Tomorrow, Zing Insights Ltd turns fifteen. If you’d told the 2011 version of me that I’d still be here, still obsessed with why people do what they do at events, I’d have believed it, but I wouldn’t have believed how much the plumbing underneath the job would change.

So, in the spirit of marking the occasion properly rather than just eating cake and moving on (though there will also be cake), here’s an honest look at what’s actually different about doing research in 2026 versus 2011, and, more importantly, why the core of what Zing does has held its value the whole way through.

What’s changed: the how
The telephone died, quietly, in the background. In 2011, phone interviewing was still a mainstream quant tool. By the early 2020s, industry data was showing online surveys used by over 90% of researchers, while CATI and face-to-face had shrunk to a small minority of regular methods. The reasons are mundane but real: landlines disappeared, mobile-only households became the norm, and cooperation rates that were already sliding from 43% in the late 1990s to around 14% by 2012 kept falling. If you’d built a business on cold-calling households for a 20-minute survey, you’d have had a hard 2010s.

Response rates got harder everywhere, not just on the phone. Panels grew, then got noisier, professional survey-takers, fraud, and rock-bottom incentives eroded trust in the “always-on” online panel model that replaced the phone. Anyone running quant fieldwork today is fighting a data-quality battle that simply didn’t exist in the same form fifteen years ago.

GDPR changed the paperwork forever. May 2018 wasn’t just an inbox full of “we’ve updated our privacy policy” emails, it forced consent, retention, and data-processing practices in this industry to grow up properly. It’s a big part of why Zing now has proper consent forms, DPA appendices, and retention guidance as standard rather than an afterthought. Compliance stopped being optional and became part of the craft.
Digital and remote qualitative research went from novelty to default. Video-based depth interviews were a curiosity in 2011. By 2022, they’d become the dominant qualitative technique, accounting for more than two-thirds of qual work, a shift massively accelerated by 2020, but already underway before it. We now run interviews with exhibitors in Shanghai and visitors in Chicago in the same week, from a desk in Norfolk, without anyone getting on a plane.

And now: AI. This is the fastest-moving change of the fifteen years, arguably of the whole industry’s history. Depending which report you read, somewhere between two-thirds and 95% of researchers are now using AI tools regularly, adoption of synthetic data methods is already mainstream among quant teams, and the debate has shifted from “should we?” to “how do we do this responsibly?” ESOMAR and the MRS have both been pushing hard on standards here for good reason, synthetic respondents and AI moderation are powerful for speed and scale, but they’re consistently shown to flatten nuance, cluster toward the middle of scales, and miss the emotional and cultural texture that a real conversation catches. Used well, AI is now doing the admin-heavy lifting , transcription, first-pass coding, drafting, freeing up time for the actual thinking. That’s been true in our workflows this year in a way that would have seemed like science fiction in 2011.

What hasn’t changed
Here’s the thing nobody selling you a shiny new platform wants to admit: the hardest part of research was never the data collection mechanism. It was always asking the right question, to the right person, and knowing what to do with the answer.

A visitor telling you, unprompted, exactly why they didn’t come back to an exhibition, that’s not a data point you can synthesise convincingly, and it’s not one an algorithm reliably knows to chase down with a good follow-up question. Fifteen years in, the single most valuable thing Zing does hasn’t moved an inch: sitting with someone, in person or on a call, and being curious enough, and skilled enough, to get past the polite answer to the real one.

Clients haven’t fundamentally changed what they need either. Event organisers still want to know the same things they wanted to know in 2011: why did people come, why will they come back, why did the exhibitor renew (or not), and what would actually move the needle on all of it. The tools for finding that out have multiplied. The judgement required to interpret it hasn’t got any less important, if anything, in a world drowning in dashboards and AI-generated summaries, the ability to say “here’s what actually matters, and here’s why” is worth more than ever.

And relationships haven’t changed either. the clients who matter are still the ones built on trust over years, not the ones won on a slick pitch deck.

Why we’re still going strong
Fifteen years, one industry-wide upheaval in methodology, one pandemic, one regulatory earthquake, one AI revolution and Zing is still here, still specialising in the niche that started it all: events and exhibitions. Not because the niche stayed easy, but because the fundamentals of good research, curiosity, rigour, and genuinely caring what the answer turns out to be, never went out of fashion, no matter what was collecting the data.

Here’s to the next fifteen. Cake first, though.

Posted by Lisa Holt, Founder/CEO