Case Study · Financial Services · Brand Experience
RBC: 83% Higher-Quality Consumer Data
How Ether replaced survey fatigue with real-time Emotion Intelligence capture — delivering 83% cleaner, more complete consumer data from RBC brand experiences without disrupting the experience itself.
83%
Higher-Quality Data
The Challenge
RBC operates across a high volume of consumer brand experiences — sponsorships, community events, financial wellness activations, and partner programming. Understanding how these experiences land with consumers is critical for both brand and business measurement.
The existing measurement approach relied on post-event surveys. The results were chronically incomplete: low response rates, high dropout, and answers that reflected memory reconstruction rather than the actual emotional experience. The data teams were working with was dirty — full of gaps, biases, and artifacts of the survey method itself.
The problem wasn't consumer engagement. It was the measurement approach: asking people how they felt after the fact produces fundamentally different data than capturing how they feel during the experience.
Ether's Approach
Ether deployed Emotion Intelligence across RBC brand experiences using Glimmers — non-disruptive touchpoints embedded within the natural flow of the experience. Rather than asking consumers to reflect afterward, Ether captured their emotional state at the moment of engagement.
01
In-Moment Capture
Glimmers captured emotional response at the point of experience — not hours or days later — eliminating recall bias from the measurement equation.
02
Complete Data Profile
Because capture is embedded in the experience flow, response rates are dramatically higher than post-event surveys. No follow-up required.
03
Clean Signal Extraction
Ether's platform filtered emotional signal from noise, producing structured, analyzable data that RBC's insights teams could act on directly.
The Results
83%
Increase in Clean Data Quality
By shifting from post-event surveys to in-moment Emotion Intelligence capture, RBC saw an 83% improvement in the completeness and quality of consumer data from brand experiences. More data. Less bias. More useful.
The downstream impact extended beyond data quality. RBC's insights teams were now working with data that reflected how consumers actually experienced the brand — not how they reconstructed it in a survey days later. That difference changes the quality of every decision made downstream.
Measurement Methodology
Every Ether engagement follows the same four-step logic:
An experience created interaction
RBC brand activations created direct consumer touchpoints across sponsorship, community, and financial wellness programming.
Emotion Intelligence interpreted emotional response
Glimmers captured emotional signals in real time during each experience — measuring attention, engagement quality, and behavioral intent without asking consumers to pause or reflect.
Insight revealed intent and motivation
In-moment capture produced complete, unbiased data — 83% higher quality than the prior survey approach — revealing which experiences drove genuine emotional engagement.
Business impact could be explained and defended
RBC's insights teams gained a reliable data foundation for experience optimization, budget justification, and future activation planning.
Frequently Asked Questions
How did Ether improve RBC's data quality by 83%?
Traditional post-event surveys suffer from recall bias, response fatigue, and low completion rates — resulting in sparse, unreliable data. Ether replaced this approach with real-time Emotion Intelligence capture using Glimmers touchpoints. Because data is captured during the experience itself (not after), it reflects genuine emotional response rather than reconstructed memory. This in-moment capture methodology produced 83% higher-quality, clean data compared to RBC's previous post-event survey approach.
What is "clean data" in the context of experiential marketing?
Clean data in experiential marketing refers to consumer insight that is complete, unbiased, and genuinely representative of the emotional experience. Dirty data problems include: incomplete survey responses, socially desirable answers, recall bias (people misremember their emotional state hours or days after an event), and selection bias (only highly engaged or disengaged attendees complete surveys). Emotion Intelligence captures data at the moment of experience, before these distortions occur.
Can Emotion Intelligence replace consumer surveys?
Emotion Intelligence complements and, in many cases, can replace traditional survey approaches for experiential marketing measurement. While surveys capture stated preferences and aided recall, Emotion Intelligence captures actual behavioral and emotional response in real time — which is often a better predictor of future behavior. For live events and brand activations specifically, in-moment capture eliminates the core weaknesses of post-event surveys.
Ready to replace surveys with real signal?
See how Emotion Intelligence can transform the quality of insight your team extracts from every brand experience.