Ben Page Interview: New World Disorder. People Don't Want to Believe The World Is This Chaotic

The article was published in Forbes, March 2023.

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In 2005, GQ magazine already ranked Page as one of the 100 most well-connected people in the world, he is also a speaker at King's College London and a frequent guest on TV and radio shows. The breadth of his interest extends far beyond public research, because in this field, as he puts it, it is all about understanding of the world.

Source: Forbes

What are the most interesting areas in which IPSOS is working today?

Our main way of collecting information is through digital technologies, in which our Czech team is world class. Most of our work consists of online consumer surveys. At the same time, using documentation from Ukraine, we are calculating the cost of repairing the damage caused by the war, for example.

We also did this in Beirut after the fertilizer warehouse explosion. Back then, it was also important to verify how much damage had actually occurred, so we carried out on-site surveys with video documentation and algorithms that calculated the total level of damage.

That is quite far from the common perception of market research and public opinion firms.

Of course we do a lot of work on fast moving consumer goods, packaged goods and so on, but fundamentally we are about understanding humanity in its entirety. One of our slogans is "true understanding". That's why in Africa we have conversations with men about how to get them circumcised to reduce the transmission of AIDS.

We did a project for Bill Gates for which we interviewed prostitutes in Tanzania and Uganda who don't use condoms because they think all their customers have HIV anyway. In Australia we have a team of indigenous researchers conducting interviews in indigenous languages. In India, we are conducting interviews in thirty-six different languages on the spot.

How specific is IPSOS in this breadth of focus?

Today, we are the only global company that focuses on social research, communities, NGOs and public sector work in this way. We think that understanding people's context is more important to fully understand society than just looking at people's media consumption or shopping habits.

A few days ago, IPSOS presented a study entitled "Global Trends 2023: A new world disorder" with the subtitle "navigating the age of polycrisis". As a fan of conspiracy theories, I was expecting the announced new world order this year, not a new world disorder...

You mean conspiracies about the World Economic Forum? We've done quite a bit of work on them right now - partly because we as IPSOS were involved in government vaccination programs during the pandemic, trying to measure the asymptomatic spread of the disease. We've been working to monitor the incidence of the disease, working with universities and testing centres.

But the conspiracies about, for example, covid are really interesting and we have published several reports about them. Conspiracy theories have always existed, but now social media allows them to be transmitted more quickly. The other thing is that the pandemic has accelerated their spread because people don't want to believe that the world is so crazy, so chaotic, so out of control.

A conspiracy often represents an island of nameable structure in a sea of chaos.

Exactly. They are more common in times of stress and uncertainty. And that's why there is a group of people who would like to believe that someone, somewhere, is maliciously in control of the whole thing. That Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum are secretly plotting to kill half the population and make everyone obey. And it's all crazy, even if the conspiracy theories occasionally prove true.

But what we find interesting is why these people address such things. Part of it is actually a desire to believe that someone must have a plan. It's just that if you've ever worked for governments - and I've spent a large part of my career working with them - you know the awful truth that often nobody actually has a clue what's going on.

How do you define the polycrisis that your study talks about?

In a polycrisis, you don't have one crisis, but a series of crises that reinforce each other. But the term is not new, it was popularized by the historian Adam Tooze and came up long before the war and before covid. The current polycrisis consists of covid, the inflationary crisis, and the war in Ukraine, which is triggering an energy crisis - which will exacerbate the inflation.

Underlying this is the climate crisis, while the energy crisis is leading to more coal burning... Everything is mutually supportive. And we can see it also at the level of uncertainty among consumers. The term I take credit for myself is the "twitchy twenties", which is how I refer to our age of uncertainty.

One would expect a few more crises to be piled on top of the polycrisis avalanche.

You undoubtedly have other factors such as massive inflation and Europe-wide or global population ageing. One of my colleagues has written a very good book called Empty Planet about population ageing and declining birth rates. We are probably at a point in time where structural economic changes are taking place and all of us who run large companies are groping for an answer to the question of what is actually the new level of growth and the new level of demand.

Other things are also changing - take the current situation in office space. I judge that there is a permanent shift regarding the fact that work in the office goes from nine to five. I think that is permanently broken. We all understand that we need to be in offices together, but we also understand that it does not have to be five days a week, but only three.

Plus, it turns out that we probably don't need as much office space as we previously thought.

How are the tendencies of "twitchy twenties" reflected in consumer behaviour?

During the pandemic, for example, we saw a shift towards a preference for local brands. However, once it subsided, interest in global brands returned to pre-pandemic levels. It is also interesting to note that concerns about climate change have increased over the last decade, but have now apparently stopped, as economic concerns have taken precedence.

What direction should companies and institutions navigate today's polycrisis?

Building resilience is the key, whether it is rethinking the supply chain or likely demand. When you look at how the world was or wasn't prepared for a pandemic, it's worth noting Gates' talk at the TED conference, where he said a few years before the covid that a virus was undoubtedly bearing down on humanity that would put us out of business.

And it is interesting to note that the crisis scenarios of really big entities such as Shell had factored in such an eventuality. So we need to fortify, think about resilience, draw up different scenarios. In general, we have shown that we can react quite quickly. But this needs to be built into business planning a bit more than just assuming that everything will go straight. That's exactly how it never works. We live in a time of great tension.

And therefore great opportunities for research companies that have the ambition to bring insight.

Uncertainty is good for our business in the sense that people want to know what happens next. And when there is strong volatility going on, which is what we have at the moment, it increases the demand for what we do. Our clients need to know, for example, what customers are interested in buying - and if anything at all.

Ben Page in Prague (from left Jakub Malý (Managing Director Ipsos Central Europe), Dmitry Shoulgin (CEO CEE Ipsos Global), Ben Page (CEO Ipsos Global), Radek Jalůvka (CEO Ipsos Central Europe), Source: Ipsos.

What new trends are you following in your industry?

One of the studies we are doing in the UK and now in Australia is basically collecting data, asking no questions. Passive measurement is hugely important, where you collect data with people's permission from their TV, iPad or phone, and then synthesise and combine that information about their digital behaviour. This is a huge, hugely complex thing where you're working with petabytes and tetabytes of data in real time.

The biggest challenge today is not getting that data, but making sense of it.

Right. The funny thing is, twenty-three years ago, I wrote an article that said we're going to end all data collection by 2020. Because we assumed that by then we would have all the information at hand. You would just look at what you have and tell the client how to sell more grapes. Of course, I was completely wrong. In fact, we're collecting more data today than ever before. But the key is synthesizing it.

Will only machines ever do this job?

I would say it's likely. On the other hand, it certainly won't be right away. If you try asking the generative AI ChatGPT about such things, you'll see that there's still a lot of work to be done.

When confronted with questions it doesn't know the answer to, ChatGPT will just start making stuff up. Experts refer to these fabrications as "hallucinations".

Yes, and such hallucinations can be extremely convincing.

As a market research company yourself, how do you avoid such hallucinations?

We strive for the same principle that applied back in the days of pencil and paper. Despite all the technological advances, our basic currency is still accuracy. For example, if we were producing surveys showing that everyone in Britain thought Brexit was going well, and our colleagues were of a different opinion, we would show the results of the survey whether we liked them or not.

In the last poll I saw, ten per cent thought 'woke' was an insult, twenty per cent thought it was a compliment and the rest didn't really care. If you look at Twitter or YouTube, where it is a common expression, you would get a different impression.

So we have to be really careful and precise. And there's also the question of what we're asking and what we're not asking. Obviously, we want to get coverage in the media. If we say in an article that people don't care if they're "woke" or not, it's going to attract less attention on this polarizing issue than if we write that eighty-five percent of the people surveyed are woke. But our job is to ensure that the questions are not biased and cover all topics.

Yet you also need to draw attention to your conclusions. How do you maintain neutrality in research and reporting?

For example, I personally take the view that women should have the right to abortion. But when asked about such a topic, I will try to ask balanced questions that don't lead people to one conclusion. My job is to gauge public opinion.

Among researchers in general, you have left-wing researchers and right-wing researchers. Perhaps you can guess what my political orientation is. But that doesn't play a role in getting the truth. So whether you like or dislike the government that is going to win the general election, there is no point in producing a poll that shows what you want.

So what is the recipe for the most accurate model for surveying world events?

It is not clear-cut. One of the foremost experts on forecast accuracy is Professor Philip E. Tetlock, who wrote years ago in his first book something that will always be true: that experts are about five percent more accurate in their predictions than chance. Only five percent!

Interestingly, the most accurate people are not researchers in Washington, New York, London or Prague. And the most accurate are retired professionals. Seriously - people who live in a small town somewhere fifty miles from a metropolis, just sitting around reading the newspaper every day. They don't care about a particular issue, whether the budget deficit is going to be twenty percent... But in the end, they're by far the most accurate in their predictions.