Research Live: The News Service of the Market Research Society
Research Live is the news service of the Market Research Society (MRS), covering the United Kingdom's market research industry — its agencies, people, data and insight trends. Published from London at research-live.com, it describes itself through its parent body as the definitive source of research news and opinion, and it serves a professional community that extends far beyond Britain: MRS presents itself as the world's largest association serving those with a professional interest in market, social and opinion research, business intelligence, market analysis, customer insight and consultancy.
Research Live began as a companion to Research magazine, the society's print title, and grew into the web news hub of MRS. Its prominence in the profession is measurable: in the Researchscape 50 ranking of the sites most mentioned in the market research conversation on social media, Research Live came first, accounting for more than 10 per cent of the links shared in that conversation, from a flow of more than 2,000 shared articles in a year.
Overview
Research Live publishes daily news, features, opinion and analysis for the research and insight sector. Its news team posts stories throughout the day, covering agency financial results and league tables, mergers and appointments, polling and its controversies, data quality and methodology, technology and artificial intelligence in research, and the policies that affect how research is commissioned and conducted. A features section takes reporting to a deeper level, examining the wider implications of industry developments and bringing in voices from across the business, while an opinion section carries argument and commentary from practitioners.
The service also carries jobs coverage and careers content for the sector, and it sits within a family of MRS publications and products that includes the quarterly magazine Impact, the International Journal of Market Research (IJMR) and the Research Buyer's Guide, the directory of accredited research suppliers in the UK and Ireland.
History and Founding
Research Live's roots lie in the Market Research Society itself, which was founded on 5 November 1946 in the offices of the London Press Exchange, with 23 founder members whose early meetings operated as a luncheon club for practitioners. The society adopted its first code of standards in 1954, held its first conference in Brighton in 1957 and published the first volume of its journal in 1959. It bought its current headquarters at 15 Northburgh Street in London in 1990, the address from which Research Live is still published.
As a title, Research Live started as the online companion to Research magazine, the society's member publication. A relaunch described in its own pages set out the ambition: a new-look, high-functionality, multimedia-enabled website intended to provide the global market research community with a vastly improved news, analysis and jobs service. The relaunch reorganised the news section so readers could view the day's top stories or search by region, added RSS feeds for readers who wanted stories as they broke, and expanded web-exclusive features written by the in-house team and by expert analysts and practitioners from across the research business.
Ownership and Leadership
Research Live is published by the Market Research Society, the professional body that also acts as the sector's regulator, promoting professional standards through the MRS Code of Conduct. The society recognises some 5,000 individual members and over 500 accredited Company Partners in more than 50 countries. Its chief executive during much of Research Live's modern development has been Jane Frost CBE, who is quoted across its coverage of the sector and who led the society while its publications set the agenda for the research and insight industry.
Editorially, the relaunch-era news team was led by news editor Brian Tarran, with features led by Robert Bain. In May 2014, MRS announced that Jane Bainbridge would succeed Tarran as editor of Research-live.com and of Impact magazine. Bainbridge was an experienced business journalist specialising in marketing, media and advertising, a former deputy editor of Marketing who had written for The Guardian, The Independent and The Observer and contributed to Impact since its launch in April 2013. Tarran, leaving after 12 years at MRS, moved to edit Significance, the joint publication of the Royal Statistical Society and the American Statistical Association. Frost said at the appointment that the publications played a critical role in setting the tone and agenda not just of the society but of the research, insight, analytics and marketing sciences sector as a whole.
Services and Content
The service's output falls into several strands. News coverage reports the sector's business: agency results, acquisitions, new ventures, senior appointments, research contracts and published studies, from technology companies' use of first-party data to public sector polling. Features explore themes at length — the future of the profession, the meaning of market research itself, anniversaries and institutional history. Opinion pieces give practitioners a platform to argue about method and practice, from how researchers should respond to social media privacy attitudes to the role of media currencies and measurement bodies.
Research Live has also extended into audio, with a Research Live podcast distributed through Apple Podcasts and Spotify, covering topics such as the industry's continuing work on data quality. A newsletter allows readers to stay connected with the latest insights and trends, and the site carries member-oriented content from across MRS, including training courses through the MRS Global Insight Academy, specialist conferences and reports, such as the society's three-part series on how generative AI is affecting the research sector, including synthetic respondents and challenges to adoption.
The Industry Report and League Tables
Among Research Live's most significant annual publications is the Research Live Industry Report, incorporating the MRS League Tables, which rank UK research agencies by financial performance. The 2026 report, covered in detail on the site, combined the league tables with client and agency perspectives on the outlook for research and insight drawn from the society's Business Sentiment Monitor. Reporting on it noted that fewer organisations expected increased revenue in the year ahead, while the financial figures showed a resilient, growing research sector taking advantage of technological developments such as AI.
The report also highlights standards work, noting which fast-growing agencies had signed the sector's pledges on data quality and inclusion, and carries coverage of the MRS President's Medal. In the 2026 report the medal went to work on community strength and cohesion in the UK. In her comments on the report, Jane Frost argued that a turbulent economic, social and political landscape makes up-to-date evidence all the more important for informing decisions — a summary of the case Research Live's publisher makes for the whole sector.
Coverage Areas
Research Live's beat is the research and insight industry itself, viewed from the UK but with an international readership — its relaunch was explicitly aimed at the global market research community, and its news can be browsed by region. Subject coverage includes quantitative and qualitative methods, polling, data quality and fraud prevention — including the sector's collaborative Global Data Quality effort to combat data fraud — analytics, customer experience and user research, semiotics, business-to-business and financial research, and the growing use of artificial intelligence across all of them.
The service also reports the sector's accountability moments. Its coverage of the inquiry into the failure of polling before the 2015 British general election — run jointly by MRS and the British Polling Council — followed the inquiry's work and its conclusion that unrepresentative polling samples were to blame, examining what the episode meant for communication and standards across the industry.
Digital Platforms and Community
Research Live's website is its primary platform, organised into news, features and opinion with regional browsing, an archive reaching back many years and integration with the wider MRS web presence. Articles close with an invitation into the society's world — member benefits, training, conferences and an archive of winning case studies from over a decade of MRS Awards — making the news service a front door to the professional body. The Research Buyer's Guide directory is promoted alongside its content, with featured accredited suppliers, connecting readers who commission research with the agencies the society accredits.
The podcast, newsletter and social sharing extend that reach. The Researchscape finding that Research Live articles accounted for more than a tenth of the links shared in the profession's social media conversation suggests a readership that uses the service as shared reference material — the stories practitioners send each other.
Relationship with Impact and the IJMR
Research Live operates alongside MRS's other publishing. Impact, the quarterly magazine launched in April 2013, shares an editor with Research Live and carries longer-form journalism; the two titles have been edited together since Jane Bainbridge's appointment covered both. The International Journal of Market Research, whose origins lie in the journal MRS launched following a 1958 council decision, took its current title in January 2000 and, after 65 years of publishing, moved to digital-only format — a transition chronicled in Research Live's own features, which reflected on how digital publishing changed the economics and speed of scholarly communication. Together the three titles cover the sector's news, its professional debate and its academic method.
Recent Developments
Research Live continues to publish daily news and to anchor MRS's reporting of its own initiatives, including the programme for the MRS Annual Conference in March 2026 — the society's 80th anniversary year — whose keynote panels examine division and cultural fragmentation and their implications for brands and organisations. Its recent coverage has followed the sector's preoccupations: the quality of data in an era of fraud and synthetic respondents, the adoption of generative AI, polling accuracy, and the financial health of agencies as measured by its league tables. As the news arm of a professional body that both promotes and regulates its sector, Research Live remains the first draft of record for the UK research industry's business, its standards debates and its people.
