This week started with an email from one of the “Mad-ison Men” who work here in Asia. 
It was to turn down a proposal for research because they thought that focus groups would give them more depth, and more emotion than anything we could do online. So there it is - after years of ad agencies complaining about focus groups - in conversations, client meetings, from platforms and in print and in blogs; people from three large agencies can still be mired in 50’s thinking.
Maybe they haven’t seen the Universal McCann data about how Web 2.0 is opening up in Asia. Maybe they have never noticed that the average talk time in a focus group is at about twenty minutes. Maybe they have not ever seen depth interviews utilising emotive exploration. Maybe the comparative atomisation of some markets in Asia has passed them by.
And obviously newer qualitative techniques that tap into the expressiveness, the depth and the emotion of web 2.0 world is passing the mad men by.