Verve Wins Awards for Breakthrough Methodology & Innovation.
Charlotte Whittle
We won two awards at this year’s ESOMAR Awards: the Breakthrough Research Methodology Award with BBC Audiences, and the Tony Cowling Innovation Award with Leeds Building Society.
The two wins recognise very different applications of AI-powered insight – but share the same principle: combining AI with human expertise to solve client challenges in ways that weren’t previously possible.
Breakthrough Research Methodology Award – with BBC Audiences
Our work with BBC Audiences combined Verve’s proprietary machine-learning engine, Maven, with expert human semiotic analysis to decode the visual and cultural language driving engagement with food content on social media.
AI enabled the team to analyse 5,000 Instagram images at a scale, speed and depth that wouldn’t previously have been possible, while Verve’s semioticians brought the human interpretation needed to understand what those patterns mean. The resulting framework helped reshape BBC Food’s social content strategy, contributing to a 19.7% year-on-year uplift in Instagram video views, and has since been scaled across nine further BBC content categories.
Tony Cowling Innovation Award – with Leeds Building Society
Our work with Leeds Building Society used Verve Intelligent Personas & Simulations (VIPS) to transform how customer communications can be developed and tested – beginning with the particularly complex challenge of communicating with customers experiencing financial vulnerability.
Built from real customer insight, regulatory frameworks and expert knowledge, the simulations give the team an always-on capability to evaluate and improve communications for clarity, compliance, cognitive load and emotional impact.
The result: in just two months, Leeds Building Society delivered more than 3x its previous annual volume of communications testing, with the same pass/fail outcomes as traditional qualitative research. The capability has now expanded beyond vulnerable customers to support communications across LBS’s wider customer base.
Congratulations to the BBC Audiences and Leeds Building Society teams involved.
