How McKinney Pairs Research with Creativity Using Listen Labs

McKinney did not bring Listen into the agency to automate creativity.

They brought it in to make their creative work sharper, faster, and grounded in real human truth.

With Listen Labs, the team can now bring the voices of real customers directly into brainstorms, packaging reviews, and client presentations in hours instead of weeks.

Takeaways:

• Rapid creative and packaging feedback 

• Qualitative studies scaled from 6 to 30+ respondents

• Easy pivots between niche and general audiences

• Less admin and logistical overhead

• Real customer voices integrated directly into creative work

The Challenge: Creativity Needs Real People

McKinney is a full-service creative agency serving brands across food, QSR, banking, healthcare, and more. Creativity drives the work. But creativity without real audience insight can drift into assumption.

Before Listen, McKinney worked with a range of traditional and AI-enabled qualitative vendors, though none presented the right solution. Deliverables were exclusively static text. And while the turnaround was manageable, confidence in the quality of responses wasn't. The results felt a little too polished to be real.

“Are we really talking to the people they say we’re talking to?” Senior Data Strategist Danica Tereau remembers wondering.

For a creative team, that disconnect matters. Designers and copywriters rely on emotional truth. Research that feels synthetic does not inspire strong work.

“I’m always thinking about the graphic designers and copywriters who are going to get this research,” Tereau said. “It doesn’t feel authentic to bring them synthetic research and say, ‘Let this get your creative juices flowing.’ It can feel soulless.”

McKinney needed research that felt real. They needed high-quality respondents. And they needed it on timelines that matched new business and pitch cycles.

That search led them to Listen Labs.

Rapid Creative and Packaging Feedback

In creative environments, it is easy for strong opinions in the room to become the default.

“We can be bought into our own “cool” opinion,” Tereau said.

With Listen, McKinney can widen the room instantly.

During a CPG packaging project, Tereau brought feedback from 30 real consumers directly into a working session with a group of designers and copywriters. Instead of debating internally, the team interacted with the Listen platform live and watched real people share their thoughts on taste, branding, and visual identity.

“In the advertising space, it’s easy to assume that we know what everybody wants. But we don’t.” Tereau said, “Our lives look a lot different from those of many of our customers, so we need to hear from them directly.”

What used to take weeks of recruiting and moderation now happens in hours. Creative decisions are grounded in actual customer reactions, not just internal instinct.

Reaching Hard-to-Find Audiences

Speed matters. So does access.

In one recent project, McKinney needed feedback from CFOs in a specific region about their perception of a bank. Traditionally, that would mean weeks of networking and referrals, and maybe six interviews at best.

With Listen, they gathered 15 CFO and startup founders in one day. The full analysis was complete in two and a half days.

“The fact that it looked as impressive as we hoped in terms of insights was incredibly encouraging,” Tereau said.

The team moved from small, anecdotal samples to meaningful qualitative scale without losing nuance.

Moving Across Industries with Ease

One week McKinney might be researching hot sauce buyers. The next week it could be bankers. Then QSR customers.

Listen made it easy to switch contexts without changing tools or compromising respondent quality.

“Listen had panels that supported both of those projects in a way we felt comfortable putting in front of clients.”

For broader audiences, results came even faster.

“For general audience questions, we had one study complete in literally three hours.”

That flexibility has strengthened pitches, expanded the types of projects the agency can take on, and allowed faster creative iteration.

Bringing Research into the Creative Room

Before Listen, qualitative insights often arrived too late to meaningfully shape creative work. Or they required heavy translation before they were usable.

“A huge part of my work is translation,” Tereau said. “Data can feel boring or like it’s holding back the real creative work.”

Now research is part of the conversation.

During client presentations, McKinney has queried respondent feedback live and pulled nuanced responses instantly from 30 or more participants. Analysis that once took weeks for a small group is now available in real time at a much larger scale.

“Without Listen, I wouldn’t be in the room,” she said.

When someone proposes an idea, the team can validate it on the spot.

Eighty percent of respondents noticed that.

This audience does not care about that feature.

Research no longer sits downstream from creativity. It supports it in the moment.

The Bigger Shift: Less Admin and More Insight 

The advertising world has been cautious about new technology. Many creatives worry it will dilute the human side of their work.

McKinney’s experience has been different.

“It doesn’t feel like a platform that’s competing for my job,” Tereau said. “It feels additive to my skill set.”

Instead of replacing creativity, Listen gives the team more access to real human perspective. More voices. More clarity. More confidence.

Traditional qualitative research comes with overhead. Recruiting. Scheduling. Gift cards. Travel. Manual analysis.

“There’s a lot of admin. We want to be getting to the real insight work.”

Listen reduced the logistical burden and gave that time back to strategy and storytelling.

“It feels like it’s bringing more humanness into the room, not less.”

The Result

With Listen Labs, McKinney has:

• Increased qualitative scale without losing texture

• Reduced research timelines from weeks to hours

• Brought real customer voices directly into creative sessions

• Expanded the range of industries and audiences they can confidently serve

• For a creative agency built on human insight, that makes a difference.