Another Advertising Week in New York is upon us and so far I have seen some great presentations from companies like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Quantcast, comScore, and even Yahoo!. However, if there is one thing that is becoming painfully clear to me is the need to be relevant to your audience – whether you are advertising to them, being social with them, or just creating the right kind of conversations about your brand. We often throw this idea around as marketers – “being relevant”, but few people discuss how!
I presented at Advertising Week and that is the exact topic I wanted to drill into – How to be relevant by using real-time data about your audience!
So to illustrate this, I decided to run a research experiment to show at IAB MIXX. This was research that was exclusive to IAB MIXX, but you can now see below. The idea focused on how I could show the IAB MIXX audience how to target marketers like themselves with real-time data.
To do this, I asked our research analysts at Networked Insights to study what marketers talk about. We created a custom audience based on social data from blogs, microblogs, social networks, and forums. We then added to that with web information from Google, comScore, and Quantcast. Together, this information tracked what topics were important to marketers over the last 4 weeks.
As a seasoned marketer, I came to the table with my own ideas of what topics marketers discuss, what media they consume, and what popular culture they talk about. The results were different than I thought.
It proved to me that even though you think you know your audience, you can never know them well enough! Real-time data can give you incredible Intelligence and can make marketing decisions like sponsorships, product placements, advertising, and content development much easier!
14. Coming soon… More detailed report via email and available at NetworkedInsights.com/IAB Paul Dunay CMO Networked Insights 646.545.3888 paul.dunay@networkedinsights.com
Editor's Notes
Let’s me tell you a quick storyMy son is a senior in high school and I am beginning to help him with his search for the right school. One of the aspects of college life that he is looking forward to is belonging to a university with strong school spirit. So to help with this, I suggested that we use football teams as a proxy to find the right environment.With this in mind, we set out to find a simple list of “2011 NCAA Football Rankings” – an easy Google search as there ever was one. I assumed that the top result, ESPN’s 2011 NCAA Football Rankings, would be the perfect match for our search, until I looked at the data.
ESPN’s site lists one ranking by the Associated Press, one from a USA Today poll, one from an ESPN poll, and one from ESPNU fan ranking. This made me wonder which one of these polls was best for my son as the intended audience. The intent of these polls was purely statistical and did not meet the needs of a college bound high school senior, and therefore provided little help for our cause. In other words the data was not an exact fit for my audience.After this discovery, I contacted my Audience Development team here at Networked Insights and asked them to develop a series of lists of the top NCAA football teams for various audience categories. I wanted to focus my research on Millennial Males, Moms (of course his mom is going to have a say!), and a list of teams by Geeks who love Consumer Tech (my son and I both fit into that one!)The research that I received from the team was really interesting because each of the audiences had completely different lists of favorites!
The Millennial Males would say LSU, Oregon, and Auburn are tops; while their Moms would prefer Florida, Alabama, and Auburn; and the Geeks like Texas, South Carolina, and Wisconsin Badgers.Whether you agree with using ESPN’s Top Ranked College Football teams as proxy for strong school spirit is not the point. If you are marketer – you need to know what your specific audience cares about. High-level survey data (like the data from the AP, USA Today and ESPN) can lead you in the wrong direction if your target is Millennials, Moms, or Consumer Tech buyers!
So in prepping for my talk here today – I asked our research analysts to study what IAB Members talk aboutWe created a special audience called marketers and tracked what they were talking about for the last 4 weeksAnd again some of the results may surprise youSo we started by looking at the content trendsAnd when we looked at the content that marketers talk about we found out that marketers are pretty boring Overly consumed with a few key topics
So I decided to broaden it from content trends to more popular trends to see just how interesting this audience really isSo we started with TV – now I thought for sure marketers would love a show like…
Turns out that was incorrect – they really love
Dexter the best – some others I kinda expected are on this list like The office, Idol, walking dead / true blood for the horror fiends So then we started to think about movies – to I asked our analyst team to give me a readout on what movie marketers really likeI thought something like …
Hangover 2 would be the marketers speed but again I was wrong
It was Harry Potter – I guess a lot of us are married with kids! – since we also like Pirates of the Caribbean, Capitan America and Cars2So this got me thinking – well its sounds like an older demographic So lets look at music – if we are married with kids most likely they would like …
The greatest rock band ever .. The Rolling StonesBut again I was wrong .. Marketers prefer
More contemporary music like Lady GagaNow I was completely confused – so I tried one last test with our analyst to determine what celebs are the tops with marketersI took an educated guess based on the results from the movies marketers like and guessed
Johnny deep – but again I didn’t know my audience as well as I thought I did since …
J lo was the fan favorite of this groupWhat I learned is 2 foldYou can never know your audience well enough Using Real Time Data can give you incredible Intelligence that would make your marketing decisions like SPAC – sponsorships, product placements, advertising, content easier
We are doing a more in-depth report exclusively for IAB Members who are attending IAB MIXXSo watch for it to arrive in your email shortly or come pick it up at our site … ni.com/iab