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Something has shifted in what the world's organizations are researching, and it says a great deal about the moment we're all operating in. Entertainment and Media has climbed to become the most-researched topic across industries, and alongside it, the work of tracking brand reputation has moved from a communications-team responsibility to a genuine boardroom priority. When a single clip, quote, or news cycle can reshape public perception overnight, understanding what audiences are watching, discussing, and reacting to has become foundational to how business gets done.
That shift is the throughline of the 2026 Q3 State of Consumer and Market Intelligence Report, our second quarterly look at where organizations are actually pointing their research attention, and it points to something larger happening across every industry we measure.
Most industry reports tell you what people say they care about. This one shows you what they actually spend their time researching, which is often a more direct signal of where priorities really sit.
The State of Consumer and Market Intelligence is built from Quid's own platform activity, treated as a proxy for where organizations are directing their attention. This edition compares Q2 2026 to Q2 2025 across nearly 40,000 research activities spanning 12 industries. Every record is classified against 17 topic categories using a consistent, keyword-based classifier, and because both periods run through identical methodology, the year-over-year comparisons hold up as true like-for-like reads rather than moving-target estimates. The result is a view of the research agenda itself, showing which topics are rising, which use cases are gaining ground, and how the priorities of an entire market are being redrawn quarter over quarter.
A few patterns held across nearly every industry we looked at, and each one carries a different weight depending on where you sit.
The first is that media monitoring has moved to the center of the intelligence agenda. Entertainment and Media overtook every other topic to become the most-researched subject across industries, reflecting how much culture, audience behavior, and the moments shaping public attention now drive the questions leaders are asking.
The second is that brand reputation has become a strategic priority in its own right. Brand Sentiment Tracking and Reputation and Crisis Monitoring now rank above Innovation Scouting as the leading use cases industry-wide, a clear indication that perception management has traveled a long way in just twelve months. The data shows exactly how far, and in which industries the shift has gone deepest.
The third is that research is widening into a broader, more balanced agenda. Rather than a single subject dominating the field, organizations are now weighing cultural trends, brand intelligence, and consumer behavior alongside technology, and understanding what that rebalancing looks like inside a specific industry is where the report becomes genuinely useful.
A few figures give a sense of the scale of the movement underway. In one industry, Entertainment and Media climbed from essentially nowhere to the number one topic relative to the same time frame last year. In another, Brand and PR rose from a low single-digit share to become the leading topic by a wide margin. And across the board, reputation-facing use cases have overtaken the innovation-scouting work that used to anchor the research agenda. Each of those shifts carries a different implication depending on the sector, and the full report breaks down all 12 industries with the specific rankings, share changes, and year-over-year deltas behind each one.
Quid listens at scale, drawing on billions of conversations, articles, and signals from broad, compliantly sourced, real-time data rather than any single feed. Q Agents then turn that raw signal into structured intelligence briefs, tracking a topic, monitoring brand sentiment, surfacing an emerging cultural trend, or benchmarking a competitive landscape, and delivering the result as a clear brief rather than a dashboard left for you to interpret on your own.
That combination is what makes a report like this possible, and it is the same capability you can point at your own questions. The classifier that organized 40,000 research activities into a coherent read of the market is the same engine that can tell you what is happening in your category, why it matters, and what to do next.
The three signals above are the headline. The report itself goes industry by industry, showing which topics and use cases are rising and which are receding, and what each shift suggests for how you resource your own intelligence work. If your organization is deciding where to focus its attention over the coming quarters, this is a useful place to start.