Hiring guide · 4 min read

Advertising & Media Research: 10 Questions to Ask Before You Hire a Research Firm

Ten questions to ask any advertising & media research provider in India before you sign, covering fieldwork, quality, sampling, data security and reporting.

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Quick answer

Before hiring a advertising & media research firm, ask who does the fieldwork, how quality is checked, how the sample is designed, which languages they cover, how data is secured, who writes the report, and what the deliverables include.

At a glance

Guide type: Hiring guide · 4 minute read
Method covered: Advertising & Media Research
Research family: Quantitative research
Typical timeline: 2–4 weeks for a pre-test; continuous for campaign tracking
Typical sample: 150–250 respondents per execution tested, per market
Written for: Buyers running a vendor call · Procurement scoring proposals · First-time commissioners

Key takeaways

Good firms answer these questions confidently
Ask for QC evidence from past projects
Check DPDP Act compliance
Meet the person who will lead your project

Reader intent

Who this guide is for

Three readers arrive here with different problems. Each should be able to act on this page without reading all of it.

Buyers running a vendor call
Questions that reveal whether an agency has actually run advertising & media research at your scale.
Procurement scoring proposals
A way to score the answers rather than the presentation.
First-time commissioners
What good answers sound like, so you can tell them from merely fluent ones.

The 10 questions

Do you run fieldwork in-house in my cities?
How do you verify interviews?
How will you design the sample?
Which languages do you work in?
How do you handle translation?
How is data secured, and are you DPDP compliant?
Who leads the project day to day?
Who writes the report?
What exactly will I receive? (e.g. ad effectiveness scores, creative guidance, media mix insights)
Can I see a sample report?

How Market Research India can help

Market Research India designs and runs advertising & media research projects across 50 Indian cities and 30 industries. A senior research director leads every study, and our own supervised teams handle the fieldwork. You get clear recommendations, not just data tables.

Share your objective and we will send a scoped, fixed-fee proposal within 24 hours, with a recommended method, sample and timeline.

What goes wrong

Common mistakes in advertising & media research

Most disappointing advertising & media research studies fail for reasons that were visible in the design, not in the fieldwork. These are the ones we see most often, and what to do instead.

01
Judging an animatic as finished film
Rough executions under-score on likeability and over-score on message clarity. Read the diagnostics, and compare only against animatic norms.
02
Measuring liking instead of branding
An ad everyone enjoys and nobody attributes to you is a cost. Branded recall and message take-out come before likeability.
03
Exposure without clutter
Showing one ad in isolation inflates recall. Place it in a reel with competitive and category advertising.
04
Post-testing with no baseline
Without a pre-campaign read, any movement can be attributed to anything. Baseline before the first spot airs.
05
Significance claimed on thin bases
A gap between two sub-groups of forty respondents is rarely real. Agree the minimum reportable base before field and grey out everything below it in the tables.
06
A questionnaire nobody piloted
Routing errors, ambiguous scales and a 35-minute runtime are cheap to find in a 30-interview pilot and expensive to find in the full dataset.

Run through this before sign-off

Your checklist before you brief anyone

A working sequence for a advertising & media research project. Most of it costs nothing, and it saves the two weeks a re-field would take.

1
Agree the norm or benchmark the result will be judged against before testing.
2
Expose the execution inside a clutter reel of competitive advertising.
3
Measure branded recall and message take-out before asking about likeability.
4
Test in the languages the media plan will actually run in.
5
Read the diagnostics with the creative team present, so the fix is agreed in the room.
6
Keep the raw data, the syntax and the tables together, so the analysis can be re-run.
7
Agree in writing who acts on each finding, and by when, before the debrief ends.

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Answers

Frequently asked questions

The questions buyers ask us most often before they commission advertising & media research.

Will you answer these questions for us?

Gladly. Ask us on a discovery call.

From guide to project

Where advertising & media research actually gets commissioned

If this guide has settled the method, these are the pages worth opening next: the service itself, and the markets where advertising & media research is most often run for our clients.

Keep exploring

Advertising & Media Research: 10 Questions to Ask Before You Hire a Research Firm

Who this guide is for

The 10 questions

How Market Research India can help

Common mistakes in advertising & media research

Your checklist before you brief anyone

Frequently asked questions

Where advertising & media research actually gets commissioned

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