The Campaign

The pace of technology is forcing marketers to make decisions faster, but research isn’t keeping up. Black Mirror is a response to these increased demands on delivering fast, quality market intelligence that drives immediate business performance. We know that people are more likely to capture their true nature in the moment of behaviour, rather than on reflection. In order to harness this ‘power of now’ we needed an enabler – technology or more specifically, the smart phone. The app sends out time sensitive ‘missions’ that can be tailored to any objective, whether canvassing nationwide sentiment toward a hot topic, tracking key brand metrics, mapping a customer’s experience or monitoring broader cultural attitudes that are shaping the future. Its intention is to put genuine and actionable insight in the hands of decision makers, helping them make smarter decisions at pace across any field be it business, creativity, government or wider social impacts.

Creative Execution

Black Mirror recruits users via our partnerships with expert panel providers. Users are then served up a relevant mission with a list of tasks to perform in a given time frame. There are four types of tasks; take a photo, record a video, freeform text fields and an emotional selection tool.   All answers and media are stored on the user’s device until they’re comfortable to upload them for review and they’re notified once the mission is accepted based on clear guidelines we provide. Our back end console allows us to create, edit, moderate and synthesise missions and we can modify each mission to fit any research brief. The app is built natively for iOS. It’s available on Android in the coming months. The admin console is a browser based application. The techstack is iOS Objective C (Native), RestKit, AngularJS, NodeJS, Redis, MySQL & Amazon Web Services.

Black Mirror launched in May 2016 with a major client. We have a revenue pipeline that’s enabled us to scale Black Mirror to become the insights incubator for Proximity and BBDO worldwide. Closer to home, Black Mirror has created fresh opportunities in our agency: • New hires in ethnographic and UX research. • New processes in how we generate, report and deliver quality insights at speed. • Stronger relationships with clients in how we work together to deliver commercial return. • A projected year one revenue of $500,000. It has changed the way our agency makes money – moving from head hours to selling IP through the innovations we create. Black Mirror redefines the boundaries of market research allowing us to tap into any age, demographic and geography in the world. It will continue to evolve to include the latest technology like facial recognition, heart rate analysis and gesture recognition.

Black Mirror is to focus groups what email is to snail mail. A faster, cheaper and more spontaneous alternative, at our fingertips. Black Mirror is a new rapid insights smartphone app that reduces the costs and lead times associated with traditional research. The app uses the latest research methods to deliver ethnographic research at scale via user-generated video, photos and self-reporting to deliver greater accuracy, reach, speed and depth of insight. Having an instant and continual window into people’s worlds provides unique insights into how we influence behaviour and drive an unfair commercial return for our clients.