Most agencies build their strategic recommendations on borrowed research. Mintel, Edelman, PwC, Kantar. All useful, all credible, all read by everyone else in the industry at the same time.
The problem isn't the research. The problem is that everyone reading the same reports draws the same conclusions, which is how an industry that sells originality ends up presenting the same five trends to different clients in the same week.
We didn't want to be that. So we built something to sit alongside the third-party data and give us a point of view nobody else can copy. We're calling it SIGNAL.
What SIGNAL is.
Twice a year we sit down with people in Ireland and listen. Facilitated qualitative sessions, designed around the cohorts and questions that matter most for the work we do.
Cycle 1, in March, focused on third-level students across Dublin campuses. We covered money, brands, tech, and how this generation sees its future. Future cycles will widen the lens, both in cohort and in topic, as the programme grows.
Each finding is paired with verified third-party data. The quote gives a finding its human face. The statistic gives it scale. Together they make a claim you can act on. Neither would do the job alone.
Cycle 1 ran in March. Cycle 2 is planned for September. From there it compounds.
One finding that explains why this matters.
We expected gaming to come up when we asked about screen time. It didn't, not the way you'd think. Console gaming has been quietly displaced by Wordle, NYT puzzles, Duolingo and GeoGuessr. Short-session, brain-rewarding, played in the spaces between everything else. Ten million people play NYT Games daily. Forty-seven million play Duolingo.
If a brand is planning a gaming-adjacent campaign and reaching for esports sponsorship, they're targeting a niche. The mainstream is somewhere else entirely.
That's a finding I haven't seen in any of the third-party reports we read. It came from a conversation in a room in Dublin, validated by numbers from NYT and Duolingo. One without the other is a story or a statistic. Together they're a strategic implication.
Why we built it.
Strategy is the most valuable thing we sell. If we're charging for it, the people doing it should know what they're talking about, first-hand. Borrowing other people's research and adding a Headcase headline is not knowing first-hand. It's borrowing a position.
SIGNAL is our way of doing the homework ourselves. Listening directly. Pairing what we hear with the best third-party data we can find. Publishing what we learn, including the bits that surprise us.
Cycle 1 is the start. Every cycle from here will change what we think we know. That's the point.
Karla Casey is Headcase's CFO and Head of Commercial and Innovations.