Daily Research news online. The global MR industry's daily paper since 2000. Follow DRNO on... Rep Data hires Melissa Dunn to lead global marketing. October 13 2026 New Orleans-based data quality specialist Rep Data has appointed former Suzy exec Melissa Dunn as EVP of Marketing. Rep Data was founded in 2019 by former Lucid and Research Now exec Patrick Stokes, and offers a centralized DIY sampling platform called Research Desk; as well as an anti-fraud software platform, Research Defender, whose software matches respondents to relevant surveys and prevents sample fraud / duplication. Dunn (pictured) brings more than twenty years' experience of marketing leadership experience from firms in insights, B2B tech and global ad agencies. Most recently she was EVP, Marketing & Communications at end-to-end MR platform Suzy, where she built the marketing organization. Prior to Suzy she led customer engagement and marketing at industrial AI company Plutoshift, and earlier in her career she worked at iCrossing (Hearst), MRY (Publicis Groupe), McCann and BBDO. In her new role, Dunn will Rep Data's worldwide expansion and help it reach more enterprise clients. An immediate task is to develop a cohesive market story reflecting the recent extension of the company's portfolio of services (including the acquisitions of ReDem, OWL and SightX), as well as ongoing product innovation - and the value these investments deliver to customers. 'We've built a company with enormous potential,' says Stokes, 'and we're ready to take Rep Data to the next level. Melissa knows how to build brands that stand out, connect with enterprise buyers and turn marketing into a powerful driver of growth. She brings the experience, energy and ambition to help us reach new markets and win new customers. I'm excited to have her on our leadership team as we continue to scale the business and introduce more organizations to what we can deliver.' Web site: www.repdata.com. All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated. Most viewed items in the last week... Each (*) indicates > 1,000 views. Select a region below...

Suzy launches AI Decision Engine. Suzy is structured around three capabilities - Focus, Prove, and Activate - each designed to close a specific gap in the journey from intelligence to insight to impact. Suzy has announced their launch as a decision engine, a new enterprise platform built to close the gap between what marketing organisations know and what they actually do about it. The announcement marks a refounding moment for the company. The Same Vision, Nine Years Later In 2017, Suzy Founder and CEO Matt Britton sent a late-night email to Bryan Silverman - then his Chief of Staff, now Suzy's COO - with a one-paragraph vision: build a companion that could help every person in business decide with confidence. That email became the company. The company became a platform trusted by 350+ enterprises, including Microsoft, Google, PepsiCo, Netflix, Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, and Nestlé. But the original ambition was always bigger than a research platform. In 2023, Britton coined the term "decision engine" to describe what Suzy was becoming - a system whose output isn't a report or a dashboard, but a decision. "Every CMO we talk to says some version of the same thing: we have more intelligence than we know what to do with. What we don't have is a way to turn it into a decision the whole organisation can act on," said Matt Britton, Founder and CEO, Suzy. "The bottleneck was never data. It's the last mile from intelligence to impact. We named this company after a person nine years ago. At the time, it was a branding decision. Now it is the product." The Signal Problem The world does not have a data problem. It has a signal problem. Enterprise marketing organisations today operate across twenty-plus tools - dashboards, vendor reports, research decks, AI assistants, social listening platforms - with no single system that synthesises them into action. According to Forrester, only 48% of business decisions are based on quantitative information and analysis. Research from Keen Decision Systems found that brands increased marketing investment by 15% in 2024 but saw only a 4% ROI boost in return. The reason isn't creative quality. It's that intelligence never becomes insight, and insight never becomes impact. The cost is invisible on any single line item but devastating in aggregate: delayed launches, campaigns built on conflicting assumptions, research that gets presented once and forgotten, and teams making competing decisions using competing versions of the truth. What the Decision Engine Does Suzy is structured around three capabilities - Focus, Prove, and Activate - each designed to close a specific gap in the journey from intelligence to insight to impact. Focus filters signal from noise, helping teams know where to direct attention before bad data enters the system. Prove turns every study and research asset into a living, queryable resource connected to the broader intelligence picture - so research compounds instead of expiring. Activate translates intelligence into outputs built for every stakeholder - the CMO, the media buyer, the creative director, the CFO - so the entire organisation acts from one source of truth. Underneath it all, Suzy is built on ground truth: real consumers, answering real questions, about real decisions. In a world that can generate anything, the one thing that cannot be manufactured is what a real person actually thinks. Every insight Suzy delivers is rooted in what people actually said. And critically, Suzy is not omniscient. When the data is thin, she says so. When a question can't be answered with what exists, she tells you what it would take to close the gap - and offers to go get it. In a market full of systems that confidently fabricate, honesty is the foundation of trust. Why Suzy. Why Now. A decision engine is an entirely new category of capability. Others will follow Suzy into this space. The need is too vast and too urgent for any single company to serve alone. But Suzy enters this category with what no new entrant can replicate: nine years and 400+ enterprise relationships across Tech, Financial Services, and Retail & Consumer. Over $120M in venture capital raised. Deep pattern recognition built across thousands of strategic engagements. And a founder whose career in the room where decisions get made - as a published AI expert, bestselling author, and advertising industry veteran - gave the company a firsthand understanding of where intelligence breaks down. Five years from now, every organisation that makes high-stakes decisions about consumers will have a decision engine. The question is whether they will have stitched it together from a dozen tools - or whether they will have Suzy. "Our customers didn't just give us their trust - they gave us a window into how the best marketing organisations in the world think, decide, and act. They kept telling us: the research is great, but what we really need is help making the decision. So that's what we built," said Matt Britton, Founder and CEO, Suzy. The Martechvibe team works with a staff of in-house writers, and industry experts. View More