Ipsos MORI

History

In 1946, Mark Abrams formed a market research company called Research Services Ltd. (RSL). RSL operated until 1991 when it was acquired by Ipsos, becoming Ipsos UK.

MORI (Market and Opinion Research International) was founded in 1969 by Robert Worcester. Robert Worcester stepped down from chairmanship of MORI in June 2005. Ipsos announced it would acquire MORI in October 2005 for £88 million, and would merge it with Ipsos UK. The merged company was named Ipsos MORI. In February 2022 the company rebranded to simply Ipsos.

Methodology

Ipsos MORI's research is conducted via a wide range of methodologies, using computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI), as well as face-to-face (CAPI) and Internet surveys. Many telephone surveys use a system called random digit dialing to interview a representative group of the population.

Controversies

In May 2013, The Sunday Times reported that Ipsos MORI had negotiated an agreement with the EE mobile phone network to commercialise the data on that company's 23 million subscribers. The article stated that Ipsos MORI was looking to sell this data to the Metropolitan Police and other parties. The data included "gender, age, postcode, websites visited, time of day text is sent [and] location of customer when call is made". When confronted by the newspaper, the Metropolitan Police indicated that they would not be taking the discussions any further. Ipsos MORI defended their actions, stressing that the company only received anonymised data, without any personally identifiable data on an individual customer, and underlining that reports are only ever made on aggregated groups of more than 50 customers.

References

References

1. (10 October 2005). "Ipsos buys Mori in £88m deal". Research.
2. "Officers / Members - British Polling Council".
3. "Ipsos MORI - Market Research Agencies - The Research Buyers Guide".
4. (30 August 2017). "Cataloguing Update: The Mark Abrams Papers – Churchill College".
5. "Reference document – Ipsos 2018".
6. Rupert Jones. (15 June 2005). "Sir Bob quits Mori chairmanship". The Guardian.
7. Julia Day. (10 October 2005). "French rival snaps up Mori". The Guardian.
8. (1 February 2022). "Ipsos rebrands in the UK".
9. "Ipsos MORI".
10. "Approached by us: Telephone".
11. (12 May 2013). "Switch on and you become a goldmine". The Sunday Times.
12. (12 May 2013). "Secrets of 27m mobile phones offered to police". The Sunday Times.
13. Pete Swabey. (13 May 2013). "EE and Ipsos MORI face privacy backlash over mobile data analysis". Information Age.
14. (12 May 2013). "Ipsos MORI response to the ''Sunday Times''". Ipsos MORI.