Listen for the conference call

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Spectator readers among you may remember me enthusing about a new technology called the Meeting Owl. A video-conferencing device costing approximately £800, it was created by a brilliant group of ex-MIT engineers.

And now the latest fruit of their genius arrives in the UK in the shape of a new, upgraded version of the Owl, called The Meeting Owl Pro. This will cost under £1,000, or $999 in the US. Now I owe you full disclosure here: the company has generously sent me an example to try. That said, even after compensating for reciprocity bias and my natural propensity for gadget-evangelism, I cannot think of any new technology more useful to people working in market research.

If you want to record groups, broadcast live groups or participate in meetings remotely, it could change your life – and wow your clients.

Simply place the device in the middle of a table (seating two to 10 people) and plug it into a power socket. It then plugs into a laptop USB just like any external webcam. Inside the device are three speakers and an array of eight directional microphones. On the crown of the Owl’s head is its pièce de résistance, a 360° HD 1080p camera.

Using standard software, you can then record a physical meeting, or connect live to your usual video-conferencing software. The Owl’s party trick is automatically to zoom in on whoever around the table is talking at the time. Cleverer still, if two or three people are engaged in an exchange, even if seated 180° apart from each other, it will create a split-screen or triptych in real time to show the people in close-up.

Think of it as an AI cameraman. Since the view is dynamic, it is far more watchable than anything recorded with a locked-off camera. And because this device sits in the middle of a table, it preserves the anthropologically natural shape of a meeting, rather than forcing everyone to sit in rows as if on a bus. (There is, after all, a reason why they were called the Knights of the Round Table, not the Knights of the Conference-Style Seating.)

Ogilvy bought 10 of the original Owls for video calls and will soon buy many more of the new version. Elsewhere, the Owl has been used in West Virginia to host remote group psychotherapy sessions for people suffering from opioid addiction.

Now, in recommending this device to market researchers, I said I had no ulterior motive. That’s not quite true. First of all, if you do contact the makers, tell them Rory sent you, just in case they want to send me more free things in the future. But, more importantly, if you do buy one and find interesting and inventive new uses for it, let me know on Twitter at @rorysutherland. There’s a reason I want to hear.

For some time, I have been convinced that video-conferencing technology should have been used to revolutionise the way in which the marketing services industry works.

Yet we have so far failed to adapt our behaviour.

To give one example: for many years, I have instinctively believed that what are commonly called brainstorms would be much better if, rather than being one meeting, they took place as two meetings a week apart.

The first meeting could be for immersion; then, we should have a period of time to allow ideas to ferment before attempting ideation at a second meeting. The reason this never happens is that travel costs force us to try to cram too much into a single session. If one meeting takes place remotely, this problem would go away.

In so many ways, our industry could use technology to enjoy a significant improvement in productivity. Yet our collective work behaviour, which is riddled with effort-signalling, presenteeism and many other biases, is proving highly resistant to change.

So, if you do find a better way of working, it benefits all of us if you share it widely.

This article was first published in the January 2020 issue of Impact.