Welcome to season 8 of Intellicast! Matthew Alexander joins Brian Peterson on today's episode to talk about the latest market research news. Before the guys discuss the news, they quickly touch on some of the conferences coming up over the next month. This includes the QCRA Annual Conference in Philadelphia on February 11-14. If you are interested in attending, use promo code EMIVIP to get a discount on your registration! Starting the news discussion, Brian and Matthew talk about a couple of friends of EMI who recently switched their roles and what that may mean for the industry's outlook in 2025. Next, the guys discuss the news of Radius Global acquiring Illuminas. They wonder if this could be the start of a more significant year of mergers and acquisitions due to a better economic outlook. This leads to a conversation about the new US panel that Bilendi & Respondi launched following its acquisition of Netquest in December. Both Brian and Matthew liked that Bilendi was investing in a new US panel and suggested that it would experience early success because of Bilendi's reputation. They next discuss Kantar's plans to combine Numerator and Worldpanel into a new company. Brian wonders if the new company plans to add features that appear from one side to the other. They then move into the news about KS&R's new AI tool. They discuss how its components are similar to other tools EMI has tested, which leads Brian to talk about how the test results will be released in the 2025 Sample Landscape report. Matthew and Brian also discuss the tool's quality monitoring portion and how it might work. In the final story of today's episode, Matthew and Brian explore the new IPA Bellwether report's news that market research budgets in the UK rose 3.1% in Q4 of 2024 and are expected to increase in 2025. They discuss how this might related to the US market, and Matthew gives some of his perspective of what he has seen from the sales side over the past couple of months. Thanks for listening! Did you miss our recent webinar, Evolving Technology and Trackers: Best Practices for Data Confidence? Get caught up and register to watch the on-demand version here. We have released the 2024 edition of our annual report on the online sample industry, The Sample Landscape. To stay ahead of the curve of what's going on in the online sample industry, be sure to download your copy now. Download Here: www.emi-rs.com/the-sample-landscape/ Did you miss one of our webinars or want to get some of our whitepapers and reports? You can find it all on our Resources page on our website here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices