We’re launching something new: Dose of Reality
A new business with a new offering
We’ve got something important to share.
We’re launching a new business called Dose of Reality.
And if you subscribe to Meet the 85%, we’d really like you to subscribe to Dose of Reality too.
Not instead of this newsletter, but in addition to this newsletter.
Because the two businesses do different jobs, and will deliver twice the value into your inboxes.
And, importantly, Meet the 85% is not going anywhere. In fact, it is stronger than it has ever been.
Every year since we launched, the work has got better, the thinking has got sharper, the client conversations have become more interesting, and our belief in the value of real human understanding has only grown.
Meet the 85% will continue to do what it does best: bespoke ethnographic research, strategy and human understanding projects for brands, agencies and organisations that want to get closer to real people across the UK.
That work continues - we still want those conversations and we still want those briefs. Because we’re enjoying it immensely.
We still want to visit homes, meet people, listen properly, and help clients understand the lives, behaviours, contradictions and contexts that shape mainstream Britain.
Working on Meet the 85% over the past few years, our work has taught us something else: Brands and agencies need more reality than the traditional project model can always give them.
The problem with reality
The need for real human understanding has never been clearer.
Businesses have more data than ever.
More dashboards.
More AI tools.
More social listening.
More trend reports.
More synthetic audiences.
More synthetic personas.
More quick answers.
But many are still making decisions from a distance.
Away from the homes, routines, pressures, trade-offs, beliefs, jokes, frustrations, worries and contradictions that shape how people actually live.
That is the gap we keep seeing between strategists, agencies and brands and and their customers.
A gap between the way brands imagine people, and the way people actually live.
A gap between what businesses measure, and what people feel.
A gap between what people say in research, and what they do in real life.
A gap between the clean language of strategy and the messy reality of homes across the UK.
We call that the Reality Gap.
Meet the 85% was built to help close that gap through bespoke projects.
Dose of Reality is being built to close it in a different way.
What is Dose of Reality?
Dose of Reality is a new research and insight platform built from real people’s lives, voices, homes, views, behaviours and contradictions all across the UK.
Real video.
Real audio.
Real photographs.
Real people.
Real contexts.
The aim is to create a searchable, growing bank of human reality that brands and agencies can access, explore and use to improve research, strategy, creative development, audience understanding and decision-making.
It uses AI, but not to invent synthetic people.
Not to create fake audiences.
Not to replace real lives with polished personas.
Dose of Reality uses AI to help users access the real human material inside the platform.
To search it.
Organise it.
Retrieve it.
Make sense of it.
Bring it back into the room when teams are making decisions.
We do not believe the future of research should be a race to create more convincing synthetic people, we believe the future of research is using AI to help people access more human reality.
How is it different from Meet the 85%?
Meet the 85% is a bespoke research business.
Dose of Reality is a searchable platform of human reality.
Meet the 85% helps clients answer specific questions through tailored ethnographic research projects.
Dose of Reality is being built to give users faster, broader, ongoing access to real human material across lots of lives, topics, places and contexts.
Meet the 85% is deep, bespoke and project-led.
Dose of Reality is designed to be searchable, reusable and always growing.
Meet the 85% takes clients into real people’s lives.
Dose of Reality is being built to make that kind of reality quicker to access, revisit and use over time.
They are connected by the same belief: real people matter.
But they both do it in slightly different ways.
Why now?
Because the world is moving quickly in the wrong direction.
The marketing and research industries are under pressure to be faster, cheaper and more efficient.
Understandable, yes, but the danger is that, in the rush for speed, we lose touch with the very people brands exist to serve.
Synthetic data will be useful in places.
AI will be useful in places.
Dashboards, surveys, panels and social listening all have roles to play.
But none of them should become an excuse to stop listening to real people.
Because real people are not neat.
They contradict themselves.
They change their minds.
They say one thing and do another.
They care about things brands never ask about.
They ignore things brands spend months obsessing over.
They make decisions in homes, cars, shops, WhatsApp groups, workplaces, pubs, kitchens, bedrooms and family conversations.
They do not live in categories.
They live in life.
That is what Dose of Reality is being built around.
What will the Dose of Reality newsletter cover?
The Dose of Reality newsletter will not just be a company update.
It will be a place where we share thinking about the future of research, strategy, AI, real people and British life.
We’ll be writing about why real human understanding still matters in a world of synthetic shortcuts.
We’ll explain how better access to real lives can help agencies, strategists, planners, researchers and marketers do better work.
We’ll share anonymised Reality Signals from conversations and visits around the UK: what people are worried about, what they are ignoring, what they are watching, buying, avoiding, feeling and quietly changing.
We’ll talk about the process of building the platform too: what we are learning, what we are getting wrong, what we are testing, and what it means to try and build a business around real human understanding.
Some posts will be about research.
Some will be about AI.
Some will be about Britain.
Some will be about brands.
Some will be about the gap between what people say and what they do.
All of them will come back to the same belief: if you want to understand people, you have to keep people in the process.
Why we’d like you to subscribe
If you subscribe to Meet the 85%, there is a good chance you already care about real human understanding.
You probably care about what is really going on in the UK.
You probably care about the gap between brands and people.
You probably care about better research, sharper strategy and more useful insight.
That is why we think you’ll be interested in Dose of Reality.
We are not asking you to leave Meet the 85%.
We are asking you to come with us into the next part of the journey.
Meet the 85% will continue.
Dose of Reality is the new venture we are building alongside it.
One is bespoke.
One is a platform.
Both are built around the same conviction: the best thinking starts with reality.
So please subscribe to the Dose of Reality newsletter.
And if you know someone in strategy, planning, research, marketing, insight, innovation, media, AI or brand who you think would be interested, please forward this to them too.
Dose of Reality is about real human insight for a synthetic age.
We’d like you to be part of it.