Consumer reality is complex. Research budgets aren't keeping up.
The Social Lens Library closes the gap — a video archive of how real Americans live, spend, and shift their thinking, ready for the questions your teams are asking now.
Consumer reality is complex. Budgets to understand it aren't keeping up.
Budgets Are Shrinking
Custom research budgets are shrinking across categories, making it harder to fund the depth needed to understand people properly.
Foundational Insight is harder to access
The kind of consumer understanding that should be standard is increasingly hard to afford and execute at a time when consumer lives are shifting quickly.
Lives Cross Every Domain
Strategy is still forced to see consumers in narrow silos, even though real lives cut across categories, channels, and moments all at once.
A library built for depth, with 500 Americans sharing their lives.
A video archive of how real Americans live, spend, and shift their thinking, built over 18 months across the categories that run their daily lives.
By the numbers
diverse Americans
in a self-recording research community
video stories
across 18 months of continuous build
behavioral domains
money, health, media, identity & more
videos per member
depth over time, not one-off snapshots
Built to reach communities research typically misses
Recruitment with intention
- Real-time recruitment monitoring
- Culturally adaptive question design
- Multilingual and accessible activities
- User-centered research design
- Iteration and follow-up built in
Represented at meaningful scale
- People of color across multiple priority groups
- People with disabilities and LGBTQ+ participants
- Urban, suburban, and rural geographies
- Income bands from under $25K to $200K+
- White collar, blue collar, and small business
Recruited to reflect real America — age, race and ethnicity, geography, income, gender and sexual identity, disability status, and household structure.
The detail, nuance, and emotion behind your data.
Surveys give you the headline. Video adds the texture, context, and feeling — so you understand not just what people report, but how they live it.
Survey says
Video adds
Survey says
"Inflation is impacting my household budget: Strongly Agree"
Video adds
Survey says
"I am anxious about my retirement: Strongly Agree"
Video adds
Survey says
"Intent to exercise more in the next 30 days: 4/5"
Video adds
Survey says
"Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): 1/5"
Video adds
Survey says
"Patient reports 100% medication adherence"
Video adds
The part of consumer behavior you can't survey for.
Surveys tell you what people do. Video shows you why, and what they're working through while they decide.
Video shows us why.
People pause. They get emotional. They contradict themselves and work through it out loud. You see the thinking happen in real time.
Method makes it honest.
Each domain uses ethnographic activity design, structured prompts that give people room to think out loud and go deeper than they would in a survey.
What that looks like in practice
Members don't just answer questions — they show us their lives.
Walking through their homes.
Opening their banking apps to explain a recent decision.
Narrating their morning routines.
Explaining how they split caregiving with a sibling.
How different types of organizations work with us.
We curate insights and create custom libraries built around the specific audiences and questions your innovation, insights, brand, and product teams are working on.
Built in-depth knowledge around luxury buyers
A Fortune 500 brand team needed to understand the lived experiences of Asian, Black, Latino, and LGBTQ+ luxury buyers before briefing creative and activation strategy.
Read the full exampleExplored the why behind quantitative trends
A research agency had strong quantitative data showing a behavioral shift. They used the library to find the emotional and contextual drivers behind the numbers.
Read the full exampleInformed new programs for the disabled community
A nonprofit needed to understand the daily lives, experiences, and unmet needs of disabled adults before designing new programs.
Read the full example