How Centerfield collects authentic consumer insights for cited research in under 24 hours

Centerfield supercharges commerce for many of the world's leading brands, including 25% of the Fortune 100, by helping them acquire customers at scale through its owned media network, proprietary technology, and performance-based execution. One way it does this is through owned editorial properties, like Security.org and Business.com. Through these independent editorial review sites, Centerfield publishes authentic customer reviews and content that drive authority, media citations, and trust.

To stay competitive in many of these fast-moving industries, they need to put credible consumer insights into the news cycle while stories are still breaking, not weeks after the moment has passed. With Prolific, they can collect detailed responses from thousands of consumers in less than a day, enabling them to run research that’s now cited as a trusted source by large language models.

The challenge: Collecting in-depth consumer insights at the speed of news cycles

Beth Klongpayabal, Analytics Lead at Centerfield, runs market research that supports their clients’ growth. The goal is to capture the voice of the consumer, including their preferences, concerns, adoption habits, and more.

Their research content tends to fall into two categories. The first involves annual benchmarking, focusing on topics such as VPN usage and cryptocurrency adoption, and tracking consumer sentiment year over year. The second is much faster and more reactive, responding to what’s in the marketplace right now, from back-to-school shopping to how small businesses use AI.

For this second approach, speed is critical. The window to deliver insights is measured in days, not weeks. Publish too late, and the conversation has moved on.

On top of this, Centerfield’s research has several specific requirements:

• Sample size and balance: For credible findings, studies usually demand a nationally representative sample of 1,200 to 2,000 people. This then needs to be balanced across demographics so every subgroup stands up on its own.
• Specialist targeting: Many studies target niche audiences, such as SMBs with specific headcounts or consumers of specific digital products.
• Qualitative depth: Centerfield earns media authority from the authentic voices of real respondents. Open-text responses are often the most valuable part of the dataset.

Before Prolific, the team used a different respondent pool and survey platform. When Centerfield asked open-ended responses, the answers were often low-effort and inconsistent. And it only takes a handful of poor-quality open-text answers to cast doubt on the entire dataset. "When I can't trust a portion of the data, I can't trust any of it,” Beth notes.

To make matters worse, the providers themselves could be frustratingly uncooperative. “When we tested other providers, the problem wasn’t just the inconsistency of feedback or low-effort responses,” she says. “When it happened, they weren’t apologetic. They didn’t give me the time of day and just said, ‘That’s the cost of doing business.’”

The solution: A reliable panel for fast, honest insights

The team set up a head-to-head test with open-text questions to see whether Prolific could meet their requirements. They were instantly taken aback by the difference in data quality they received.

After years of struggling to get authentic responses, she had found a reliable source of rich, genuine insight from people who took the questions seriously. **Even when the team ran multiple-choice questions with an open-text ‘other’ option, they found that Prolific participants provided substantive and honest answers.

“It’s very important to remember that we’re not reporting on statistics,” she notes. “We’re reporting on human beings having human experiences with products for human needs.”

That’s why, when Beth presents her analysis to clients, she’ll often include verbatim responses from Prolific participants. “We just say, for example, ‘Mabel from Alabama said…’ and show them the quote,” she explains. "Their words tell the story better than the statistics do."

It's part of the reason Centerfield keeps coming back to Prolific, even after testing other panels. Every so often, the team blind-tests a legacy provider to ensure Centerfield is working with the best data on the market. While responses are often fast, they lack the thought, honesty, and consistency that Prolific participants provide.

Beth also noticed a difference in the support she received. Where other providers were relatively indifferent to resolving issues, Prolific was proactive and responsive. "Every time I've brought a concern to Prolific, they've responded immediately and looked into it," she notes.

"You can't get rid of us,” Beth adds. “We just keep coming back!"

Time to data reduced from weeks to days

Centerfield self-serves via Prolific’s platform. The speed and ease of getting set up and started mean that her internal how-to guide for using Prolific runs to all of three pages.

Prolific’s 300+ screeners, combined with the option to add custom screening questions, enable Beth and her team to target highly specialized audiences without requiring any back-and-forth with an account manager.

“We can react quickly in the marketplace to what’s in the media right now,” Beth says. “The self-serve platform works really well for that.”

Automated demographic balancing removed a major operational burden. Studies that previously required manual weighting for factors such as age, gender, and geography can now be set up in a few clicks.

The reduction in time to data has been significant. Where it would once take weeks to collect hundreds of responses, Beth can now get thousands in less than 24 hours.

The result: Credible research cited as a trusted source by AI models

Centerfield recently fielded a study for a client on AI adoption inside small and medium businesses.

The target was specific, focusing on decision-makers at companies of a particular size with authority over purchasing decisions. The team wanted to know whether these people were genuinely using AI and to capture their honest concerns and complaints about the technology.

With the providers Centerfield used in the past, reaching this audience would have taken weeks, long enough for the findings to become outdated before they’re even published. “With AI, things move so quickly. In a month’s time, the opinion has changed.”

But with Prolific, the team was able to field it, analyze it, and publish while it was still news. It landed in the cycle and earned media interviews, putting Centerfield in the conversation on a subject that was changing under everyone's feet.

The research is now being cited in AI-generated answers on the very topic it covers. When users ask AI assistants about small businesses adopting AI, Centerfield’s study surfaces at the top of the results, a signal that the research is regarded as an authoritative, trustworthy source.

This is part of a broader pattern. Several of Centerfield’s sites are among the most frequently cited sources in AI-generated answers for their categories. That authority has been built over years of consistent, credible consumer research, backed by insights from honest and generous research participants.

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