Kathleen Garlasco and Harry Gotimer have opened Garlasco & Gotimer, an industry analyst relations agency with strategic as well as tactical capabilities. Their speciality:

providing direct support to professional services firms, outsourcing providers and software companies seeking assistance with comprehensive AR outsourcing and AR strategy execution, as well as select AR project execution

Kathleen has built a strong track record in building analyst relationships and designing and executing AR programs at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Harry brings a GM’s perspective to ensuring that client engagements deliver real business value — no small feat in the relationship management business.

What’s my take? From where I sit, the demand for analyst relations support seems to be holding steady. I don’t see signs of imminent boom or bust, or serious calls for strategic reinvention of the AR function. Longer term, we all know change is coming. AR cannot escape the seachange slowly seeping into the big-budget areas of high tech marketing and product development: advertising, innovation, market intelligence, brand management, conversion, etc. And that will be compounded by changes in IT procurement and resulting changes in the analyst business models.

Engaging senior AR advisors like Kathleen is a practical way to get the right things done today while sleuthing the optimal playbook for next year’s budget negotiations and org charts.

Best wishes to Kathleen and Harry.

Harris Interactive is offering me $20 to fill out an online survey on advertiser perceptions: “Media Influencer Survey: $20 Incentive & Survey Results.” That got me thinking, what is the going rate for my opinions?

Individual compensation for participating in market research studies is all over the place. Most focus groups offer well over $100/hour. ICT analysts offer research reports valued at a few thousand (or executive summaries worth nothing) or a small contribution to a charity. Meanwhile, online “insta” polls offer nothing. Likewise for blogs and review sites.

Worst case scenario is paying a researcher to give them your opinion. I think there’s a bit of that going on with some (not all) of the hybrid peer council / roles-based analyst research services.

Back to the Harris email, I’ve decided that $20 and an executive summary is not worth it. I probably would have filled out the survey, had they let me negotiate the compensation — such as a contribution to any one of a half dozen critical humanitarian causes. In the here and now, that’s what my opinion is worth.