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Time Out and Rival Technologies win 2026 Esomar Award for Excellence in Global Research. Sep 09, 2026, 08:13 ET Partnership recognized for evolving Time Out's successful decade-long global research program through Rival Technologies' conversational research platform and bringing audience insights closer to editorial, audience and commercial teams VANCOUVER, BC, Sept. 9, 2026 /PRNewswire/ - Time Out, the global brand dedicated to inspiring and enabling people to experience the best of the city, and Rival Technologies have won a 2026 Esomar Award for Excellence in Global Research. The award was announced at Esomar Congress 2026 in Valencia, Spain, recognizing their work to make audience insights a more visible part of editorial storytelling, audience engagement and commercial activity across Time Out's global business. For over a decade, Time Out's Global City Survey has been the research foundation behind its annual Best Cities ranking, combining the views and experiences of local residents with Time Out's editorial expertise. Over that time, Best Cities has grown into one of Time Out's most successful global editorial initiatives, generating significant audience engagement, international media coverage and locally relevant stories across its network. Building on that success, Time Out partnered with Rival Technologies to evolve the way people participate in the research. Rival's conversational, mobile-first technology helped Time Out move away from a more traditional survey experience towards one designed to feel closer to a conversation, while retaining the scale and structure needed for a major global research programme. This award-winning project engaged 18,500 people across nearly 60 countries in 45 languages, generating approximately 1.6 million data points and an 86% completion rate. The findings reached more than 6.3 million people organically within the first seven days of publication and generated coverage in CNN, Forbes, The Independent and The New York Post, while supporting localized editorial storytelling across Time Out's international network. "The Global City Survey has been part of Time Out for years and has grown into one of our most successful global editorial initiatives. What Rival has helped us do is evolve the way people take part, making the research feel much more conversational and bringing us even closer to the people who actually live in and experience these cities," said Anna Norfolk, Insights and Trade Marketing Director at Time Out. "That partnership has since grown into Time Out Loud community and helped us make audience insight a much more visible part of how we work across editorial, audience and commercial teams. It's wonderful to see that work recognised by Esomar." Following the success of the Global City Survey, Time Out and Rival launched Time Out Loud, a proprietary insight community powered by Rival Technologies and focused on Gen Z and millennial city dwellers. In its first six months, the community supported more than 30 fast-turnaround research projects, combining quantitative data with conversational and video feedback and AI-supported analysis. About Time Out Group Time Out Group is a global brand that inspires and enables people to experience the best of the city. Time Out launched in London in 1968 to help people discover the best of the city - today it is the only global brand dedicated to city life. Expert journalists curate and create content about the best things to Do, See and Eat across over 350 cities in over 50 countries and across a unique multi-platform model spanning both digital and physical channels. Time Out Market is the world's first editorially curated food and cultural destination, bringing a city's best chefs, restaurateurs and unique cultural experiences together under one roof. There are currently Markets in 13 cities including Lisbon, New York and Dubai, with several new locations expected to open in 2026 and beyond, in addition to a pipeline of further locations in advanced discussions. About Rival Technologies Rival Technologies is a research technology company redefining how brands understand people. As a pioneer in conversational research, Rival's AI-driven, mobile-first platform transforms traditional surveys into engaging, chat-like experiences that reflect how people communicate today. By blending quant, qual and video in a single conversational flow, Rival helps global brands like Cash App, ŌURA, Carnival Corporation and Warner Bros. Discovery capture richer insights, increase response rates and move from data to confident decisions faster. Part of Rival Group, Rival Technologies was named to the Top 10 Most Innovative Technology Suppliers in Greenbook's 2025 GRIT report. rivaltech.com. SOURCE Rival Technologies

Rival Technologies launches MCP and first syndicated intelligence offering. Search. New capabilities help organizations build, manage and apply customer knowledge across research and enterprise AI Rival Technologies today announced its new Model Context Protocol (MCP), giving organizations a direct way to connect proprietary research data with full context from the Rival platform with enterprise AI applications. The company also unveiled its first syndicated intelligence offering, the Emerging Consumer Index, tracking the emerging affluent Gen Z and Millennial consumers gaining spending power across the United States and Canada. Rival's conversational research platform powers insight communities, Voice of Market and experiential research, allowing organizations to capture customer and consumer knowledge across ongoing and project-based research. Rival MCP is the next step in the platform's extensibility. Building on years of open APIs and integrations, it gives brands that have already built agentic workflows into their insights function a standardized, two-way connection to the Rival platform. On the output side, teams can bring trusted human research directly into their own AI environments and agents. On the input side, those same systems can help shape and inform research before data is collected. Because MCP is an open standard, clients connect Rival to the AI tools they already use without custom, one-off integration work. "Our clients are already building agentic workflows into how they run insights," said Andrew Reid, CEO and founder of Rival Technologies. "Rival MCP gives them the flexibility to work with their data on their own terms, pulling trusted human research into the AI systems they already use, and bringing those systems into the process before a single question is asked. It's an investment in how insights teams will actually work as AI becomes part of everyday operations." The company also introduced the Emerging Consumer Index, the first in a planned series of syndicated intelligence offerings. It tracks emerging affluents, the Gen Z and Millennial consumers in the U.S. and Canada who are building spending power, through a continuous research stream with new data collected every two weeks. Combined with AI-assisted exploration, the Index lets subscribers investigate topics well beyond the findings of a traditional report. The Emerging Consumer Index gives consumer-facing brands a steady source of ground-truth data on one of their most important growth audiences while augmenting their own research programs. It can also help keep brands' synthetic audiences and large language models grounded in real human data. Rival is currently collecting its fourth wave of data and will make the Index available after the sixth wave, with delivery planned through quarterly reports, ongoing data subscriptions and data marketplaces. "Research teams are figuring out how AI fits into their organizations while continuing to deliver reliable customer insight," said Dale Evernden, EVP of Innovation and Design at Rival Technologies. "Communities, syndicated research and open connections like MCP each play a role, grounding the AI systems our clients are building in real, trusted human data." Rival is already piloting Rival MCP with customers. More information about Rival's connected set of agents and AI capabilities is available at rivaltech.com/ai. Additional information about the Emerging Consumer Index, including pre-launch availability, will be announced soon. At the 2026 Quirk's Event in New York, Rival CEO and Founder Andrew Reid will preview the Emerging Consumer Index during his presentation with The Knot. Insight teams can request early access at rivaltech.com/emerging-consumer-index-request. Rival's approach combines conversational technology, consulting expertise and high-quality audiences to help organizations build customer knowledge that becomes more valuable over time.