“I know half my advertising budget is being wasted,” grumbles the CMO in an archetypal fable of the marketing industry, “but I don’t know which half!”
If that describes a familiar challenge in your marketing/advertising strategy, help may be on the way. A new generation of analytics platforms is shedding light into the darkest corners of the media landscape, helping brands understand not only who is seeing their ads, but who is sharing them, how they feel about them, and how they are performing relative to competitors.
Computers watching TV. iSpot.tv, a Bellevue, WA-based company founded in 2012, built a system that tracks every commercial spot on every US broadcast, cable and satellite network, 24 hours a day, live or recorded, by “fingerprinting” the video images on millions of television monitors around the country. This gives the company unique insight into the reach and targeting of every version of every spot running in every campaign. It can provide comparative results within industry segments, so marketers can keep tabs on their performance relative to competitors, and it enables A/B testing of different media and creative strategies so brands and their agencies can continuously optimize their media strategies.
iSpot.tv makes this data available to subscribers to their platform on a real-time basis, using an interface so straightforward even a business journalist can figure it out. No more waiting weeks for data to come back from ratings agencies, and no need for expensive data scientists to interpret the results.
“Every advertiser needs this data,” said iSpot.tv CEO Sean Muller. “We’re the only company that can provide these capabilities at scale in real time so brands can do true responsive marketing.”
They love me! They really love me! A popular television spot can outperform its paid media by factors of 10x or more if it catches on with audiences who share it on social media. But what makes a spot catchy? And what are users really saying about it?
A New York-based analytics firm, Canvs, is a technology platform created to measure and interpret emotions. It offers insights into the nuances of social conversations around content of all kinds, including entertainment and advertising.
“Excitement drives engagement,” says Canvs CEO Jared Feldman, who cofounded the company with his NYU professor, data scientist Sam Hui, in 2014. “In the age of big data, it’s astounding that companies are still spending billions on focus groups. Our goal is to provide analytics around emotional connection at scale so clients can figure out what’s working and what’s not with their advertising and content.”
The company’s analytic platform combines cutting-edge machine learning technology with human expertise to figure out exactly who’s tweeting what, and what they actually mean. The team has identified over 4 million expressions of emotion, broken into over 50 categories of sentiment. The platform can discern sarcasm, decode acronyms and abbreviations and interpret emoticons in context.
Putting the tech to the test. This weekend is the biggest advertising event of the year: the Super Bowl. Lots of site will be offering their opinions and analyses of the big budget spots. But here at Forbes, I’ll be using these next-generation analytic platforms to provide some unique and authoritative insights into the real winners and losers at the Big Game. Stay tuned!
