What we do

 

It’s pretty simple:

• Our members fill out surveys to get cash & rewards
• We analyze the survey responses for brand owners & media agencies (our clients)
• We help website owners market their traffic to advertisers
• We help advertisers find the best websites for their products
• We use bullet points (sentences starting with little dots)

Our members get great rewards
Our clients (the brand owners & media agencies) get great information
Our website partners get more money for their work


So everybody wins!


We also have an educational mission. We want more people to learn and understand research, statistics, polling, and how results are used in modern communications. Every day, people try to sell us things, vote for them, or make us believe something using fancy numbers . But few people really understand how to interpret those numbers.

This makes it easier for  people to be fooled, and that’s not good for a healthy society. So we’re trying to do our part by making understanding statistics and math fun and interesting – for more, check out our educational stuff section.

We do several types of surveys:

• Member profiles: demographics, psychographics, media habits
• Product categories: knowledge, attitudes and practices for different products
• Entertainment & topical: fun and newsworthy items to see what people are thinking
• Custom-designed surveys: tailored to the needs of our clients

Click here to for more about the surveys

The surveys

We do the following types of surveys:

• Member profiles:


• Demographics: these are standard profile descriptions like age, sex, education and location. They are not terribly helpful in marketing since not all men or 20-35 year olds or whatever behave the same, but they’re easy to measure so advertisers tend to use them a lot for segmentation


• Psychographics: these try to measure how you think. It’s much more useful than demographics in trying to sell you stuff, but it’s not so easy to measure. Lots of research firms make up psychographic (or behavioral) segments; ours are based on Carl Jung’s theories of how the mind works. These are much better tested than most other tools, so we think they’re better than what the other guys made up.


• Media habits: advertisers need to understand where to advertise, so we ask about what magazines you read, tv shows you watch, websites you visit and so on. Nothing really complicated here.


• Product categories: we ask for your knowledge (what do you know), attitudes (what do you think) and practices (what do you do) regarding different brands along four major product areas – fast moving consumer goods (FMCG – stuff you buy fairly often like groceries or soap), large purchases like a car or a refrigerator, financial services like bank accounts or credit cards, and technology related items like mobile phones or internet services. We ask about this stuff because these are our major clients – they advertise a lot so need to know what you’re thinking.


• Entertainment & topical: We think it’s fun to see who and what is popular or what people think about recent news events. We don’t make any money off this stuff, it’s there to share. It’s not all about money, you know, we like to have some fun too!


• Custom-designed surveys: sometimes clients ask us for specific research, like “hey, do you think 25-30 year old guys would buy underwear without a fly?” In that case, we have to develop a new survey since it doesn’t fit the standard product categories . Usually people get extra bonus points or cash for these surveys, but you have to be invited - like in this example, only 25-30 year old guys would be invited.

Who we are and why we’re doing this

We are nerds – we like data, we like research, we like analytics, we like numbers and math, we like the internet
We are also entrepreneurs – we’re looking to build an interesting business and (we hope) make some cash

We noticed that lots of people are going online in Thailand, but there’s not much internet business going on
About 15-20% of Thais use the internet, but online advertising in Thailand is only 1% of all advertising
Compare that with China, where internet usage is about the same as Thailand, but online ads are 4.2% of all ads
Or compare with India, where the online ad spend is about the same as Thailand, but only about 5% of people are online
Given Thailand’s online population, there really should be a lot more online marketing going on, so what’s the problem?

We think the reason online marketing hasn’t taken off in Thailand is because online marketing is about data analysis
The big difference between online and traditional media is interaction, which means you can collect data
If you can analyze this data, you can improve your marketing – that’s been the big promise of on online marketing

But in Thailand, we don’t see many people using a very data-intensive approach to marketing, online or offline
The biggest Thai websites are still relying on banner ads and CPM rates while the rest of the world has left these behind

So we’re taking a very data-intensive approach to online business – collecting survey data to create market research and using that data to generate sales leads online. We think this approach will boost online marketing in Thailand

And there’s our educational mission. For more on that, check out our educational stuff section.

We really love this stuff, so if you’re interested, contact us and let’s talk more about it!

The Roomai management team
Dev Appanah – the innovation dude
Pat Supaoath – the website partnership guy
Pippa – the marketing and advertising chick
Dr. Amitava Biswas – the advisor