few of the companies that rely on Ypulse to successfully engage with young consumers.

world’s best advertising agencies, including BBH, JWT, and BBDO. Vanella has always been passionate about brands and communications, how they are created, and how they work. She constantly strives for outstanding creativity in anything she is involved in. Hall & Partners specialize in creating commercially and emotionally rewarding brand relationships, closing the ‘relationship gap’ between people, brands, and business. She is particularly interested in how digital technology is transforming business models and has built pioneering new thinking about how brands and communications drive behavioural change. Vanella’s role is to provide energy, direction, and inspiration for the team, to help them develop strong client relationships and to attract valuable new clients. Vanella is passionate about sustainability. Her highlights whilst at Hall & Partners have been to help the company grow successfully (doubling in revenue and trebling in profit). Hall & Partners also became the first research company to win a place in The Sunday Times ‘Top 100 Best Companies to Work For’ and Marketing Magazine’s ‘Research Agency of the Year.’ Vanella has also won a ‘Woman of the Year’ award. She is Vice Chairman and a Fellow of the Market Research Society having previously chaired The Society. She is currently seeking a non-executive position in a business focused on building strong brands and relationships, both in the UK and internationally.

Charlotte was elected as the first Independent Director to the Board of Advicenne, S.A. (Euronext: ADVIC), a specialty pharmaceutical company focused on the treatment of renal disease she serves on the Remuneration Committee and CEO Search Committee. She served on the Board of privately held Taconic Biosciences, Inc., a leading global provider of research models and services, where she chaired the Nominating/Governance Committee and was a member of the Compensation Committee. She is Chair of the Board of Fort Hill Company, developer of innovative tools for workplace and performance improvement. She served on the Board of American Pacific Corporation through 2014 (NASDAQ: AMPAC), a leading custom manufacturer of pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) and propulsion products, where she served on the Compensation and Nominating/Governance Committees. She is an NACD Board Leadership Fellow. Advisory board positions include Valued Solutions, dedicated to accelerating early-stage life science companies and Galileo Analytics, a leader in the field of claims data analysis. She is Past President of the Marketing Research Institute International. Her non-profit board service includes Chair of the Board of Mendelssohn Chorus, the largest volunteer chorus in Philadelphia and a frequent performer with the Philadelphia Orchestra. She was a regular lecturer at Columbia University’s Executive MBA Program and serves on the Advisory Board of St. Joseph’s University Healthcare Executive MBA. She has received numerous awards for leadership and achievement: Middlebury College’s Alumni Achievement Award in 2018 the Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association (HBA) 2008 Woman of the Year, recognizing leadership, business expertise and mentoring and one of PharmaVoice’s Most Inspiring People in Pharma in 2006. Charlotte has built and led integrated commercial assessment and insights teams (market research, competitive intelligence, strategic forecasting, commercial evaluation, and decision science) in four major biopharmaceutical companies. Most recently, she was at Shire plc. (now Takeda) as Senior Vice President, leading talent management and key corporate initiatives focusing on customer engagement and marketing excellence. Starting in market research at Pfizer, her career has spanned all sectors of the life sciences industry: medical devices at Johnson & Johnson the global pharma market at Bristol-Myers Squibb and Pharmacia (now Pfizer) biotechnology at Millennium Pharmaceuticals (now Takeda) and consumer products at Lipton. She established the US business for a leading UK- based market research company, achieving profitability in 18 months. She also spent three years on Wall Street at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette as a security analyst for the pharmaceutical industry. Charlotte is known for her strategic vision, building and leading teams, and for developing and coaching women and men at all levels of the organization. She holds an MBA in Finance and Marketing from the University of Chicago Booth Graduate School of Business and an AB in French from Middlebury College cum laude. Charlotte and her husband, Leif Magnusson, a retired attorney (deceased), and their three cats live in Berwyn, PA.

Michael Brereton is a leader in the global marketing research industry. He has a passion for understanding, and playing a leadership role in, the transformation of the marketing research and decision intelligence space. In 2014 he retired from Maritz Research after eleven years as CEO. Maritz was ranked in the AMA Gold findings as the 12th largest marketing research firm in the United States and 18th globally. Michael has since joined the faculty of Michigan State University’s Eli Broad Graduate School of Management where he is Executive in Residence and teaches in the Master of Science in Marketing Research Program. In this role he has launched the Research Transformed Collaborative, an initiative to fuse industry and academic thought leadership in understanding the rapidly evolving marketing research and decision intelligence space. Michael also operates a private consulting practice through which he advises firms on business strategy related to business transformation in the marketing insights industry. He has contributed substantially to the commercial and academic advancement of the marketing research discipline, and is a regular contributor to industry trade journals. Michael received a Bachelor of Science degree from General Motors Institute in Flint, Michigan and a Master of Business Administration degree from Bowling Green State University in Ohio.

Dan Coates is president & co-founder of Ypulse, a leading authority on youth. With degrees in English Literature and Management Systems Science, his passion is in humanizing data, bringing the hopes, dreams, and passions of young consumers to life. Ypulse produces award-winning research, surveying more than 250,000 tweens, teens and young adults annually in order to drive understanding between brands and young consumers. Google, Facebook, Spotify & Viacom are but a few of the companies that rely on Ypulse to successfully engage with young consumers.

600+ primary research studies, 30+ years experience (client-side, agency-side, and as a market research educator). Many years as a hands-on survey researcher (elbow-deep in banner tables and SPSS syntax), qual researcher (various modes), methodology advisor, and analyst (delivering reports for executive-level clients). Passionate about excellence in business excellence through fresh, objective customer insights. A current focus is promoting "data fluency" skills to help research & insights professionals adapt to market research 3.0: where data silos are breaking down, speed is picking up, and opportunities for blended methods are booming. Through my work at Research Rockstar, I want to help all researchers become Research Rockstars.

Lisa Wilding-Brown has been in the industry for nearly 20 years. Lisa’s specialties include executive business leadership, product innovation, sampling and survey design, panel development and management, online and mobile recruitment as well as full service mixed-mode field management across a multitude of industry sectors. As Chief Executive Officer at InnovateMR, Lisa has a passion for building strong relationships and a relentless mission to drive innovation and efficiency. Lisa and the InnovateMR executive team deliver transformational research strategies for their clients by harnessing the power of technology-enabled solutions that accelerate and activate insights for agencies and brands alike. In 2021, Lisa and the InnovateMR team launched the Vision Suite, a fully integrated and hyper-intuitive research platform that allows market researchers and marketing professionals the autonomy to conduct high quality research; expediting the insights journey and answering the resounding call for democratized and accessible insights. Prior to joining Innovate, Lisa was a member of the executive team at uSamp where she developed the company’s global panel and led the firm’s mobile business division. Lisa got her start in insights at Harris Interactive, where she played an instrumental role in developing the company’s first full-service online project management practice. Lisa later joined the panel team, focusing her efforts on research-on-research, survey methodology, specialty panel development and online user engagement for the Harris Poll Online. Lisa serves on the board for both the MMRA and UTA’s Master of Science in Marketing Research and she is an active contributor to WIRexec, the Women-in-Research mentorship program and the Global Research Business Network. Lisa is a widely sought after global speaker and she has presented at such conferences as AAPOR, ESOMAR, the MRMW North America and Europe, The MRS, The Insights Association, IIEX, SampleCon and she has published research related to business transformation, operational efficiency, data privacy, multicultural insights, participant engagement, online survey design, fraud mitigation and mobile best practices.

Today, he is the co-founder of HubUX and the host of the Happy Market Research Podcast bringing you interviews from insights pros at LinkedIn, GoDaddy, General Mills, and many more. You live once. Love the... 1. stuff you build, 2. the people you build it for, and 3. the team you build it with. Those 3 things are where Jamin dedicates all his effort.  As the previous CEO of FocusVision, he was the first to bring to market a combination of qualitative and quantitative technologies that are used by 75% of the Fortune 100 and over 3,000 companies globally. Prior to FocusVision, he pioneered online surveys, conducting one of the first ones in 1996 and founded a top survey platform, Decipher, in 2000. Jamin started Happy Market Research to help companies use market research to 'generate outsized returns and growth' and offer free podcasts exploring the state of the MR industry.

With a passion for building strong relationships and a mission to drive innovation, Merrill is leading this top full-service marketing research company into its sixth decade. He and his team form actionable research strategies and solutions by combining an intimate understanding of clients' business objectives with the design strength and marketing expertise required to drive business growth. Merrill has served on the MRA Board of Directors for six years and is past National Treasurer. He currently serves on the advisory boards for the Michigan State and Hofstra University, was a past president of the AMA Boston Chapter and co-chaired two AMA Leadership Summits. In addition, he is a much sought after speaker for industry conferences and university lectures and has won a number of national awards, including Marketing Research Association's Distinguished Service Award, the Meritorious Service to Marketing Research Award and the Honorary Lifetime Membership Award for outstanding service to MRA and the marketing research profession.

She founded The Hunter Miller Group (HMG), in 1995, a Chicago based, leading edge market research and strategic firm. Since then, she has been helping Fortune 500 companies better understand and positively engage Black America, so they can have loyal customers and a positive bottom line. Pepper has interviewed thousands of consumers about their beliefs, feelings, thoughts and usage of hundreds of products and services for a number of companies including: AARP, BRAVO, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Ulta Beauty, The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and more. Her experiences, passion and insights, are revealed in the book that she co-authored with the late Herb Kemp What’s Black About It?, and her book, Black Still Matters in Marketing. Both books are considered to be the most important references about Black consumer insights by many business leaders in the marketing industry. Pepper’s third book, For the Culture: Why Black Americans Matter Today More Than Ever, will be released next year. Pepper is able to help audiences think differently about Black America, and how they should approach this audience professionally and personally. Pepper invites the audience to dig deeper into the Black-American market by talking about both simple ideas and taboo topics. It’s this ability that earned Pepper many awards including MOBE’s D. Park Gibson Award for Excellence in Market Research(2018), MAFA’s Trailblazer Award (2014), the “Takes the Cake” Best Speaker award in 2006 and 2012 at the prestigious Marketing 2 Women Conference, and Target Market News’ MAAX Award for Market Research Executive of the Year (2007). For seven years, Pepper blogged for Advertising Age, is a featured blogger for Forbes, and she enjoys engaging and mentoring and young professionals (and having them mentor her!).

Described as a modern-day, consumer-focused Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Ari Zelmanow helps businesses uncover "clues" that will position their company, product, or service in the market for consistent growth—in both customers and revenue—month-after-month. Ari leads Analytics, Research, and Insights for Gtmhub, a team of UX, MRX, DS/A, RxOps working together to solve problems for the business. He has built XFN teams at Twitter, Panasonic, and Indeed. Previously, Ari solved crimes as a metropolitan police detective at @SLMPD. He believes in truth, justice, and the American way, the Oxford comma, and NY style pizza.