In this episode of the Green Book Podcast, Lenny Murphy and guest Rafa Cespedes recap the IIEX LATAM event, discussing the growth of the insights industry in Latin America and the impact of fostering innovation and cross-pollination between Latin American and U.S. markets. They explore how technology, including AI, has transformed the industry, while emphasizing the importance of human connection and cultural understanding. Rafa highlights the challenges and opportunities in adapting to new trends, and how brands must evolve to meet changing consumer needs. They also touch on the value of building a global community and sharing knowledge through collaborative efforts like IIEX events and other industry initiatives.

You can reach out to Rafa on LinkedIn.

Many thanks to Rafa for being our guest. Thanks also to our producer, Natalie Pusch; and our editor, Big Bad Audio.

Hello, everybody. It’s Lenny Murphy with another edition of the Greenbook Podcast. Thank you for taking time out of your busy day to spend it with myself and my guest. And as often happens, we’ve got history here. So, Rafael Cespedes is just an amazing man that we—I have known for about 12 years. The quick story, he invited me to speak at the Chile Market Research Event many years ago. I had never been to Chile. Flew down there, had an amazing, wonderful time with Rafa and other folks like Alex Garnica, and other, kind of, luminaries in the research space.

But probably what’s really the key takeaway is that through that conversation, realized that there was an opportunity to create an event series. And that became IIEX. So really, Rafa is the Godfather of IIEX. He and the team down there got us excited to do the things that we’ve done since then. And as a piece of that, we’ve continued to do IIEX Latin America as an event, which just occurred in Miami. And now we’re going to let Rafa introduce himself. We’re going to talk about that event, and then the future of the industry in Latin America. So Rafa, welcome. How are you?

Hi Lenny. I’m so happy to be with you again. You know, man, I love you, and I learned a lot from you during these 12 years that I can say that changed my life a little bit.

[laugh]. Okay.

This experience that we had together was those, kind of, moments that came in a special moment of your life. I was living my first moment without a job [laugh]. My story came from Cima that was my own company that was acquired by Synovate, and later Ipsos acquired Synovate. And after that, I left the company the same moment that I meet you, and you invited me to this crazy adventure to design something because you saw something good in Latin America. And I really appreciate it because from this moment to now, I am another person.

Really, I am another person. I learned a lot of things, I get a lot of new skills, and our challenge when we started was to show how brilliant things we could found here in Latin America. But at the end, as what I feel during the last week in Miami, that we build a community, an insight community. And this is a wonderful experience when you have a great community to live for, and will live by that.

Absolutely. And I think that was, kind of—so for the audience as well, the thinking was that we were building a community of innovators, so people that had a vision of what the future of the insights industry could look like during a period of pretty significant disruption and transformation. And we always think about North America and Europe as these big drivers of innovation, but what I saw in Latin America was a market that was really interesting because it was fragmented in many ways in terms of the geography, but yet, homogenous in culture, in language, and some of those things, and there are all these pockets of people trying to do cool, interesting new things. And at that point, mostly mobile-first was a dominant trend, and how would we channel that and try to help reinforce it and create, kind of, cross-pollination with the major markets that were US and Europe into this really vibrant, amazing emerging market of LATAM? And I have still a huge fan of that idea. And it’s working would be my take, and I think from the event, where it seems like that community really is making an impact, that vision continues to manifest and make a difference. Is that right?

It’s right. It’s correct. From the first event that we started in São Paulo, in each city that we arrived with the IIEX LATAM, we make a change on this local community because we bring to them the different, kind of, point of view, different point of view of the industry, the technology that work with us during all this journey, that we must to adapt [laugh] always on that. And today we can see that in the different countries that we ran on the IIEX, today we have a community more technical, more adapted to this, and they want more.

So, how have you seen things change? Well, we’ll talk about IIEX LATAM in Miami in just a minute, but let’s set the stage here from those early days of that we had described, kind of, 12 years ago where things were shifting. Kind of, encapsulate what you have, the trends that you have seen change in Latin America as a whole, certainly the Latin American market from an insights standpoint and how that’s influenced North America or other parts of the world. What’s your take, as the expert?

You know, in our beginning, as you say, the mobile-first was one of the trends. But we had another big trends like cheaper, faster, and better, and for myself, those was one of the worst moments of our life. Because [laugh]—

[laugh]. [unintelligible 00:07:17] you go from a qualitative, consultative business, right?

Yeah, because we push a lot of the technology arrived to the industry. We tried to use the budget for that, and all these kind of things. But it was a very good moment for the Latin American in general because this trend pushed us to start to see our industry in a different way. Used to be just a consultant, pen and paper interviews, and the qual has less relevance in that moment to the quant. We normally say that 20 to 80: 80 quant, 20 qual. And today we can see that the world changed.

We still sell focus groups and survey, [laugh] but I think we have a better proposal for that because we are here to make better business, better world, better satisfaction of the necessity of the people. We put the person in the middle and the center of that, all those things changes. I don’t know if I answered your question, but—

You did.

[laugh].

You did.

[unintelligible 00:09:08].

And the same trends here, right? And I think what’s interesting about that is you think—you know, we just get tunnel vision, and we think about the US and Europe, right, where—and we even use these terms, ‘emerging markets,’ for instance, for Latin America, for Africa, even Asia, and that’s more of a methodological perspective, recognize that in some areas, face-to-face and some of those approaches are still absolutely applicable. But technology leveled everybody up, and the ubiquity of technology, it allowed for, again, this, kind of, cross-pollination and creativity where we take these same tools, but apply them to the specific cultural appropriateness, I guess, in each country or region. And the learnings from that.

I think particularly—here’s an observation about Latin America. My perspective is, people matter in Latin America, right? Relationships matter a lot. It is about connectivity. It’s about social connection. But we need cheaper, faster, so how do we leverage the technologies in a way that we get the cheaper and faster, but we also reinforce that social connectivity? And that’s helped, I think. It’s helped other parts of the world realize that we’re not robots, right? We can’t just turn everything into this, kind of, very quantitative structured component. And instead, we’ve seen the growth of putting the person first as part of the technology.

When you say this kind of words came to my mind, one of the concepts that we used in this conference in Miami, that is the orange economy. I don’t know if you are familiar with the orange economy, but for our countries, it’s something that is taking a lot of power in our actions because it’s the only way that we are equal with the developed countries. If we put the talent, work their minds in developing games, like you really love them or, for example, you start to—if you write a nice book and can get an impact in the world, or maybe a podcast like this one, it’s part of this economy. And the marketing research industry is also one of these tools in the orange economy can make the difference because we are using our brain. And today, the technology is more accessible for everyone. 12 years ago, it wasn’t possible to imagine that we could use the tools that were starting in Europe or in the US. But today, we can access them. In this moment, the AI that we’re going to—

Yeah, knew that was coming. All right, yeah, let’s get into it.

—[crosstalk 00:12:04] it’s coming, it’s coming. You know, in Latin America, it’s going faster than so many other countries. Why? Because we need to be on this boat as soon as possible. We need to use this kind of tools if we want to be in the same road that Europe and North America is.

Chile, for example—I know I am from Chile; [laugh] I can put maybe into more value what do we do—but Chile is one of the most important countries in Latin America that’s growing faster using the AI on the business. The government is giving a lot of opportunities today to do that. They are investing a lot on those, but when I say that, it’s because it’s the way. And I’m seeing in the ESOMAR and IIEX events that we are getting in equal opportunities moment for these kind of things. And I think we are making the magic.

Yesterday—sorry that I go back again, but yesterday we received a wonderful email that I copy—[laugh] I copy you on that. I don’t know if you have time to translate that, but I received an email from a thought leader of the industry, that she lived in Miami for a long time, she worked in a huge company. I can say the name of the company, or—

Sure, yeah.

If they are not paying for the sponsor, I cannot say.

[laugh]. That’s all right. Give any shout-outs you want to give to.

It’s VISA. It’s VISA. And Paula Warren, she sent me a note that she gets very impressed with what we built on that because we exceed her expectations on the content, on the people, of the conversation that we have on the networking moment. She’s from Colombia, but she lived a long, long time here in the US. And these kind of things, when we started, we say, “Well, we want to bring this new [unintelligible 00:14:11] to the state,” and they remember [unintelligible 00:14:13] said, “Okay, but you must do the same in the States. If not, we are not going to support that.” [laugh]. “And we must run in very short time.” [laugh]. The first one was in Philly, I remember, in the US. Well, and I think we make more than we expected because the communities start to understand our initial challenge, and now they take the wheel. They are moving this industry. I am enjoying the ride.

So, moving to—we’ll get into the event, right?—the idea of shifting to Miami, when it’s IIEX LATAM, was very much to symbolize they’re not two different markets anymore, right? They are merging. And as you said early on, the Hispanic market in the United States is growing and growing, and we need to start thinking about it from a cultural standpoint versus a geographic boundary standpoint. That does not mean that there is not still obviously things that are specific to different countries within the region. Of course, there is. But that melting pot component is just accelerating in many ways, and that should create the opportunity for scale, right?

The good news is, as the Hispanic market merges more within the broader North American—and US specifically—market, it becomes critical for us to now incorporate that in and think about the specific cultural elements that are necessary in the US to engage with the Hispanic market. And who better to show us how to do that than the folks that have been doing it all the time, right? I mean, you are the experts in how to talk to [laugh] other people in the Hispanic market. And that is a skill that we need desperately here in the United States, as well as leveraging all that, kind of, can-do attitude that you’ve manifested for years—the market has manifested—in creating new technologies and new solutions that are just accelerating. So that’s, kind of, my take. Did you see that? Was that felt at the event? Was there that sense of, okay, it’s time to really connect these things up, versus having them just, kind of, stand out alone?

I can say that was my initial idea when I talked with [Lukash 00:16:40] about that. I think Lukash wasn’t too much agree with this moment. And I prepared a document, I remember trying to—[laugh] trying to convince him to do that. And the people came in the same way, like, Lukash was. The people came because they were curious. We didn’t get too much sponsor for the event initially.

The people came as a system to see, what is going on here. What are those guys are doing here in Miami? And after today’s event, the people understood the idea. It’s not that we are going to come to the States to run our own business. It’s not that. It’s, we can help to the local industry to understand better the culture of the people that came in first, second, third generation from Latin America.

It’s not only for Miami. Miami is a great place to go ever, but it’s that we can arrive to a place like the Mecca, [laugh] we can go together just one place, nice fly. But also we can invite people from the Caribbean, from the Central America that normally they are out of our normal business. And I feel that connection that interests for a lot of takeaways of the technological stuff, new methodologies, new ways to do our job, not only technological. And a lot of things that are news in the industry, like the orange economy, as I said, or like the new masculinity or new manhood, that is something that we really need to talk if we want to connect with those people.

And the other stuff is the ethics with the technology, the ethical stuff with the technology. I think it’s something that we must to get involved, and we must to have this conversation all together. Not in Africa, one guy, other guys in Europe, and UN/US, and—no, we must talk together about that because we must to define rules for this new stage of the industry. We can do this together. But Miami is a good point to start. They say, they repeat a couple of times, “Today, Miami. Tomorrow, the world.”

[laugh].

[laugh].

Well, I agree. I mean, I think that the world has changed in a variety of ways, and technology is that connective tissue, as well as that leveling of the playing field for everybody. It’s kind of a universal common factor now in many ways, and now that leaves us with wanting to retain the diversity from a culture standpoint, and heritage and, you know, language, all of those things, but as things—by default, we’re going to intermingle, right? It’s going to mix, and it’s going to come together, and we should be leveraging those relationships across the board.

And the market is large and important enough. And, of course, the, you know, the population is just rich in so many ways that, in my opinion, it is worth an event to understand that and continue to focus on that. So, I certainly hope that we continue to do IIEX LATAM, on a personal level, even though I couldn’t make it to Miami. It’s a lot easier for me to make it to Miami than to Chile, so I—

Yeah, right, right.

—yeah, so [laugh] I’m in favor of that, and we go from there. But what were the high points of the event itself? I mean, were there some presentations just stood out that you were like, “Man, that just made the whole thing worthwhile. That was great.”

As I told you, I think that we cover different point of view on this event. And, of course, I cannot talk about the 35 activities that we have there. But my top-of-mind on that is, I think the first context that Marta Villanueva give to us was amazing. She lived in here for a long time, but she is from El Salvador, I think so. That’s a very, very good point to start.

By the way, had a wonderful moment also with one rising star that get the prize of a Future List Honoree. She was amazing. She makes amazing presentation. Her name is hard for me—

Asha Parmar.

Asha, Asha, from C Space. And was, you know, when the people arrived to see what this young lady going to say, and the people stand up at the end, clap and say, “You move our [fate 00:23:13].” And that was amazing. She talked ethics, as I told you, a critical point of view on the technology and the AI and these kind of things. Other thing that was important for me was, when you see the way of work in the industry, it changes, I think, to a work with more empathy where you put a real person in the center of the strategy, it’s something that I’m very glad that this finally happened.

We don’t talk anymore about products. We’re talking about people and this is great. And our work increased in value on that because we are not methodology anymore. We do methodology. By the way, we are consultants, see, that help the brands to make a better job. Not only make money. That is—[laugh] that used to be. I don’t think that I told you, a little bit was the new masculinity. I think this topic that for my company, Provokers, I make the advertising this moment.

Go ahead.

It’s one of the topics that we are starting. We work a lot about—we work a lot about women and how they’re changing the way to work, the opportunities, the equality that was necessary. But today, we have men [laugh] in trouble. We have the men, they don’t know really how managing themselves on this new scenario. And I think the brands must to understand that this is a work in progress process, this transition need to be helped, and the brands has a lot to do on that.

Well, I can talk to you about it from other trends that they saw, but I think the most important things for me is we have a mix of contents that give us a lot of new ideas, and I can see in linking how the people that went to this activity, they returned to their countries, and they just start to spread the words, like [laugh] a priest after the mass, I decided to use the contents that they had, they received, and they start to put in their document or trying to share the knowledge that they received, asking the right question to the audience on this platform. And I think it’s a moment.

And that’s the goal, right? To make sure that we’ve created this mechanism for people to be able to share, and grow, and build off of, and cross-pollinate, and go from there. So, I’m thrilled to hear that continues because that was the goal.

Sorry, I forgot something very important. During the event, we talk a lot of AI, but we used the AI to talk about more things. We talk about the AI as a tool that where we need to, but wasn’t the main topic. I think we are moving on, man. The AI is living with us, but it’s one more thing in our work life.

Agreed wholeheartedly. I think that—well, let’s talk about that for a second and see if this has been how it is in LATAM. I mean, here in the U.S. There was this, “Whoa, holy crap,” right? It could do all these things, this new technology that just was, kind of, miraculous in the things that it could do. And there was almost a shock element of recognizing all of the hows and the whats, right, the tech itself.

Although, I agree, I think we’ve already went past that, and now it’s more of the, so what? That’s great. We have this technology. It makes a lot of things amazingly faster, and easier, and it unlocks lots of capabilities that would have just been very challenging from a resource standpoint—time and money—to do before. Now, it’s far easier. That’s great. But it doesn’t matter. All of that is great from an efficiency perspective, but what do we do with it, right?

Yeah, right. Right. I try to watch your program so often, and I remember a moment of the year that every week you say, “Well, you know, this company started with a new AI software,” but was the same news with different names?

Yes, yeah [laugh].

I’m sure that during the next IIEX AI, we’re going to see how mature is this part of the industry. And I’m really happy for that.

Yes. Yes. The focus of that event is on use cases. And not the, “Oh, look, we can automatically transcribe interviews,” and, you know, and… that—yeah. Okay. Got it. We’re way past that now. So, how does it unlock more value creation, and really enable us to deliver better insights, and that event is going to be the case studies around that.

And yeah, is there an opportunity for IIEX AI in a year from now or two years from now? I don’t know [laugh]. So, maybe there is or maybe there’s not, but for now, it’s still—it is amazing how people have not gone there yet. Truly. There are still—the adoption level is still very low overall. And that’s just mind-blowing to me.

Now, it’s interesting—so let’s start that for a second because you mentioned how the AI has unlocked greater creativity and production in LATAM. So, have you seen that across the board that maybe there’s people glommed on to this because it just created new opportunities that were less resource intensive than were there before?

Well, I think if we look at back five or six years ago, mostly the market research industry has not insight guys that think in bytes, you know? And now after the other kind of issue, we have people that think in bytes, that they are more tech, more geek, and then it’s possible to understand that this AI is real things that we can do. Five years ago, we will say we are not on this party. It’s not my party [laugh], but now we can do that.

I think that the big elephant that they have an issue to move faster. This happened in the in countries also. Brazil is a huge monster of the industry, and they are moving very slow because it’s too big. The same happened in Mexico. Mexico, the small company are starting with some stuff, but the bigger companies they are sitting in a mountain of gold, making a lot of money on their business way, and they are not rushing that.

But I think countries like Argentina, they must move because they are in the moment of economy that is pretty hard, and they need to do things cheaper, faster, [laugh] and better right now with the tools that they have. And I think Argentina is going to give us a lot of surprise on new application on that Ecuador. Ecuador is another country that many people doesn’t know—they know that Ecuador exists because they are in the middle of the world, but they are giving surprise with what they are developing right now. Peru, whoo, I am very impressed on that.

I agree. And even if you step back and look at the—you know, you kind of hit at the geopolitical shifts happening there, countries like Costa Rica, Argentina, right? We don’t have to get into their politics, but there’s change, change focused on economic growth there, and stabilization, it appears. That’s exciting, right, to see what happens when you have that type of energy manifesting in those countries.

The boundaries are here, are not anymore on the map.

Yeah. Very cool. Very cool thoughts. I remember when I was there, we had a lot of conversations of, “Oh, it’s hard if you’re in Chile to be able to go to Costa Rica, for instance,” right, because of visas and passports, and it was kind of pain in the butt. So, it seems like that maybe the lines are opening up across the board.

Mm-hm.

That’s great. So, Rafa, anything else that you want to bring up or talk about that we didn’t touch on?

No. Well, you know, you and me, we can stay together talking a lot over a long time. And I think we have a lot of opportunity to keep this conversation. It will be great if we can meet in some moment to talk more deeply on that. But I think the most important is we—I take the [flag 00:33:29] of let repeat events IIEX in Miami, I hope so.

But if not, if don’t, if we must move to down, we’re going to keep this conversation in other place, Panama, Brazil again, I don’t know. We’re going to see that with the team. But I think we’re breaking a boundary with this event, and we must keep in that way. And I really appreciate that you invited me to talk right now. And we can promote this instance to talk.

We are not Amazon [laugh].

The idea is that we can say to them, “Boy, this book, is it in English? Is it in Spanish? Is it in German?” You can get this book directly with the author. This is the name, this is the description, or you can go to Amazon with this link and you can download it. I think the idea is to show to our community, to the insight community global, that we have great authors that are moving our [fate 00:35:25]. Well, one of the presentations that I really love it was one author that worked in Mars—Deepa. Deepa, Deepa [garbled]. Oh, I have his name in some place—in some place I have his name—but it was the best presentation for me, and also I received a book as a present after that.

And I think—Sandeep. Sandeep Das, a great, great book that I’m reading right now. And he talked in this book about how to use the storytelling to create new scenarios, future scenarios, and I love it. And I think we have a lot of information that our colleagues and friends are living there in their books. And we can exchange this knowledge through eating those books [laugh]. And this is what my last point—thank you for asking that, Lenny. I forgot that.

[laugh]. Good. Yeah, no, that’s a great point. We should be collating and collecting all of the creativity and knowledge from folks in a more substantive way than just like the blog or whatever the case may be, or podcast. So, that’s great. So Rafa, how can people contact you?

Well, you can find me on social network as Rafael Cespedes, as you said. Of course, I am part of the Greenbook family, and you can write me to [rafa@greenbook.org 00:36:54]. I think it will be the easy one. The, the… [laugh] the Provokers, you know, it’s a little bit more complex, but it’s [rafa.cespedes@provokersite.com 00:37:05], with 1s in the middle. For that, I prefer that you can use [rafa@greenbook.org 00:37:14]. And go ahead, contact me, and we can have a very nice conversation. And we can design the future of our industry in a great conversation, and later we can bring those to our IIEX event.

Absolutely. And if you’re ever lucky enough to go to Chile and to have barbecue with Rafa—

[laugh].

—absolutely encourage you to do that.

A really good wine [laugh].

Yeah, good wine, good barbecue. That was—I still cherish those memories, Rafa. So [laugh]—

[laugh].

—quick shout out. We also have another podcast episode featuring Martha from AQR, who was a speaker at LATAM, so this is not the only LATAM-focused episode that you will get. And listeners, let us know if you went, let us know which thought and—or if you didn’t go, let us know what would make you go, right? We’re obviously in planning stages for next year. So, with all that said, a shout-out to our sponsors, shout-out to Natalie, shout-out to Big Bad Audio, and most importantly, thank you to our listeners because without you, Rafa and I would not necessarily have had the time to have this conversation, and I think that it was well overdue, and hopefully you found value out of it as well. So, that’s it for this episode of the Greenbook Podcast. Everybody be well.

A big hug for you and for everyone.

Ah, thank you, Rafa. All right, everybody. Take care. Bye-bye.