As the workforce becomes increasingly diverse—not just in terms of race and ethnicity, but also in education, language, and lived experiences—brands must rethink how they communicate internally. It's not enough to craft a compelling message if it isn’t understood, or worse, if no one cares.

For communication to be effective, it must be accessible, relevant, and actionable. Employees need to clearly grasp what the message means for them and what, if anything, they’re expected to do next. Without that clarity and connection, even the most well-crafted message falls flat.

Effective internal communication begins with empathy, which starts with recognizing the diversity of today’s workforce. Across a single organization, employees may span multiple job shifts, job functions, languages, education levels, and cultural backgrounds. Inclusive communication must be multilingual, multi-channel, and well-timed to meet people where they are, both physically and cognitively.

Traditional top-down communications often fall short because they’re designed for a single type of audience. However, when messages are designed with a broader range of identities in mind, and supported by data, feedback, and direct human connection, they drive authentic engagement and build trust. Employees feel seen, heard, and valued, and they recognize the company’s effort to include them.

When language barriers exist, translating core messages into employees’ native languages and using transcreation to adapt them for cultural context becomes essential. Communication plans must consider how different audiences will interpret a message, what cultural context might alter its meaning, and, most importantly, why they should care.

In this episode of The New Mainstream podcast, Jenna Marston, Communications Manager at BASF, shares how she uses inclusive, multilingual strategies to engage employees across geographies, leveraging an approach rooted in active listening, cultural awareness, and authentic connection.

Meet Jenna:

Jenna Marston is the BASF Communications Manager for Freeport, Texas. In this role she leads crisis management, government and community relations, and employee engagement. Prior to her joining the BASF team, Jenna was the Global Marketing and Communications Leader for the Corteva Agriscience Biologicals Business, collaborating across international sites to align corporate and product brand positioning while leading communications strategies to accelerate business results. 

With a belief that we can accomplish the greatest challenges of today together, Jenna’s career has focused on driving impact at corporations dedicated to supporting the harmonization of human health and productivity to solve some of the world’s greatest challenges.

Let’s face it! Traditional research panels aren’t cutting it anymore.

For years, market research has relied on large pools of pre-profiled individuals, often referred to as “panels,” to generate insights at scale. And while panels gave us reach and reliability, they also lulled the industry into a comfort zone, where respondents became data points, not people.

But the world has shifted. Audiences have evolved. Attention spans have shortened. Expectations have skyrocketed.

At ThinkNow, we believe it’s time to rethink how we engage respondents not as panelists, but as people.

The Problem with the “Professional Respondent”

You know the type, the person who’s in 15 panels, knows the right answers, and is simply rushing to the incentive. They’re the product of outdated engagement models where surveys are transactional, not relational.

This results in flat data, low authenticity, and insights that don’t reflect reality, especially when researching diverse, underrepresented communities where trust and context matter.

What Needs to Change?

The industry must move from mass reach to meaningful engagement. That means:

• Contextual Relevance: Surveys that reflect people’s lived experiences, languages, and cultural realities.
• Trust First: Especially with multicultural audiences, engagement starts with trust, not a survey link.
• Mobile-First, Human-Centric Design: It’s 2025 — stop designing surveys like it’s 2009. Respondents expect intuitive, mobile-first experiences.
• Rewarding Value, Not Just Time: Incentives should feel fair and respectful, not like a barter system for opinions.

Turning Panels into Communities

The online sample team at ThinkNow is building more than panels. We’re nurturing communities of people who want to be heard and willingly share their opinions, providing zero-party data brands can trust. Our approach combines cultural fluency, smart segmentation, and behavioural insights to go beyond checkbox answers.

We're also exploring new frontiers, including synthetic data modeling, AI-driven recontact strategies, and authentic content integration that makes surveys feel less like tests and more like conversations.

Because at the end of the day, insights don’t come from checkboxes. They come from connection.

The Way Forward

It’s time we ask ourselves: Are we collecting data, or are we listening? The future of market research lies in making every respondent feel like their voice matters, because it does. Let’s ditch the dusty “panelist” label and treat our respondents like what they truly are: individuals with stories, context, and value.

When we do that, the insights take care of themselves.

People make assumptions. While that may seem like a common character flaw, it can have serious implications on brand perception. When marketers rely on outdated stereotypes and beliefs about the American public, they are ignoring the complex reality in which consumers live. Today’s consumer is far more nuanced than the binary labels imposed upon them, e.g., Democrat vs. Republican. Clinging to binary frameworks in a rapidly shifting cultural and political landscape leaves brands vulnerable to costly missteps.

To avoid pitfalls, brands must do the work upfront. Trust in traditional institutions may be eroding, but people still want something to believe in. This creates opportunities for marketers to partner with market researchers to do a deep dive into the cultural drivers that activate and define the audiences being engaged.

But navigating today’s sensitivities requires more than curiosity. It demands intentionality. Brands must know who they are, know who they’re speaking to, and test their messaging, values, and assumptions across lines of identity. Many Americans share core values like freedom and fairness, but how those values are interpreted depends on who you ask. That’s why words matter.

There’s often a gap between what brands think their words mean, what they intend them to mean, and what people actually hear. Closing that gap is critical. But brands that attempt to please everyone risk saying nothing at all. Instead, marketers are encouraged to double down on their core identity and speak directly to their audience, even if it means not appealing to everyone.

In this episode of The New Mainstream podcast, Julia Glidden, Group President, U.S. Public Affairs and Ruth Moss, SVP, Senior Client Officer at Ipsos North America unpack the findings from the newly released “Know the New America” report that explores how political, cultural, and economic shifts are transforming the consumer and business landscape.

For many entrepreneurs, success isn’t just about top-line growth. It’s seizing opportunities to break barriers and shape their identities as cultural and economic drivers. That’s especially true within the Latino community, where small businesses continue to power economic growth in both the U.S. and Mexico. But thriving in today’s marketplace requires more than determination and grit. On a practical level, it takes access to digital tools.

One of the biggest barriers for Latino entrepreneurs remains the digital gap. During the pandemic, many small business owners, particularly in underrepresented communities, found themselves forced to adapt overnight. They made a digital leap in three months, setting up e-commerce and learning video conferencing, that others took years to accomplish. Their determination highlights a crucial truth for marketers: to reach multicultural audiences, you must meet them where they are, not where you assume they should be.

Adaptation means more than bridging the digital divide, however. Global companies have traditionally viewed Mexico as just a source of inexpensive labor or materials. But today, it’s a hub for innovation, driving change not just in Mexico but worldwide. For brands, this means rethinking how they engage with the Mexican and broader Latin American markets, seeing them not just as suppliers but as partners and sources of influence.

In this new episode of The New Mainstream podcast, Israel Serna, entrepreneur and Partner Marketing Manager at Autodesk, shares how his work in digital education, entrepreneurship, and cross-border collaboration is reframing what it means to do business in a global, multicultural economy.

Meet Our Guest: Israel Serna 

Digital Marketing Strategist | Small Business Advocate | Bilingual Trainer & Speaker 

Israel Serna is a bilingual marketing strategist, brand consultant, and speaker with over 15 years of experience spanning tech, small business development, SaaS, and the design and interiors space. His expertise includes partner marketing, digital strategy, brand positioning, and content development—helping businesses and creators connect authentically with diverse audiences. 

Known for blending creative vision with data-driven insights, Israel approaches every project with cultural fluency, empathy, and a belief in purposeful growth. In addition to his marketing work, he curates antique collections and supports design-focused ventures bridging the past and present. 

In a digital environment where attention spans are measured in seconds, traditional metrics like clicks and views offer an incomplete picture. They tell us what users did but not what they saw, felt, or understood. Which parts of the creative actually registered with them? Did the ad spark interest, confusion, or indifference?

That’s where online neuroresearch comes in. By analyzing visual attention, emotional response, and cognitive load, marketers can move beyond surface-level performance to discover how audiences truly engage with content. The result is a sharper creative, stronger messaging, and a deeper understanding of what drives real impact.

Technology Reveals What Traditional Metrics Miss

With today's digital tools, it’s possible to conduct neuroscience-based research entirely online — no lab or specialized equipment required. Technologies like remote eye tracking, facial coding, and EEG sensors can now be deployed directly from a user’s computer or mobile device in a natural and familiar environment.

This shift enables marketers to evaluate a wide range of assets, from video ads and social media content to display banners, landing pages, and full user journeys. By going digital, researchers get instant insight into what captures attention, what emotions are triggered, and how cognitively taxing the experience is, all without leaving the screen.

Actionable Insights Before Launch

Unlike traditional metrics that show what happened, digital neuroresearch helps us understand why it happened. We can identify which visual elements attract attention, when users disconnect or feel confused, and which moments spark positive or negative emotional responses.

These insights empower teams to make data-driven adjustments to campaigns before they go live, such as reworking layouts, refining messaging, tweaking video pacing, or emphasizing emotionally resonant elements. It’s especially effective for early-stage concept testing, A/B comparisons, message validation, and UX optimization.

Seeing Beyond the Obvious

At ThinkNow, we integrate these tools into digital studies to capture real-time, real-human responses. That is, what users see, feel, and process as they interact with advertising campaigns. It’s a smarter way to move beyond vanity metrics like clicks and views, and uncover insights that drive ad effectiveness.

If you’re interested in applying this technology to your next study, reach out. We’d love to help you discover what your campaigns are truly communicating.

Contact: ventasfullservice@thinknow.com

Inclusive marketing isn't just about doing the right thing—it’s about doing what works. When companies fail to speak the cultural language of their audiences, they risk more than lost market share. Brands lose trust, relevance, and relationships. But when inclusion is rooted in strategy rather than performative gestures, it becomes a powerful business driver for long-term growth.

Even in industries not typically associated with emotional connection, like utilities or manufacturing, marketers can find more meaningful ways to engage. That starts with listening to real people, using data to understand their needs, and communicating in ways that reflect their everyday lives. The goal isn’t to craft the perfect message for everyone as much as it is to show each group that they matter.

The same applies inside the workplace. Inclusion has to go beyond written policies and procedures and glossy posters on the wall. It must be part of everyday actions being taken and decisions made, showing up in how people are treated, included, and supported. That means being mindful of the different life experiences employees bring, whether they have children or not, are married or single, or navigate life in a myriad of other ways, and ensuring every team member feels valued. When inclusion is lived, not just stated, it creates a culture where people feel safe to contribute, grow, and thrive.

In this episode of The New Mainstream Podcast, Crystal Marie McDaniels, Senior Manager of Product Marketing & Acquisition (B2B) at Duke Energy, shares how leading with inclusion in the marketplace and the workplace builds stronger brands and better teams.

At ThinkNow, we’ve spent over a decade building DigayGane^TM, our proprietary online consumer panel designed to connect brands with diverse, hard-to-reach audiences in the U.S. and Latin America. Today, DigayGane^TM powers thousands of interviews monthly and fuels insights for Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and media partners alike. But behind the clean dashboards and seamless user experience lies a constant battle: maintaining data integrity in an ecosystem vulnerable to bots, bad actors, and evolving fraud tactics.

This blog shares what we’ve learned over seven years of defending the integrity of the Hispanic online panel. These lessons have shaped DigayGane^TM into one of the most trusted multicultural research panels in the industry.

The Paradox of Accelerated Growth

When I joined the company in late 2017, DigayGane^TM was in the midst of scaling its reach and capabilities. We celebrated every new signup because expansion meant greater statistical representativeness, better segmentation, and, of course, higher revenue. However, the joy brought by volume came with a silent threat: fraud. The success of our panelist recruitment campaigns—referral programs, programmatic ads, social media promotions—turned into open hallways for bots, cloned accounts, and users who discovered how to “farm” rewards without adding any value.

As fraud threats evolved, so did the need for a more strategic approach to panel protection. Being appointed Panel Security Director wasn’t just about guarding credentials. It meant designing a socio-technical system that rewarded genuine panelists while deterring, detecting, and eliminating opportunists. This blog chronicles that journey, from early failures and hard lessons to the solutions that today form a highly effective three-phase model.

I’ll also outline the challenges on the horizon, like the rise of generative AI to global data regulation, and the strategic ideals that, in my opinion, will shape the next decade of digital market research.

Understanding the Anatomy of Fraud

In 2018, our dashboards showed seemingly healthy indicators: completion rates above 80% and average survey times below estimates. It was tempting to call it a “success.” The wake-up call came when blatant inconsistencies, contradictory and nonsensical answers, began to appear. This forced us to acknowledge that speed is not always synonymous with efficiency. Sometimes it’s pure fabrication.

Identified Fraud Typologies

1. Mass registration bots: scripts that auto-fill forms and confirm disposable emails.
2. Human “survey farms”: groups exchanging credentials and rapidly responding with copy-pasted generic text.
3. Incentive hunters: real users creating dozens of identities to multiply redeemable points.

The first lesson was paradigm-shifting as it revealed that fraud is not just a technical issue, but also an economic and sociological one. The attacker values the incentive and assesses the cost of outsmarting us. That’s why our countermeasures had to raise the “cost” of attacking while minimizing friction for legitimate users.

Phase 1 – Reinforcing the Entry Gate

Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) at Signup

We adopted a simple approach. The more dynamic the verification, the lower the chance of automated replication. Implementing SMS-based 2FA resulted in a 38% reduction in the creation of profiles using temporary emails within the first three months. The key metric wasn’t just the drop in fraudulent volume, but also the conversion rate and retention. After some UX improvements, we lost just three percentage points of legitimate signups, an acceptable cost for the benefit gained.

Real-Time Geolocation

We inserted a microservice that, before confirming registration, validates the IP and compares the declared country with physical location. Of 10,000 daily attempts, 7% came from VPNs jumping regions to access higher-paying studies. Automatic blocking, combined with manual review, created a visible deterrent: after six weeks, proxy attempts dropped to 2%.

Welcome Call

Many in the industry see welcome calls as costly. For us, it was qualitative gold. Over 90% of respondents demonstrated genuine intent. Evasiveness was highly correlated with low-quality scores in later rounds. The call also revealed linguistic nuances that enriched our demographic questionnaire. For example, we learned that certain anglicisms confused lexical verification algorithms in the southern border area near Mexico. We retrained our models and improved dialect matching accuracy by five percentage points.

Phase 2 – Ongoing Panel Monitoring

Geo-Verification via Newsletters

We turned the monthly mailing into a digital “proof of life.” We added tracking pixels to log opens and IPs, without compromising privacy (only storing partial hashes). If a panelist fails to open three newsletters or opens them from inconsistent locations, they are quarantined. This practice reduced zombie email inventory by 26% and cleaned our base for targeted campaigns.

Device Fingerprinting

We implemented device fingerprinting, which combines user-agent, screen resolution, time zone, and 40 other attributes. When the same device tries to register multiple identities, the system applies elasticity: two profiles are allowed (e.g., siblings), but three or more trigger an audit flag. Thanks to this policy, we detected a cluster in China operating 120 profiles pretending to be in California. We dismantled it in under 48 hours.

Adaptive Captchas and S2S Redirects

We migrated from reCAPTCHA v2 to an adaptive system triggered only on suspicious events, preserving ease of access for legitimate users. In parallel, we consolidated all survey redirects into an encrypted SHA-1 S2S bus. Traffic no longer exposed tokens in the frontend, and we blocked malicious URL injections that were stealing incentives. Today, every survey completion generates a checksum validated in real-time, saving 60% compared to the previous architecture.

Phase 3 – Post-Survey Safeguards and Community Reinforcement

Data Reconciliation

We trained a gradient boosting model to evaluate semantic coherence, item-level response time, and cross-survey similarity. Responses in the bottom 10th quality percentile are queued for human review. We discard an average of 3.2% of interviews per study, resulting in a 12-point increase in our Net Promoter Score and higher client satisfaction in 2024.

Social Media Groups as a Strategic Trust Layer

We created closed communities on Facebook and TikTok where top panelists receive previews of new projects and participate in AMA sessions with researchers. This “trust ring” serves two functions:

• Social identity: peer pressure discourages fraud; it’s hard to lie when your reputation is on the line.
• Early warning: members themselves report fake links or impersonations. This is how we detected an “incentive phishing” scam on WhatsApp and deployed countermeasures within two hours.

Emerging Challenges: Facing the Next Tech Curve

1. AI-Powered Synthetic Identities: Generative models can now produce hyper-realistic faces and voices. I foresee attackers generating “digital twins” with seemingly valid documents. In response, we will invest in passive biometric verification—specifically, micro-expression analysis in video selfies—and decentralized proof-of-personhood using blockchain technology.
2. Contextual Content Automation: Tools like GPT can generate coherent text to fill open-ended questions, bypassing traditional lexical filters. It will be essential to combine stylometric analysis with AI signature detection (perplexity, repetition, burstiness) and, most importantly, change the type of question: incorporate multimedia, local-context microtasks, or verifiable personal references.
3. Privacy Regulation and Multi-Jurisdictional Compliance: With the EU AI Act and national frameworks, such as the revised U.S. Federal Data Protection Law, coming into force, we’ll need to constantly audit the data custody chain. One strategy will be building “clean rooms” where analysis occurs without exposing PII.
4. Panelist Fatigue and the Attention Economy: More filters mean more friction. The challenge will be choosing meaningful friction. We’re piloting variable incentives based on “historical quality” and transparent gamification: the more reliable your track record, the fewer authentication steps you see. This turns security into a positive experience.

Recommendations for Industry Peers

• Security equals UX: if your defense layer causes 20% abandonment, you haven’t won—you’ve just traded fraud for attrition.
• Iterate fast on “micro-fraud”: resist the urge to build the “perfect wall.” Target the most profitable weak spot this week, measure, learn, and move on.
• Culture of shared data: involve Support, the Product PM, and the Sales team in metric design. Each sees a different angle of the same diamond.
• Transparency with clients: sharing your anti-fraud policy, including numbers and mistakes, builds trust and reduces future external audits.

From Fortress to Resilient Ecosystem

Now active in 17 countries, DigayGane^TM handles thousands of interviews daily, of which less than 3% are flagged for review and only 0.6% are discarded due to confirmed fraud. But the most significant achievement isn’t statistical—it’s cultural. The company now understands that security and quality are inseparable from the value proposition, not just technical appendices.

My journey as Panel Security Director has taught me that the fight against fraud is a relay race, not a sprint. To professionals just starting on this path, I’d say, invest in people before tools, document every hypothesis, celebrate small wins, and embrace constructive paranoia. Because, in the end, security is the science of anticipating others’ creativity, and creativity, both good and malicious, never rests.

Want to know more about our advanced anti-fraud solution? ThinkNow Shield combines cutting-edge AI and proprietary tools to safeguard your data. Learn more.