When Research Says ‘Go’ But The Real World Says ‘No’
Four days after running its Super Bowl Ad about a lost puppy reunited with its family through a network of neighbourhood cameras, Ring cancelled its partnership with Flock Safety, which had been in the works since October of last year.
In cancelling, Ring said the integration would "require significantly more time and resources than anticipated." Maybe. But the timeline of events tells its own story. Senator Ed Markey had written an open letter to Amazon about the commercial, calling the technology “creepy.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation had called the feature “a surveillance nightmare." And, videos of people pulling Ring cameras off their porches were making the rounds on Reddit and TikTok.
Though I have a hard time imagining people not raising concerns internally along the way, this is a story about how research can be used to give you a green light that the real world will never honour.
From the outside, we can only speculate what research was or wasn’t conducted here. But, if the ad was tested, which it likely was in some fashion, I bet it tested well. Who doesn’t love pets? The creative itself isn’t the issue here though. The issue is how easy it is to strip away critical context that informs how messages land in the real world, when we’re looking to make business decisions.
There's a concept I've written about before called the 90-10-1 rule. In any online community, 90% of people lurk. 10% engage occasionally. And 1% create the content, drive the conversation, and set the terms of the debate that everyone else ends up having.
That 1% is what I call the loud minority. They aren't representative. But they're disproportionately influential, because they care more, know more, and push harder than everyone else.
Traditional research routinely screens out, or fails to reach these people: They're too informed. Too opinionated. Too niche. Too difficult to find. They aren't the target. We don’t want rejectors derailing the conversation. Let's focus on the large group of people we're trying to sell to… And so on.
The problem with all of that is the loud minority doesn't need to show up in large numbers to derail your best laid plans. Not in today’s media environment. All they need are compelling hooks, and a story that travels well.
The stage for that story was already set here.
In 2023, Ring settled with the FTC for $5.8 million after employees were found to have improperly accessed customer video, including footage from bedrooms and bathrooms.
The Flock Safety partnership, announced in October 2025, would have allowed Ring owners to share video with law enforcement through a program called Community Requests. Flock's network of automated licence plate readers had already been linked to federal immigration enforcement, prompting cities to cancel their contracts, and triggering TikTok campaigns urging people to smash their Ring cameras.
Ring had also launched "Familiar Faces," a facial recognition feature, which had drawn its own wave of pushback from privacy advocates and lawmakers.
“Search Party,” the feature to find lost pets, had also been live for months before the ad aired, opt-out by default.
Though your average person might not have been aware of any of the above, it was all publicly documented, widely discussed, and deeply felt by the people who were paying attention: The kind that market research routinely excludes.
But, you don’t need to be deeply invested in the story here, or privacy, to think “Ew. That’s creepy.”
Within hours of the Ring Super Bowl ad airing, online sentiment had flipped from mildly positive, to majority negative. And then, four days later, the Flock partnership was dead.
The loud minority didn't just drive the narrative. They drove a very material and costly business outcome.
So, what’s the lesson here?
It's worth acknowledging that the signals there would be pushback to the Ring ad were probably there. It's also entirely possible that flags were raised internally, and got overruled by momentum, sunk cost, or seniority. It's also possible that research was conducted but designed, consciously or not, to confirm a decision that had already been made. That happens more often than people like to admit.
But, let's assume good faith.
Here are five questions worth asking when you’re thinking about the path forward around any high-stakes initiative:
Who is your loud minority, and are they in the room? Every brand and category has a loud minority. The people who will shape the public conversation about your message, product, or decision aren't always the people you're trying to sell to. Identify the 1% who care most, and make sure their signal is accounted for somewhere in your process.
What's the cultural backdrop your message is landing in? Messages don't land in a vacuum. They land in a world full of prior associations, recent controversies, and accumulated sentiment. What has your brand done recently that people might connect to this? What's happening in the broader landscape that could shape how it's received?
This cuts both ways. A recent New York Times article about Meta’s plans to bring facial recognition to their Ray-Ban Meta Glasses included an internal memo. In it, someone at Meta notes that the ongoing political tumult in the United States means it's a great time for them to focus on facial recognition, because "many civil groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns." That's cultural backdrop analysis too - just pointed in a much more cynical direction.Are you casting for tension, or consensus? A lot of market research tends to assemble people who are broadly similar — same demographic, same usage patterns, same relationship to the category. That gives you consensus. But it doesn't always surface the tensions or contradictions that you need to hear. Think like a casting director: assemble participants who hold genuinely different relationships to your brand and the tensions around it. Game-changing insight often lives in the friction between them.
Is your research design about how people react, or how narratives travel? There's a difference between "does this message resonate?" and "what happens when this message enters the real world?" Most research focuses on the first question, but less frequently considers the second. Ask yourself: if the 1% who care most about this topic saw this message, what story would they tell? How fast would that story spread, and where?
What would you need to hear to make you reconsider? Be truthful with yourself and the dynamics at play within your organization. Before you go into research, build consensus around this. What would make you pull the ad, change the messaging, or rethink the launch? If you don't define that threshold upfront, you'll rationalise your way past the warning signs — because momentum can be hard to stop.
Hearing what you need to hear can be uncomfortable, both emotionally and commercially. As anyone working client side will attest to, it can also be politically sensitive. But the alternative is finding out in public and having invested in things that end up going nowhere.