Abstract
The primary aim of this paper is to draw practitioners’ attention to lesser-known risks of digital marketing research: while it enables quick and low-cost results, quality and reliability are not guaranteed. The paper also surfaces broader consequences of transitioning from traditional research, based on offline investigations and face-to-face interviews carried out by professionals, to digital research. 
 
 The paper presents the results of a survey on a cohort of 200 freelance interviewers working for Italy’s main research institutions, conducted through a self-administered questionnaire. Recently online marketing research, especially through panels, has gained meaningful traction. As demand for traditional marketing research contracts, professional interviewers are experiencing a material drop in requests for their in-field services and a worsening working environment. In return, this affects the quality of on field research they can provide. This is the first study, to the best of the author’s knowledge, where issues and limitations of digital research are studied from the perspective of professional interviewers. 
 
 This study enables managers and organisations that commission marketing research to make more informed decisions when facing the trade-offs between traditional and digital methods. Furthermore, it provides a view on how such choices may impact the future of professional interviewers and their services.
 
  
Highlights
Internet-based technologies have rapidly transformed the relationships between players of the marketing research industry
This study is based on data collected through 200 interviews conducted via a 16-question structured survey administered to a sample of the target population composed of about 3000 professional interviewers (Note 2)
These issues received limited coverage so far, while this paper tackles them from the perspective of professional interviewers—an angle that, to the best of the author, has not been explored before
Summary
Internet-based technologies have rapidly transformed the relationships between players of the marketing research industry. The changes have impacted the step where interviewers connect research companies and their clients with the data sources (respondents) This is a crucial part of the marketing research process because interviewers are the interface between those who have specific information needs and those who have the knowledge to fulfil them (Kumar, Leone, Aaker, & Day, 2020). They contact potential respondents, motivate them to participate in the research, and interact with them to collect the necessary information to answer the questions that the client has addressed to the research company. Between 2012 and 2019 the percentage weight of the cost of telephone interviews has halved from 14% to 7%, in person interviews dropped by 6%, while the share of expenditure for online quantitative marketing research has grown from 9% to 13% (Table 1)
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