Justin's Podcast
Dive into the captivating world of extraordinary individuals with "Interesting People," the podcast where host Justin Wallin sits down with some of the most intriguing personalities from all walks of life. Each episode unravels the unique stories, challenges, and triumphs of guests who have made remarkable impacts in their fields or led fascinating lives. From trailblazing innovators and inspiring artists to unsung heroes and enigmatic personalities, Justin brings you candid conversations that reveal the human spirit's endless capacity for wonder and achievement. Tune in for thought-provoking interviews, surprising revelations, and a celebration of the diverse tapestry of human experience.
Justin's Podcast
Communication, Data, and Innovation with Ron Howard
Transform your understanding of data analytics with insights from Ron Howard, the brilliant mind behind Mercury Analytics. Get ready to redefine how you view communication and intelligence as Ron reveals his passion for turning complex data into actionable insights. This episode is your chance to learn how breakthroughs in qualitative and quantitative research can refine messaging across diverse sectors like politics, policy and branding. Ron's innovative strategies promise to make your communication not only more effective but also cost-efficient, helping your messages resonate with target audiences. Discover how AI is seamlessly integrated into Ron's tools, boosting productivity and transforming the landscape of deeply actionable data analysis.
Join us as we explore the groundbreaking advances of Mercury Analytics, a platform that redefines qualitative opinion research with its rapid, detailed reports generated in just sixty seconds. Ron shares his journey as a serial entrepreneur, illustrating how his software engineering background led to the birth of this new tool. Outdated research methods get a modern twist as Ron discusses Mercury Analytics' role in simultaneously executing hundreds of projects, offering comprehensive and cost-effective solutions. Embrace the future of opinion analytics with Ron's pioneering work that is reshaping the industry.
Welcome to Interesting People, the podcast where we delve into the lives and stories of fascinating individuals from all walks of life. I'm your host, justin Wallen. In each episode, we bring you inspiring, thought-provoking and sometimes surprising interviews with people who are making an impact in their fields and communities. There's only one common thread that the world is more interesting because of them. Get ready to be inspired, entertained and enlightened as we spotlight the extraordinary. Let's dive in. Hello everybody, and thank you for joining me.
Speaker 1:Today. I am joined by my friend, ron Howard. Ron is an extraordinarily interesting guy. He is an entrepreneur. He is owner of Mercury Analytics, which is one of the leading businesses in the world of converting data into actual intelligence. He's actually collecting data as well. He does a number of things that are new or innovative and have been proven. I have the good pleasure of working with Ron regularly. He has an extraordinary team and, on top of that, ron is a good man. He is a man of great character, he is interesting and he's one of the wonderful people that you meet in life, and it's just an absolute pleasure to have you here today.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much. I would repeat so much of what you said about yourself and your intelligence and your decency, and we may not always agree on all of the issues, but it's just such a pleasure to work together and be able to exchange ideas and be able to do great work together. So thank you very much for that introduction.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. And I wanted to start talking about your business because, one, what you do is very interesting, and then the very just fact of what you've created as a business that's successful, working with a wide variety of different organizations, and because we work in this a lot in this world of public policy, that also means you're going to be working on opposite ends of contentious issues, you know, and navigating all of that the businesses, the personalities and so forth. What tell me? What do you first off, what do you love most about what you do?
Speaker 2:I think what drives me is I want to know the answers, I want to understand what's behind the issues, and so to do that, you have to ask a lot of questions, you have to listen a lot, you have to let the data tell you the answers and and put your preconceived notions to the side. So, whether it's executing quantitative projects which are interviewing a lot of people a thousand people, 500 people, 2 people, 2,000, 5,000 people and getting their answers to a series of questions that have been created in an unbiased way, attempting to get at you know how, having people interact and guide them through different parts of the story to understand how did they react to it, so that you can get a sense of what people think about these issues and it's important to understand. That's sort of interesting and anecdotal, but it's not quantitatively significant yet. You can get ideas from qualitative research, but then you really need to test those ideas in larger audiences to see how they hold up and so forth.
Speaker 2:But whether it's working on politics or whether it's working for brands to understand a brand know a brand has a problem, people don't like it, or its popularity is dropping, or a crisis comes on, or it may be something where they have five ads and one of them is going to do better against one audience or another audience, and figuring out what are the messages that work and work best and what words do people like and don't like, and so forth Not so that they can change what it is, but to make it better, to make it clearer, to make it resonate better.
Speaker 2:And the same thing is true in politics. When a candidate or someone wants to communicate a message, you can test the message and you can see where it falls short or where it works well. And then it's not that they're going to change their message to the opposite or something, it's just there are better ways to say it. So it's helping with those kinds of things. So those are some of what we do, and we have very advanced technologies that allow us to do it very fast and very in-depth.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and the key thing is, the better you are at your job, the more able the communicators are to not only move the dial in an effective way, move more people more quickly, with more enthusiasm, but also do so in a way that doesn't require you know expensive them right, everything's expensive, but it's one thing to say well, you know, spend $2 billion and you're going to move people's opinions. The reality is, we don't have $2 billion we work with in budgets and what you do allows people to affect that change within. You know the realms of reality, right? It makes a five bucks behave like 25 bucks.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I mean again, when you can make the communication better, when you can position the product better, when you can improve something by understanding how the audiences react, you can much more effectively utilize budgets and you can really hit home runs much more often than just, you know, sort of winging it or hoping. You understand your audience. Sometimes you need to test it and really make sure that you understand it, you know clearly, so that you get the most effective outcome.
Speaker 1:You're incorporating quite successfully, I think, because I've used it and I think it's terrific One of the big items of the past couple of years. Ai right, and most of the time when you see AI in the news it's around the kind of breathless nature of creating audiovisuals and the idea that you can create all these extraordinary things essentially without the use of graphic designers, and it's really just prompt inputs. Those of us who actually work in that space recognize that there's significant limitations, although there's some pretty neat things that can be used within that. But for me, the exciting things about AI is how they are used to enhance productivity and used to enhance those things that we're doing every day as a tool, and you have done it with great effect, I think, within your suite of tools. I was wondering if you might speak about that a little bit.
Speaker 2:Sure. So when it comes to the research field, one of the most important types of questions there are qualitative questions which are easy to understand. You know, how would you rate this candidate? Excellent, good, fair, poor? You can see the percentages of people within an audience segment that like the person or don't like them at all. But the question, the next question, has to be why, why do you feel this way? What is it about them that makes you feel this way, so that you can understand it, the meaning behind it? And if you have a thousand people in the audience and you get a thousand responses as to why, understanding what they're saying is expensive, it's time consuming. You have to do something called coding it to try to come up with the themes that are present, the top themes that people are expressing in it. That's the kind of thing that we have built into our analytics platform. That's automated, always private, always secure, but you can go and you can say you can define an audience segment.
Speaker 2:I'm interested in young Republicans and here was the question that was asked and here's the type of analysis I want Go and it sits there and crunches for 60 seconds and then gives you a report, an overall summary that says among the people that you know, among Republicans who are young, you know, whatever. Here's what we found. The top thing was this you know people express this and it will include quotes, and it will. The next thing was this the next thing was this so what you end up with is 60 seconds a complete understanding of oh my gosh, this is what this audience segment is trying to tell me. You can also code it. You can have it actually go through and assign who felt what about this thing, so that I can then analyze the data based on how they felt about it. Those are the types of analysis. The same thing is true for qualitative research, for focus groups and those kinds of things where you can take an entire focus group and you can analyze it in 60 seconds. What did I learn, learn, what did people say? Who felt what, how? What did they agree strongly, what did they disagree strongly on at the end of the focus group, and have that analysis in 60 seconds, where that would take an analyst or a moderator. They would. They would take hours and spend a lot of money or time, you know, generating that, and we do the same thing, depending on the type of media. So we have that analysis. We've done analysis, ai analysis of all of the debates. We've done analysis.
Speaker 2:You can do analysis of interviews. When candidates or ceo appears on a news show, you can generate an analysis of how they do you know and what did they do. Well, we have a type of report that basically is, if I'm talking to the candidate or to the person who's interviewed, here's what you did best. Here's what you did worst. Here's why it was important. Here are the audience segments you likely helped yourself with. Here are the ones you hurt yourself with and here's what to do about it. And here, if you're going to be interviewed by the press, here's what they're likely to ask you and here are some great answers for you. And that's all 60 seconds based on the dialogue that occurred during the group, and it's just a few clicks.
Speaker 1:It's truly remarkable. It's a game changer in the world of analyzing data, not just in terms of the speed, but that it's actionable, it really works, and all of this stuff as with any product, if you're working with a peer or anyone like that comes back to you. You read through it, you digest it, you modify it however way it fits your particular lens, but the reality is you have an excellent well, it could be a finished product if that's the way you're approaching it as the client, but certainly for others, just an excellent draft. It's terrific work and truly valuable and really transformative in this space, and I think it speaks to that as a tool making people's lives better, faster and yeah, cheaper in the world of business. I think you really created an extraordinary tool and people should see it. It's wonderful.
Speaker 2:Thank you, starting point and they may like it and they want to share it with a client, their client or it may be just a starting point for the team so that they get a quick grasp on what happened. What are the key points, what are the key things people are saying, and so they can start writing their analysis with that understanding as well. So it can just be very helpful. But thank you.
Speaker 1:So I want to talk a little bit about the business of business. When you started this particular business and what were you thinking when you got into it One of the key lessons that you learned over time, stuff that you wish you knew and the things that you really enjoyed about building this business.
Speaker 2:So I'm a serial entrepreneur. With the exception of one time. I really never worked for anyone other than when I came out of college and started my first company, built that and sold that next company and so forth. So I am truly a serial entrepreneur. Truly a serial entrepreneur. I started Mercury Analytics because of the fact that I was a software engineer by training All my life, had a very entrepreneurial father and family and I felt that the research industry, which I used greatly as an entrepreneur running companies that were I was the founder and CEO of companies that were several hundred million dollars in size I felt I depended on research greatly, but I felt like research the way it was done in the past traditionally was sort of old and antiquated and it really needed updating.
Speaker 2:And so, based on my software knowledge, my software technology knowledge, I developed much more advanced automated systems for doing analysis, for questioning people, doing analysis. I loved internet research as a basis for how you reach people because, you know, as the internet became ubiquitous and you could access people all over the world, all types of people, as long as you had ways to validate people and so forth, you could get anyone and you could do it more rapidly and more cost effectively. So I loved Internet research, but it needed analytics. It needed the ability to let people dig in, and so the original premise of Mercury was we were going to be a great research company, but what we evolved to was we have a full service group in Mercury, but we work with a lot of very advanced other research companies that use us because of our advanced analytics and tools and capabilities that we offer, and so we really evolved to be a platform that lots of companies use. We have hundreds of clients thousands of clients, if you will, over the years. We are executing hundreds of projects at the same time, and so we really take care of all sorts. We sometimes are developing questionnaires and surveys when we're doing full service work for a company that has a problem and is using us to help figure out what to do, or we work with people like you who are very advanced in knowing what you want to do and will tell us what you want to do, and we make it happen for you and you do your analysis. You are the one who's responsible for it, but we're executing it for you and making it easy. We work with lots of different kinds of companies and what I think drives a good entrepreneur is there has to be a thirst for something that the business that they're getting into, that they want to be in, that really keeps them up at night, that they love, that they want more of.
Speaker 2:And for me, again, it's understanding the answer. You know, I want to know why don't Republicans and Democrats, why can't they agree on this? Or, you know, when a crisis happens, how do people feel? You can't believe? You know some know, when a crisis happens, how do people feel you can't believe? You know some of the research studies we've done where a company, a 60 minutes news story is coming out about a company and they they are testing ways to respond and things like that, and and when they're ready to pounce, and the 60 minutes news story airs and we test right away afterwards to get public reaction and we discovered that really nobody really cared that much. And the company is about to launch an onslaught of saying it's not true and this and that.
Speaker 2:So the first day, this was a major, major organization. The first day, 50, I think it was 80 something people canceled their account out of millions. Next, you knowsomething, people canceled their account out of millions. Next, 19 people canceled their account and they needed to do nothing. They basically needed to do nothing about it and it saved them not just money but so much headache of dragging out the issue. So that's what research can do, but as an entrepreneur, learning that was thrilling, and knowing that and being able to be on top of it was just thrilling. So for me, it's always I have this mantra better, faster, lower cost. That's my mantra. I want to implement something that makes a process better, it makes it faster and it can be done at a lower cost, and that's a winning formula that I have found in all my businesses. It's a great strategy to follow. That's what works for me.
Speaker 1:It's terrific, it really is. I want to talk a little bit about you personally, because, running a business, starting a business, selling a business, doing it over and over again, how do you manage making sure that you're taken care of as an entrepreneur, as a father, as someone who has a real life in addition to these great businesses that you're building? How do you make sure that you know you've got the energy you need, you can tackle the stuff that is unexpected every day and do so in a healthy, happy way? I mean, we're all imperfect, but what are your lessons for that?
Speaker 2:Well, the first thing is I want to say the word that comes to mind is compartmentalized. It's the ability to compartmentalize and to be able to say, okay, I've got this worry over here. I know I've handled much, much more significant things. I can handle this. I just can't deal with it right this minute. But I'm going to put it on the side.
Speaker 2:I have loved my children without hesitation. I shower them with love. I am always there for them. When they need me, I am there. That is my number one priority. It's so fundamental. In a similar way, it's so fundamental In a similar way, I love my employees.
Speaker 2:I take amazing care of them. They are so important to me and having a culture that people love to work in is so important to me. You know we pay 100% health care for our people. We do that. We have people work for us around the world. We do it in every country and it's unheard of in some countries. That's just the way you do it and that's the way you show people that you actually care. We are considered someone that has some problem that befalls them. We help them. We do whatever we can to take care of them, to help them, do whatever we can to take care of them, to help them, and when you do that, and when it is legit, when it's not, you know. When it's not, I don't know, done for some purpose, like see how good I am, you know nothing like that. It's done because it feels right to me, it feels right to everyone that works here. The single most important thing to me is I will not hire I would use another word but jerks.
Speaker 1:No matter how high performing they are.
Speaker 2:Brilliant jerk will never work for us. It will never happen. I would rather have someone who we can develop, who fits into our culture, who brings something wonderful to it and is additive to it. I will never hire an asshole.
Speaker 1:Excuse me, no, no, no, that's perfect. Speak frankly.
Speaker 2:How is the word I was going to use? I will never hire that person because they literally can ruin your company. They'll never care for that person because they literally can ruin your company. We have a situation here where, if there's a problem, someone will say oh my gosh, I made a mistake. Can you help me with that? How wonderful is that? Everyone makes mistakes. We learn from them. We hopefully don't make them too often, but let's own it, let's fix it and let's learn from it. And if you have a culture where you have someone who's sitting there going, did you see the mistake Joe made? He makes those mistakes. You know everyone's going to start to cover their butts. That's a better word. Everyone thinks that.
Speaker 2:So, avoiding that kind of characteristic being part of a team, it's so important and I think our I mean I truthfully hear from our customers all the time how wonderful it is to work with us and so forth, and that's what I want have expertise. Also, I have incredibly kind people. It's actually the way when I'm doing a presentation to a new client, I always include we are incredibly nice people and it makes executing work that much easier, because sometimes we're all stressed, we understand it and our focus is let's do a great job, also not focusing on not having everyone focused on money Money. If we have a great relationship with a client, everything will work out. Some projects that we execute will be lower profit than other projects.
Speaker 2:We may lose money on a project because something turned out not the way it was expected to. It happens, but over the long run, if we do a good job, they want to work with us everything will work out. As long as we do the right things, we'll make more. Sometimes we'll make a little less. It's all okay. We look at it in the long term, long-term view.
Speaker 1:Wise words, a wise approach, and I can personally attest to it. It's absolutely true. You have an unbelievable team. They're a joy to work with, extraordinarily professional, extraordinarily effective, very, very good at what they do True excellence. And, yes, very, very good at what they do, true excellence. And, and yes, nice people, um, capable of of, of resolving, uh, unexpected things that come up. It's always about how do you find a resolution. Uh, it's always creative, practical and, um, you know, just bottom line, genuine joy to work with your folks. Uh, they're, they're amazing. Uh, ron, uh, my friend, it's just been a true pleasure having you on. Thanks for sharing some of your time. Thanks so much for the opportunity, thank you, thank you for tuning in to Interesting People. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. If you liked what you heard, be sure to subscribe, rate and review the podcast on your favorite platform, and don't forget to follow us on social media for updates and behind-the-scenes content.
