Audience ‘Listening’ May Eventually Drive Ad-Spend Decisions
VivaKi, BuzzMetrics discuss 'listening' to consumers via digital-media ether during Advertising Week seminar.
By Robert Marich -- Broadcasting & Cable, 9/22/2008 10:01:00 AM
A new frontier in advertising research is “listening” to consumers via the digital-media ether, and this embryonic slice of audience measurement may eventually emerge as a big driver of ad-spending-allocation decisions, speakers said a seminar during Advertising Week in New York.
“It’s about media, it’s about behavior and it’s about the brand … that are incredibly important in driving ‘big ideas’ in marketing,” said Jeff Flemings, vice president of renaissance planning at VivaKi, a unit of ad-agency giant Publicis Group.
Audience listening is possible because social Web sites, chat rooms, e-mail, blogging and other forms of personal expression in digital media are easily data mined. Flemings predicted that marketers increasingly will use a listening metric of brand buzz emanating from digital media to help decisions for ad spending and other marketing.
Audience listening is a brave new world. In the early days, the Internet was characterized by “chat rooms populated by geeky teen-agers and strange adults,” but now, the audience and discussion is mainstream, noted Jonathan Carson, president of international for Nielsen Online and a co-founder of BuzzMetrics, which Nielsen acquired. “It’s a big opportunity for the research industry and broader marketing, as well,” Carson added.
Audience listening goes beyond looking for consumers complaining about products to also tap into what they like or don’t understand. “Speaking is often motivated by a positive product experience,” Carson said.
Carson cited research that inquisitive consumers make a brand’s Web site their first stop for information 55% of the time, indicating that a company’s official Web site is a big influencer of brand buzz.
Now in its fifth year, Advertising Week is a series of seminars and events running in New York through Friday funded by media companies that are corporate sponsors of the event.
The Advertising Research Foundation sponsored the seminar.
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We have a consumer-oriented social networking forum for shoppers and you can pick just about any CPG brand and do a search and find thousands of posts of unfettered content about the brand. I''d love to be able to find a way to packetize that and send it back out to those brands because I think it would be very telling for them to get real opinions that didn''t come from an opted-in survey or a focus group with people behind the mirrors. I think social networking sites like ours are the place to datamine and get very useful feedback. For food products as an example, these shoppers are talking about everything from how it freezes to where they can find it onsale to when the last coupon came out for it. There''s lots of insights waiting to happen if brands are willing to support the datamining process to gather that information. Just my .02cents worth!
Julie Parrish - 9/23/2008 6:07:00 PM EDT -
We are just starting a buzz marketing company, Buzz.io, that does exactly what you are describing here. We find and join relevant online conversations to your company and industry. Essentially, we say what you would say if you had the time and knowledge but in our own voice. We are also developing a consumer version of our software for companies that can’t afford the full service, which will allow them to self serve.
Cari Stewart - 9/23/2008 4:24:00 PM EDT
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