ComQuest, the Callout Specialists, was founded by Garry
Mitchell in the summer of 1994 to provide PD's with a seamless,
turnkey solution for callout research. After spending two decades
in radio, first as an announcer, then as a PD and consultant,
Mitchell determined that radio stations were still grappling with
the same callout research issues in the mid-90’s that they
had been since the 70’s. He founded the company to improve
efficiency and control of the callout process, and to standardize
the song data collection process through IVR technology, while
leaving the up-front screening and recruiting steps in the hands
of live Interviewers.
ComQuest’s In-House Callout was the first
product to be released. This turnkey system enables Interviewers
to call households that meet the station’s demographic listening
profile, and qualify them to participate in a music test. ComQuest
invented the concept of randomizing the starting position for
song hooks, which made the issue of order bias a thing of the
past.
Later, in 1998, ComQuest developed the first Speech
Recognition engine for music testing, enabling radio stations to collect
song score data from respondents as they spoke their preference
for each song. This enhancement not only made recruiting easier,
but also simplified administration by allowing test-takers to
interact with the computer for more rapid response. ComQuest developed
a robust set of output reports and graphing, charting and mapping
features on the back-end to help PDs more easily interpret and
visualize results. Stations that have adopted this technology
have since noticed better music test results and have reduced
costs by as much as 35%.
To answer the need of client stations that wanted
to get more input from their core, P1 listeners, ComQuest launched
an Internet music testing solution in 2000 called NetQuest. Leveraging
its expertise and bleeding-edge technology, ComQuest produced
this highly flexible, easy-to-use tool for collecting song and
perceptual data from respondents linked from client radio station
web-sites. Many of the same principles that standardized and improved
the callout music testing process were migrated to NetQuest, including
a patented algorithim for building sample panels to the exacting
demo, gender, ethnic and radio station listening parameters that
a radio station desires.
As evidenced by its track record of success, ComQuest
is a leader in callout research, and, in fact, callout is its only business—the
company has no other agendas. Years of experience and hard work
have evolved into a set of solutions that are highly valued today
by leading program directors.
ComQuest, LLC is a privately-held software
development company, based in East County San Diego. The company
supplies and supports callout software products for commercial
broadcast radio stations around the world and aids in the weekly
collection of callout information. Over 1,000,000 song
scores are collected each month by ComQuest systems throughout North and
South America, Mexico, New Zealand and Europe.
|
