Roi Perez

Let’s start with you. Who are you, and what lens do you bring to understanding people online?

I’m a classic case of a chronically-online millennial who got online in 1996 using an old school dial-up modem, and later on enabled by a DSL modem to play online games like Warcraft and World of Warcraft. Always keen to be part of a community,I was part of the early generation which got a little too excited by writing CSS styles for a Myspace page, talking to people on MSN Messenger, and I ended up doing Interaction Design in university. This perfectly set me up for a career in social media and graphic design - still at the time seen as something meaningless and worthy only of the office intern. I joined the agency world and slowly gravitated towards insights, learning to write booleans, and now trying to master the world of vibe-coding so I can make my own insights tools. 

I don’t think you can fully understand people by reading their online output alone. It’s a well established idea that people can say one thing and do another offline. In my work, I tend to prefer showing how people behave using a variety of metrics and stats to see if the behaviour that happens in one channel is corroborated by another. 

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What’s a working theory you have right now about how people behave online?

People online are optimising for emotional safety, not expression.

Small choices push users towards low-risk actions that still meet their need. This might come across as:

• Wanting to learn without commitment to a major programme
• Participation without visibility means they don’t get ‘judged’ by peers
• Belonging without exposure helps feel like your managing risk and exposure

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What’s an insight you surfaced that you still think about? What one stuck with you?

People are wildly unpredictable and often assumptions can be wrong or outright even harmful. 

When speaking of London, people will often say something like “There is no community in London” arguing things like “everyone is out for themselves”. As a Londoner, I always think this is a huge shame. 

In a pitch I once told the story about how there are numerous metrics which show this isn’t correct - Londoners over-index for charity work, volunteering opportunities and giving to charity. 

Data shows Londoners are 25% more likely to want to be involved in volunteering opportunities - we’re so brilliant and we need to tell people about our loving nature to help 

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What’s the weirdest rabbit hole your work has ever sent you down? And what did it teach you?

I’ve worked on lots of campaigns for health clients, and I feel like I’ve scrolled through the most insane Reddit threads of people talking about their various ailments, posting pictures other people definitely shouldn't be seeing. It hasn’t taught me anything useful for my job other than weird health facts - which are probably wrong - that people tend to cite like ‘our bodies are 3% bacteria’. 

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What skills or mindsets do you think the next generation of analysts will need?

We have and always will be needing to show we have a high level of discernment - in a world where everyone can generate content and opinions you need to be very certain in why you’re making the choices you’re making. 

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What’s a niche community, account, or corner of the internet you’re watching right now? And why?

I really like https://www.instagram.com/dylkelly/ 

Above and beyond being crazily well dressed and very chic, Dylan also manages to capture how fashion, arts and culture are all inter-twined and connected. It’s really difficult to do and he manages to cram a lot of information into very watchable videos. 

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Last non-work thing you read that shaped your thinking?

I just read a book titled The Eyre Affair. It’s a book about a time-travelling Government department which is investigating the kidnapping of Jane Eyre and other fictional book characters. The idea is that the disappearance has knock-on effects on other things. The book has lots of quips about seeing things from a different perspective, and it has made me rethink a lot of what I’m reading, question why someone might be saying that and generally appreciating that every situation has lots of perspective - mostly as the people in this Government department are time travellers. 

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