How a research firm turned display advertising into a live data collection channel.
With custom-built interactive survey creatives in three languages and DESSY's audience targeting, the team collected 1.6 million user responses across MENA - at under $0.50 per interaction, with per-question answer breakdowns delivered back for analysis.
Read the resultsTraditional research is slow, expensive and rarely reaches enough people.
The firm runs surveys on behalf of clients across very different categories - EV, automotive, clothing, AI - each needing responses from a specific type of consumer, each on a quarterly cycle.
Conventional research methods made that hard. Panels are expensive per respondent and skew toward people who habitually take surveys. Recruitment takes weeks, which sits badly against a quarterly cadence. And sample sizes are usually small enough that clients question whether findings hold - a problem that compounds when the audience is niche, like EV intenders or early AI adopters.
MENA added a further complication. A survey only produces reliable data if the respondent fully understands the question, which meant running in Arabic and Turkish alongside English rather than treating English as a regional default. Every question and answer option had to exist in multiple language versions, and budget had to be split so the local-language versions carried real weight instead of running as a token layer.
From research questions to structured response data.
Build the survey into the ad
Custom-develop interactive creatives carrying the client's actual questions and answer options - so the ad unit itself is the survey instrument, not a click-through to one.
Produce every study in the respondent's language
Build each survey in English across MENA, in Arabic for Arabic-speaking markets, and in Turkish for Turkey - with Arabic carrying 50% of budget in its markets, so local-language responses form a substantial share of the sample rather than a fraction of it.
Target the right respondent per study
Define audiences to match each research brief, so an EV study reaches vehicle intenders and an apparel study reaches a different profile entirely - varying the sample by category as well as by market.
Deliver at sample-size scale across MENA
Run through DESSY DSP across the region, using reach to build a sample large enough that findings hold up under client scrutiny.
Sample size at media scale. Cost per response well below panel rates.
new unique users reached
Million interactions delivered
cost per interaction
uplift in interactions
reduction in cost
in three languages for research collection