Charity Work Again?

Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief

As our valued friends over on the ADVFN and iii forums and bulletin boards would say – “DYOR!!!

Dear Mr. Cotterill,

I am the editorial assistant for Cleverdis. We will be putting out our new SMARTreport on Digital Signage in July (More information on this upcoming edition here) , and are currently preparing the editorial content. I know from your blog that you are quite current with the trends in Digital Signage (although I am having trouble accessing your archives) We were wondering if you had any current market data, analysis and white papers on the market for the upcoming issue.

Thank you

To be fair Cleverdis have in the past produced some very good reports BUT it’s just that, we as always question what lengths they (and others) go to in order to procure their research material.

If as it seems from just the requests we see for information – gathering white papers, reading other people’s blogs and conducting unpaid for interviews is a very poor reflection on who has the real expert opinion in this industry sector.

We wrote about this before with regard Frost & Sullivan, see Charity Work, We Do For Macmillan for more information and after we published that we received a dozen or so emails supporting our ‘attitude’ and our response!

One of our subscribers wrote into us on that subject…

“We asked Frost & Sullivan to do a research report for us about the European DS market, which they did. These guys charged a hell of a lot of money for that AND on top of it they charged additional fees for third party research which, in their OWN words they ‘needed to purchase’ – incredible!”

When YOU as a corporate purchase these sorts of reports from the so called experts (and it is the Corporate sector that keeps these folks in business), just remember that unlike in academia, the folks you hand money over to rarely list all of their (primary and secondary) sources and any sort of bibliography.


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