Oliver Sweet is an ethnographer who leads the Ethnography Centre of Excellence at Ipsos MORI. He has led research across 35+ countries for clients including Unilever, Tesco, UNICEF, and the UK Department of Health. He is a board member of the AQR, a published author, and an advocate for immersive, empathetic, and participant-led qualitative research. He has a great newsletter CultureStack.
I start all these conversations with the same question—a big one that I borrowed from a friend who helps people tell their stories. Because it’s such a big question, I tend to over-explain it—just like I’m doing now. Before I ask it, I want you to know you’re in complete control. You can answer—or not answer—however you like.
The question is: Where do you come from?
You know, I think it’s the way you ask that question—the intonation—that makes it so good. Because I can interpret it in so many ways. Before I answer, I just want to point out the obvious: being asked that question in conversation—rather than reading it—prompts a completely different kind of response. So, good question.
So, where am I from? I’m a Londoner living in London, which I take some pride in, because there aren’t that many Londoners in London anymore. Whenever I meet someone and they ask where I’m from, and I say London, they respond, “Oh my God, I haven’t met a Londoner in ages.” London is such a melting pot of diversity, and I think it was when people started reacting that way that I started to feel proud of being from here.
I actually moved around a lot growing up. That constant moving is one of the things that shaped me. When I tell people we moved every two or three years, they often ask if my parents were in the military or something. But no—they were just restless. They got bored easily and liked new places. That restlessness probably rubbed off on me. I like new experiences, new environments. But still, yes—I'm a Londoner.
I went through a phase when my parents moved to France during my teenage years. For a while, I claimed I was French. I enjoyed saying it—it had a certain comedy value. But then I met a few fluent French speakers, and that quickly exposed the truth. My French is pigeon French at best. So now I’ve gone back to identifying as a Londoner, which feels more genuine—and it seems to have some kudos again, which it didn’t always have.
What does it mean to be a Londoner?
People assume certain things about you, which is one of the fascinating parts of identity. It’s not just what you think—it’s what others project onto you. People assume you know the city, that you know its secrets and history, where to go and where not to go. Because London carries a certain cultural cachet, that assumption of being cultured gets projected onto you too—like, you must go to the theatre, attend exhibitions, that sort of thing.
Ironically, if you’re a true Londoner, you probably don’t explore the city that much. It’s usually the visitors who engage more with the cultural side of London. Still, I enjoy being from here. I do know my way around. And I love the memories—different neighborhoods hold different chapters of my life. Visiting those places feels like opening up little time capsules.
My experience is the opposite—I moved away. I’m nowhere near where I grew up, and I’ve had moments where I’ve felt the absence of that deep connection to place. It’s powerful—there’s something grounding about being able to revisit your past in a physical way.
I think that’s true. Maybe that’s why, after all these years, I’ve returned to calling myself a Londoner. I grew up here, spent time away, and now that I’m back, there’s a renewed pride. I can access that history.
I’ve heard you ask this question many times, but I’ve never heard you answer it.
Nobody asks me. I appreciate the opportunity. I think my answer is: I come from the burbs. I come from the suburbs—a very ordinary American suburb outside of Rochester, New York. I often say every other house looked the same, they just smelled different. I have this strong self-image of being a very ordinary, suburban, middle-class American kid.
And what kind of feeling does that bring up for you? Is it pride?
Here is your cleaned and polished transcript section:
Or is that sort of... probably a deep ambivalence, I think. A lot of my work has taken place in the suburbs of American cities. They're important places for many of our clients. So, I think having grown up in that environment gives me access to a mindset and worldview that a lot of research clients are actively trying to understand. That, in itself, is a powerful thing to know.
That’s beautiful.
I'm curious—when you were a boy, did you have an idea of what you wanted to be when you grew up, other than French?
Absolutely not. I spent years wandering around the UK, Europe, and other parts of the world trying to "find myself"—which sounds like a cliché. But really, I was just a bit lost, doing things I enjoyed without a clear path. The throughline was that I loved meeting people and having new experiences. No one tells you that there's a career in that.
I only found my way into this work later—at 27. That’s when I became a proper researcher and ethnographer. And I realized all the things I’d been doing for fun—what I thought was just drifting—were actually meaningful. There was this thing called “insight.” All those stories from my twenties, from traveling and living abroad, turned out to have value.
I thought I was just confused. But in truth, the world of market research tends to gather curious people who had no idea they were going to end up here. I’d love to change that, to raise awareness earlier on, but I haven’t figured out how yet.
Before we go further into that, catch us up—where are you now, and what do you do?
I work at Ipsos, a large global research agency, where I’m Head of Ethnography. I've held this role for about 16 or 17 years. Over time, I’ve had opportunities to take different jobs or pursue promotions, but I’ve turned most of them down because I genuinely love what I do.
I run a team of over 15 people—ethnographers, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, artists, documentary filmmakers. It’s a multidisciplinary group. We work around the world on client projects, digging into complex, often tangled questions. We do this by spending time with people, immersing ourselves in the cultures they live in.
That’s what keeps me going year after year: the richness of cultural understanding we gain. Recently, we’ve worked in places like Sierra Leone and Papua New Guinea to understand cocoa farming, and in various parts of the UK exploring how people do their laundry. The projects are varied, but the throughline is always this: how does culture shape behavior?
Culture is this amorphous, fascinating force. It’s everywhere, it shapes all of us, and I never tire of exploring it. I truly love my job.
Where is the joy in it for you? You've already expressed a lot of admiration for the work, but how would you describe the source of joy?
The joy comes from two places. First, it’s about meeting people and learning how others live. It sounds a bit cliché, but it really is about stepping outside your bubble. You get to see how other people prioritize their lives—what matters to them, and how different those priorities are from your own.
We live in echo chambers, both online and offline. We socialize with people who think like us, live like us. And that’s dangerous. The more you get out of that environment and into others’, the more you learn—not just about them, but about yourself. That’s the first source of joy.
The second is intellectual curiosity. I love the process of sitting with a complex cultural question and pulling it apart over time. Something like: What does elitism mean today? Why is it praised in some circles and condemned in others? How does a new cultural narrative form that shifts behavior and identity?
So yes—meeting people and indulging in intellectual curiosity. Those are the parts I love most.
You mentioned it earlier, but when did you realize you could actually make a living doing this?
I was very lucky. In my mid-twenties, after bouncing between seven jobs in four years, I realized I needed to find a real career. I used to tell myself I didn’t like those jobs—but if I’m honest, they probably didn’t like me either.
At the time, I was working at Ipsos, doing survey research. It wasn’t a great fit—I’m not great with numbers—so I’m not even sure how I landed that job. But then someone from another department stepped in: Johanna Shapira.
She had come from Ogilvy, where she ran an ethnographic group called Ogilvy Discovery, and had just started the ethnography practice at Ipsos UK. I was thinking about leaving, and she invited me to try this new work. She saw something in me, something I hadn’t yet seen in myself.
She taught me how to be an ethnographer. I already had the academic background—social sciences, psychology, sociology, a bit of anthropology—but she showed me how to make that thinking relevant to the world today. She even helped me realize that those so-called "lost years" of travel had value in this work.
That was about 17 years ago. I went from jumping between jobs to finding something I loved. And Johanna—she was one of those rare bosses who truly focused on you as a person, more than the business. In our appraisals, she’d make just two or three observations about my behavior, and I’d find myself in tears—because she was spot-on. She helped me grow, personally and professionally.
So yes, I found this work through someone who believed in me, taught me, and gave me the room to become who I needed to be.
In that time, how would you describe the changes you’ve seen in the understanding and application of ethnography?
Oh, that’s an interesting question. I think ethnography has evolved in two or three distinct ways.
First—and this is something I’ll never fully understand—in the world of market research, marketing, and innovation, ethnography is often seen as the “new and cool” thing to do. And yet, it’s probably the oldest discipline in this space—much older than surveys or focus groups. Despite that, it still carries this label of being fresh and exciting.
As a result, a lot of agencies and researchers have tried to add value to their work by rebranding it as something ethnographic—“ethno light,” “ethno research,” or simply sticking a video camera in front of someone and calling it ethnography. I have a pet hate for the term “ethno.” To me, if you’re doing “ethno,” you’re not doing ethnography. It describes something incomplete. I think people shy away from the full depth and rigor that proper ethnography requires.
About five to ten years ago, clients began to lose interest in ethnography because they didn’t see it as especially applicable or actionable. But as more clients adopted a global mindset, they began looking for answers beyond personality typologies. A lot of market research, especially segmentation, focuses on personality types. That’s useful—but only part of the picture.
The other part is culture. Where you grow up—India, the U.S., Argentina, China—shapes you deeply. Your upbringing, the social norms, the structure of daily life—all of it plays a significant role in who you become. I’d go so far as to say culture shapes your personality to a large degree.
Historically, marketing has favored the idea of comparable units—having a consumer segment in Brazil that maps cleanly onto a segment in the U.S. But that just doesn’t hold up. In the last seven or eight years—pre-pandemic even—there’s been a renewed desire to understand the cultural backdrop behind behavior. That’s led to a form of ethnography that’s less about producing glossy videos and more about understanding how culture influences us.
Of course, there are ongoing pressures around speed and budget—everyone faces those. But ethnography seems to be having a resurgence. People need to understand culture now more than ever. And I think that’s only going to intensify as artificial intelligence becomes more embedded in what we do. AI, by its nature, tends to cluster around the mainstream. But ethnography is often about the fringes—those edge cases where culture is changing, where innovation happens, and where inclusion matters.
The more clearly AI maps the center, the more we’ll need ethnography to explore the edges.
What is a proper ethnography? For much of my career, that word wasn’t even said aloud. It wasn’t a thing, and now it’s become common—but often misused or misunderstood. So for you, what makes something truly ethnographic? What must be true for it to be valuable?
I’ve often been accused of being a purist, which I refute—because there are academics who think what I do is a complete bastardization. So, there's a spectrum. The real question is: how much time and effort are you investing to truly understand why people do what they do?
Ethnography can happen over a month, a week, a day—maybe even an hour or two, though that’s pushing it. The point is not the length of time but the depth of understanding. You need to connect several elements.
You need a deep grasp of the culture someone lives in. That can be researched before you even meet them—understanding their influences, what they watch, where they spend time online. You need to know where they grew up, what their environment was like, their neighborhood, their social context. You learn a lot just by being with someone, observing the world they navigate.
Ultimately, it’s about understanding how culture informs behavior, and how that shapes attitudes. Most non-ethnographic work starts with attitudes and then tries to deduce behaviors. I prefer to start the other way around. What people say is useful—but I want to dig into what that really means.
Ethnography is about creating meaning. It’s about understanding the system of meaning someone lives within. And there are many valid ways to do that—even if you're not a purist.
Not everyone listening may fully understand what ethnography is, even at a basic level. Can you share a story that really demonstrates what you mean by it—something that brings it to life?
Yes, absolutely. That’s probably a good idea, seeing as I’ve been talking around it. The first ethnography I ever did is a great example.
We were doing research in the north of England, in a fairly deprived rural town. One of the participants had taken part in a telephone interview. He said that he liked to go for a long walk each day, that he ate healthily, and that he often went to the park. That was the limited information I had going in.
I also knew, based on how he was recruited, that he was clinically obese and had diabetes. So, I was really interested in understanding his situation, especially because, on the surface, it seemed contradictory.
I called him and asked if I could spend the day with him for an ethnographic interview. At that point, I already had some understanding of Oldham, the town, from previous work, so I had a sense of the broader context.
We planned to spend the whole day together—from around 9 a.m. through dinner. The idea was to see different points in his day: his routines, his interactions with family or friends, his meals, and his diabetes management. That’s what I’d call a solid market research ethnography—one where you’re fully dedicated to observing and understanding someone in their own environment. You put your phone away, forget about distractions, and just be with them.
Within ten minutes of arriving, he told me he had to take his medication. He sat down in the kitchen, pulled down his trousers, and gave himself an injection in the leg. I wasn’t quite expecting that—not for my first ethnography. It caught me off guard, but it was fascinating. I asked why he was doing it at that moment, and he just said, “I don’t know. I do it morning and evening.” I asked if he needed to do it around meals or if he should be measuring his levels, and he replied, “I don’t bother with any of that. I just do it morning and evening.”
So already, I was learning something meaningful about his relationship with his condition—far more than we’d ever get from a survey.
Later, he said, “Let’s go for a walk. I need to walk the dog.” But instead of walking, he shuffled outside and got on his mobility scooter. We went for a four-mile “walk” through the park that way. So, the “daily walk” he had mentioned in the phone interview wasn’t really a walk at all.
Then, at lunchtime, he grilled his sausages instead of frying them—that was his idea of healthy eating. These were the kinds of compromises he was making. He didn’t want to go out, but he had to because of the dog. He didn’t want to grill sausages, but he thought it was better than frying. These were real decisions he was making with the resources and knowledge he had.
As we talked, I learned more about his background. He had been a truck driver for 25 years. When he developed diabetes, his eyesight began to fail, and he had to stop working. His entire social life had revolved around his job, and now it was gone. He became isolated in his community. The town itself had racial tensions and had experienced riots, and he felt confined—trapped. He had far bigger concerns than the health authority’s goals for improving his lifestyle. He was dealing with issues like neighbors occasionally egging his door.
Spending the day with him revealed all of that. It was a profound window into someone’s world. And from there, we can ask: how do we support people like him—people in those circumstances?
That’s beautiful. What kinds of conversations do you have with clients? When does Ipsos call you in? I always imagine it like the red phone from Batman—when does someone call Oliver? What’s that first conversation like?
I love that image. I do actually remember having a red phone on my desk once. It was ridiculous—but kind of hilarious.
I think the best time to bring in ethnographic research is when you know something’s missing, but you don’t quite know what it is. In a lot of traditional research, the process starts with clearly defined objectives: “Here’s what we want to find out—go and get the answers.” If you already know exactly what you're asking, ethnography might not be the right tool.
But when the problem is murky, when you’re unsure of what the real question is—that’s the perfect time. That’s when I get most excited. Maybe the client has a target audience, but they don’t really understand what that audience does, let alone why they do it. There are too many unknowns, especially around behavior and meaning.
We work a lot in consumer packaged goods. And every product that someone buys carries some kind of meaning. Even something as routine as buying laundry detergent has emotional and cultural weight behind it.
It means they’re striving for a hassle-free life. Or it’s about taking pride in sending their kids out the door looking presentable. Or it’s the satisfaction of knowing something’s been done right. It can mean many, many things.
But every single product—whether it’s laundry detergent, a chocolate bar, or a smartphone—carries meaning. And that’s what we’re always trying to decode. But I feel like I’m preaching to the choir here, especially since your newsletter is called The Business of Meaning. You understand—there’s purpose behind everything.
Yes, but I was going to ask: what do we mean when we talk about "meaning"? I take a kind of perverse joy in going back to basic concepts I’m drawn to. So, what does meaning mean to you?
That’s a great question. And it’s something I’ve been working through over time. I’ve developed a framework to explain how we think about meaning—what we call a cultural framework. It’s built on the idea that meaning is a system.
When I conduct research, I’m always trying to explore three things. They’re deeply interrelated. When you find the connections between them, you begin to understand meaning more clearly.
The first is identity: Who is this person? How do they express themselves? How do others see them? What are their stylistic choices, the signals they send? That’s the individual level.
Then we look at community: How are they connecting with others? That could be at work, at school, with friends, or online. Identity and community are linked—it’s through community that identity is often reinforced or performed.
The third piece is belief systems: What beliefs or values underpin that identity and community? This includes ideology, morality, personal values—all the stuff that gives shape to someone’s worldview.
When you connect identity, community, and belief systems, that’s when you can really see what something means. And meaning is fluid—you can shift or reshape it.
One of the early projects I worked on was about trying to engage young boys who were displaying antisocial behavior on the streets of London. The question was: how can we get them to go to the local youth centre?
The youth centre was well-funded and had great facilities, but the boys simply didn’t want to go. What we discovered was that the boys wanted a space that felt unregulated—a place where they weren’t being watched. They wanted freedom to explore this emerging form of masculinity. That was their identity.
In terms of community, they wanted to be in environments that didn’t feel sterile or restrictive. And their belief system was rooted in discovery—figuring out who they were, both individually and as a group.
We looked at what the youth centre represented: different social codes, a different kind of order and structure. The meanings didn’t align. The boys weren’t rejecting the youth centre as such—they were rejecting the values it implicitly stood for.
So, our suggestion to the youth centre was: don’t try to attract the boys directly through table tennis, computers, or football tables. Instead, attract the girls. Because if the girls go, the boys will follow. And then it becomes a safer, more vibrant environment for everyone. That became part of the strategy. So, understanding meaning through identity, community, and belief allowed us to unlock a more effective, culturally attuned solution.
That’s wonderful. You mentioned earlier that ethnography had a sort of moment, or maybe even matured a bit in the years leading up to the pandemic. But the pandemic clearly drew a hard line across so many of these practices. How did you respond to that moment, and what impact do you think it’s had on how ethnography is done?
I had to do the biggest U-turn of my entire career.
For years, I insisted that real ethnography required being physically present with people. None of this “digital ethnography” stuff. I dismissed it as shallow, surface-level work.
Then the pandemic hit. Flights were canceled. We couldn’t travel. We couldn’t go into people’s homes. I had a team of about 15 or 16 people, and none of us knew when—or if—things would return to normal. We were worried about our jobs. So we sat down and did some serious soul-searching.
We acknowledged that digital ethnography was out there, but we had always resisted it. We thought it didn’t go deep enough. But we had no choice. So we asked ourselves: if we must do this digitally, how do we do it in a way that still honors the core principles of ethnography?
And we realized something important. Digital gave us time. Instead of spending one or two days with someone in person, we could now spend two, three, even four weeks with them—because they were home, and available. We leaned into that.
We also focused on reflection. It wasn’t just about getting participants to film themselves with their phones. We set up regular interviews—weekly or even more frequent—and encouraged people to reflect deeply on their own lives.
It became less about capturing “natural” behavior in a single burst, and more about creating a space for participants to observe themselves, to articulate and process what they were experiencing. And that turned out to be rich in a completely different way.
To really understand someone’s belief system, you have to have a deep conversation. You have to ask lots of “why” questions to get beneath the surface. So, we also decided to do a lot of cultural research beforehand and use that to pose hypotheses to people—to give them something to reflect on and respond to.
We took a big gamble. We recruited around ten households in each of five different countries—so fifty households in total. Then we told our clients, “Look, we know you’ve canceled all your planned research work, but we’re going to launch a new syndicated study. The cost of entry will be very low, and in return, we’ll send you a report every single week about what’s unfolding during the pandemic.”
The plan was to ask participants to film themselves using their mobile phones, to have regular conversations with us, and to let us explore the cultural and political context they were living in. And we followed through. We produced a weekly report for about nine months.
It was exhausting. But we sent that same report to six different clients who had signed up, and honestly, it was a lifeline. At the time, we had zero other work. It was also a way for us to learn—fast—how to do digital ethnography well.
Because this wasn’t just people showing us their homes and saying, “This is my kitchen.” It was about getting them to reflect deeply, to have meaningful conversations within their own households. For example, we’d ask them to talk to their families about food: Has it become more exciting? More boring? What’s changed?
And what we saw was an emotional rollercoaster. In the early weeks, people fell in love with food again. They wanted something to do with their hands. They baked bread, played board games, got into crafts. When you strip away the distractions and give people time, you realize they’re innately creative. They want to make things. They want to do something.
That explosion of creativity lasted maybe six or seven weeks. You saw it in the rainbows in windows, the clapping for carers, the singing from balconies. And then... it all became tiresome. People got stir-crazy. They missed each other. The novelty wore off.
But that’s when something else kicked in: reflection. When you’re stuck at home, you have time to reassess your values—your priorities, your work, your family. People started to realize that the lives they were living pre-pandemic didn’t really align with who they wanted to be. They didn’t want to spend two hours commuting every day. They wanted to be at home with their kids.
The move to remote work changed everything. Now that we’re trying to shift back to hybrid, no one wants to go into the office five days a week if it means losing that precious time.
Our values were fundamentally reassessed. Take the murder of George Floyd, for example. That wasn’t the first instance of racial violence, but because the whole world was at home—re-evaluating their moral frameworks—and because the footage was so raw and unfiltered, people responded differently. It was a turning point. It wasn’t just that event; it was the context. People had the time, space, and emotional capacity to reckon with it.
And that was fascinating to watch unfold. Exhausting, yes—but also deeply meaningful.
I can’t imagine doing that while also going through your own pandemic experience.
Exactly. That was the other layer—processing our own lives while documenting everyone else’s.
So, how would you describe the state of ethnography now—especially when it comes to digital versus in-person? Where do you stand now, post-pandemic, as a former purist?
I think I’ve found a way to frame it that works pretty well. What we’ve learned is that digital ethnography—when done properly—can be incredibly confessional.
Yes, it’s amazing to meet someone in person. But when someone is alone, with their phone, and reflecting on their own life, that solitude can create a powerful space for honesty. Some of the work we’ve done on obesity in recent years—people recording their thoughts alone—has been incredibly raw and revealing.
They’ve told us things they could never say to their partners, or even to us if we were sitting across from them. That requires trust, of course, which is why we don’t just do a couple of “mobile diary” entries. We build that relationship over two, three, even four weeks. And the emotional depth we get can be profound.
On the other hand, face-to-face ethnography—when done well—delivers surprises. It allows you to follow people, go where they go, see what they see. That’s when you discover things no one expected. And it’s a harder sell, because clients always ask: “What kind of things are you going to find?” And the honest answer is, “I don’t know.” But that’s the point.
So, I’ve come to think of it this way: digital ethnography gives you confessions, and in-person ethnography gives you surprises. That’s a useful way to think about the strengths of each.
That’s a beautiful distinction. And it ties back to something you mentioned earlier—that your favorite kind of brief is when the client doesn’t quite know what they’re looking for. How do you describe that sweet spot—the mindset of a client who’s willing to go on that kind of discovery journey with you, into the unknown?
So it can be quite tricky. But this is actually, I think, the role of thought leadership. Ipsos is an enormous agency, and we do a lot of research all the time. My team is always out talking to people, spending time with them. And we start to notice patterns—things that repeat across studies, even when we’re not looking for them.
Three or four years ago, someone on my team said, “This whole notion of masculinity is getting weird—it’s warped, it’s difficult.” And they wanted to dig into it. We brought the idea to a couple of our beer clients at the time. They were mildly receptive—“Yeah, maybe, whatever.”
So we said, fine. We’ll look into it ourselves.
As a piece of thought leadership, we set out to explore toxic masculinity, modern masculinity, changing role models, and how all of this plays out online. The insights were eye-opening. And much of what we uncovered is now part of everyday conversation. But we were looking at it years ago.
About nine months after finishing the work, we brought it to clients and said, “This matters.” And suddenly they got it. They came forward and said, “OK, now I see what you mean.”
We had a similar experience with health care—specifically, the experience of women in health care. We observed that women were being treated very differently. At first, clients responded with the usual hesitation: “Maybe... sure, if you say so.”
But when we did the work, we showed how women were often labeled “hysterical” for symptoms that were, in fact, common and valid. The language, the treatment—it all needed to be reexamined. Pharmaceutical companies started coming to us saying, “Yes. We need to address this.”
Right now, we’re working on a study about elitism. Everyone assumes that’s a political topic—something to do with populism. But it’s much broader than that. Businesses don’t have political immunity anymore. Everything they do is under scrutiny.
Being labeled “elitist” can completely shift how the public sees your company. And often, you don’t get advance warning. Suddenly you’re tagged with this label, and your corporate reputation is at stake. So that’s the focus: how does politics enter the business sphere? And how does it influence corporate reputation?
I see this as a call to arms for the industry. We can’t just follow the client. Yes, of course—we follow their needs, their questions. But we also have a responsibility to look outward and say, “Here’s what we’re seeing across the world. Here’s what we believe matters. Here’s what you should be paying attention to.”
We can lead—not just respond.
Yeah, it’s amazing. I feel like the power is sort of hidden. You said you were looking at this three or four years ago, and now it’s everywhere. So this kind of work gives you early notice. Can you say more about that?
It feels like the value of this work is that it gives you a perspective on what’s coming—long before other methodologies can. But maybe it’s hard to articulate that. It’s true, but not always true in the moment, if that makes sense. Do you know what I mean?
Yes, I do know what you mean. It’s crucial to look at the fringes of society. That’s where the early signals come from.
The masculinity example is a good one. It started when someone on my team heard her daughter come home from school and say, “I don’t want to go to school—the boys are being such dicks.”
She kept hearing similar things: “The boys are so annoying,” “They’re shouting at the teacher,” “They’re saying things like, ‘Miss, make me a sandwich.’”
She thought, “This is strange.” So we started listening more closely to these signals.
When we get a research brief, it’s easy to focus on the mainstream—because that’s what clients usually want. They need to understand their core audience. That’s fair. But we should always include someone from the fringes, because people on the margins often give us a preview of what’s coming.
There are many ways to do this.
For example, this same researcher started looking at masculinity across different projects. We’d ask, “What does it feel like to be a man today?”
People would say, “Oh, it’s great. Obviously, being a man is great.” But then they’d follow with, “But, you know, it’s women’s moment right now. Equality is moving forward.”
Still—we didn’t quite believe them. There was something in their tone. Was it really great for them?
There were early warning signs in the way people talked.
She did something simple but brilliant: she created a dummy Instagram account. She named it something like “The Real Bob,” and she started following a network of male influencers. These were guys promoting a very specific version of masculinity—talking about how to care for yourself, how to make sure your woman respects you, and how not to let her “step out of line.”
By following who they followed, she went deeper and deeper into this network—what we now call the “manosphere.” It was a dark, self-reinforcing world that was easy to miss unless you were looking. But it was there. And it was growing.
Social media echo chambers make it easy to overlook what people are really consuming. But with the right strategy, you can uncover it. Set up a dummy account. Use keywords that align with your topic. See what emerges. Follow the threads.
It can be researched. It can be done.
And I’ll say this: in nearly all of our projects, we should be looking at the fringes a lot more.
Yeah, we're kind of near the end of time, and I've got two questions at war in my mind. One is about AI, and the other is that I want to hear more about the confessional benefit of digital ethnography—what happens there. And then, I don’t know, maybe some tricks of the trade? Having spent as much time as you have in conversation with other people, how do you think about what it means to ask a question or to listen to somebody?
Ah, good question. The thing to do—or I have found, anyway—is that you get some confessional stuff in face-to-face ethnography as well. I think at the end of a day spent with someone, you often find they say, “You know what, I’ve not necessarily had this experience before... I’ve just realized that you’ve focused on me the whole time.”
It feels wonderfully indulgent for the participant. They’ll start to open up: “Let me tell you a bit more about me... I’ll tell you a bit more.”
And I think that’s such a lovely thing to do.
So fundamentally, whether you’re working face-to-face or digitally, you need to gain someone’s trust. And to gain that trust, you need to be absolutely authentic about who you are.
Tell them stories about yourself. There’s this idea in research that we shouldn’t share anything about ourselves because it might bias the process—but that just keeps it surface-level. It prevents you from establishing genuine trust.
You need to be fully transparent: who you are, what you know, what you don’t. People will feel comfortable with you—even if you're completely different from them—if you’re being real.
Then, give them the attention they deserve. That part can be exhausting. I’ve come out of a day of ethnographic interviews feeling completely wiped out. And it’s not like I’ve done all that much—just asked a few well-timed questions.
But mentally, you're hyper-vigilant. You’re observing everything they do, everything they say, how they say it. You’re listening for repetition—"They’ve mentioned this three times, so it must matter."
You’re noticing not just what’s present, but what’s absent. You’re asking, “Why are they doing this... and why aren’t they doing that?”
It’s intense, even though it feels relaxed in the moment.
That’s how you establish trust in a face-to-face setting. It’s harder online.
One of the tips and tricks we always share is this: when you’re asking participants to film aspects of their life—for instance, if you’ve done a Zoom interview and now ask them to show parts of their daily routine—you need to model it first.
So if you ask, “Can you show me how you do breakfast?”—you show them your breakfast. Say, “Welcome to my kitchen. I really like this space. Here’s where I store everything. This is what I do in the morning.”
You’re giving something of yourself.
Because why would they keep giving you something meaningful if they’re not getting anything back? Yes, they might receive a monetary incentive, but that’s not enough for an authentic exchange. You need more.
That’s what we’ve learned in our digital work—we need to work even harder to give participants something. We send them video tasks. We don’t just post a question on a bulletin board and call it digital ethnography. That won’t yield confessional responses.
So, I think it’s about giving something.
Beautiful. Oliver, I want to thank you so much. This has been a lot of fun, and I really appreciate it.
I’ve loved this conversation. It’s been a very real conversation, so thank you very much.
And thank you for inviting me to this chat. I’ve followed your newsletter and your work for some time—so it’s a real privilege.
That’s very kind.
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