Consumer Centric

At ARF’s Audience Measurement 5.0 for some of the sessions.  Actually speaking here later this afternoon.  Had to post a quick thought on a recurring theme I think deserves further debate.

ESPN is doing a great job of emphasizing that how many, how often, and how long is all that is needed for audience measurement.  I totally agree… if you stop at the channel measurement job of counting up and showing reach, frequency, and engagement.  But, when it comes to understanding really how to connect with people through the channels and messages you deliver, it’s not enough.  I’d guess ESPN would probably agree.

ESPN just shared fascinating data about the media consumption patterns of male sports enthusiasts in the US.  It is so comprehensive that you can see how incredibly useful it is in understanding when and where sports fans (men in this case) are using different channels for sports-related activities.  Clearly, with this information ESPN can attract advertisers by showing they know the elusive men 18-34 is watching online, mobile, TV at these times, etc.

Totally agree that’s a monetization metric that helps the negotiation of the value of ad space.  The addition of how long to how many and how often provides an engagement dimension that helps you see that the people you’re interested in are going to be hanging out a bit longer, so your chances of connecting are that much better.

This information helps you know the chance of being connected with someone strictly because they’re in the vicinity of your content.  However, what if we also understood the relevance of the medium (TV, online, mobile, social, print, etc. – in this case, all in the sports genre) in providing some utility in helping that same audience make decisions in their lives?  This added, people-centric dimension to measurement is about more than message and campaign planning, it can provide a future currency to monetize media properties and content–and do it in a way that benefits the marketer AND the consumer AND the content provider.

For example, if you know a channel has relevance and utility to buying cars or selecting college options for your kids or choosing a profession or stopping smoking or deciding where to eat or picking a movie, you now know how to create an experience for the consumer.  If you can assign a value to the “power” or “ability” of a channel to deliver an experience (what I’m calling relevance and utility) within a category, then you can charge more to the advertiser who wants to use your medium to reach a consumer.

Too often we think of relevance and utility as the job of the creative – getting a message that matters to someone and then delivering it where they are.  Similarly, we think of out-of-home or experiential marketing solutions as the ones responsible for creating experiences.  Today’s media landscape has changed enough to make it so that the distinction between creative/message/medium is very blurred.  Combined, they’re all creating experiences whether we measure it or not, and, as such, provide relevance and utility for the individual, on their terms.

Instead of focusing our spending and buying of ad space based on numbers of people and how long and how often they use the channel, let’s start looking at the relevance of that channel to be useful within the context of a decision-making process.  Then sell space based on that.  In my view, that benefits the consumer, puts people at the center, and ends up benefiting the media property and the marketer.

UK company FreshMinds Research recently ran a test by pulling social media commentary about Starbucks using several popular analytic tools offering automated sentiment analysis of the text gathered.  They found flipping a coin to determine the sentiment of each individual comment would have been more accurate than what the tools reported.

FreshMinds analyzed over 19,000 online conversations with tools from Alterian, Biz360, Brandwatch, Nielsen, Radian6, Scoutlabs and Sysomos.  All content was centered on Starbucks.

The good news is aggregate level reporting of sentiment (average overall) was between 60% and 80% in agreement with a manual coding by trained staff.  Not bad.  The bad news?  Only about a third of individual comments were accurately coded.

Somehow, the randomization of automation errors resulted in an aggregate number of coding all conversations that wasn’t off by much.  But, if you wanted to dig deeper into individual conversations either for more insight or to engage in the conversation, the likelihood of finding the right positive or negative comments is not very high at all.

Their report is an excellent overview of these seven tools and how they perform across geographies and content sources.  And, as a side note, it’s a great marketing effort to get you and me to pull down their paper in exchange for contact information.

It’s not surprising to me that these tools are still so far off.  It’s a micro-representation of a macro-level challenge facing most research firms, agencies, and marketers today:  putting things into context from a people-centric approach.  We have so much data today that making it both accurate and actionable requires a more concerted effort to put everything into context, mirroring the reality of human decision-making and behavior as much as possible.

I’m sure some combination of neural networks, complexity science, and/or agent-based simulation tools eventually will yield “smarter” sentiment analysis tools to speed up the process of sifting through thousands of lines of text-based data.  Those pursuing that dream need not lose sight of the biggest mystery to solve:  understanding the meaning of words within a human context.

The FreshMinds report is definitely worth the read.  I’m curious what the makers of these tools would have to say about their report.

Thanks to Research (the magazine) for the heads up on the white paper release.

I love coming across someone writing about core issues in our field of marketing that you totally agree with, but seldom here discussed in the trenches with actual clients and campaigns.

For me, Alan Mitchell’s March 10th post for Marketing magazine on reinventing marketing is just that and much more.  You can learn a lot from considering the way Mitchell explains these six issues.

#1 – Personal information management.  People manage their own info today, so organizations need to understand how and why people want and use their info.  Different circumstances, jobs, and situations require different flow of info between people and companies.

#2 – Consumer-decision making.  It’s more critical than ever to understand how people make decisions.  When you do that, you put why we make the decisions we do in the proper context.

#3 – Brands as information services. One way Mitchell offers to reinvent branding.

#4 – Touchpoints. People choose the touchpoints that help them achieve their goals the most efficiently and effectively.  As Mitchell says so well, touchpoints are no longer a means to an end, they need to be selected based on the value they provide to the consumer.  He also notes that products, services, marketing… all touchpoints.

#5 – Marketing and market metrics. I’ve been saying this forever, but 99% of the industry still tracks things in this very one-sided way.  Advertisers measure how much they spend to reach a specific number of a group of people, and what business they pick up. The metrics capturing what happens in between, the consumer’s personal outcomes, are not included.  They have to be if you’re going to be able to address points 1 through 4 above.

#6 – Value propositions.  Mitchell’s summary is these 5 issues mean value needs to be defined from a people-centric perspective, not a company- or organization-centric point of view.

I not only whole-heartedly agree with Mitchell’s articulation of these issues, I think his explanations and examples make it easy to understand and, hopefully for brands, to apply.

In recent years working with brands who get this control shift, it has been my experience the best way to be prepared to address these “killer issues” (borrowing from Mitchell’s naming) is to more fully understand the way people make decisions.  When we’ve studied the stages of a decision-making process, the triggers that activate behavior or response, the outcomes sought, and the influences (or influencers or both) along the way, we’ve been able to help organizations understand where they can add the most value along that journey.

It boils down to being relevant and adding utility so people choose to interact with you.  Relevance.  Utility (or usefulness).  Interaction.

When you think that way, you add metrics to those you track for your marketing efforts.  What do you add?  The degree to which people, with whom you are trying to connect, reach the outcomes important to them along this journey.  When you understand the journey, you can see what people want to think, feel, or do in order to accomplish their goals.  More importantly, you know which outcomes make your products, services, or information relevant and useful.  Bingo.  Track these metrics in addition to how much you spend and how much you gain in business, then you’re tracking what matters in the system.  Then you can have authentic interaction with people — real relationships.

Alan – thanks for shedding more light and teaching me a thing or two with your packaging of these very real issues.  I’m sure Mitchell has a lot more worth reading at his website.

When I first read the description of Michael Wu’s presentation, I thought he was going to show human health indicators and/or “fit scores” for various cities around the country. I mean, didn’t some of you think that when you read the title of this post: “Community Health Index”?

Wu was actually offering a point of view on how online communities should be measured to be able to diagnose their health and predict future outcomes. We were both on a panel at the Persuasive Technology 2009 conference yesterday at Claremont College.

Lithium, company Wu works for, apparently has been around quite a while creating communities for numerous companies. The smart framework Wu presented for measurement explains why I think they’ll keep growing.

Basically, their Community Health Index measures the ability of an online community to meet the needs of its members. 

First, they cover three basic diagnostic measures:

(1) Traffic

(2) Content — useful and interesting (passive vs. active)

(3) Members — registration, conversion rate

Then, they roll up three predictive factors:

(4) Liveliness — posts per board

(5) Interaction — unique user per topic X number of topic conversations

(6) Responsiveness — average response time

I like the simplicity and breadth of coverage these metrics combine–they generate a composite index across these six. And you can see how you could take the same predictive factors and generate different metrics but still under the same more broad buckets, depending on the dynamics of your community.

Nicely done.

Only piece that jumps out right away as missing is longevity or retention. I haven’t studied in detail the technique, but I wonder how that is incorporated–how much churn is expected versus toxic for a community, for example.

I’m speaking in LA and NYC this week on similar topics at two totally different events:  Persuasive Technology 2009 and the ARF’s Advertising Effectiveness Council. In both cases, we’re trying to challenge the push toward a single currency metric for ad effectiveness to be about more than reach, frequency, and, now, engagement. 

Let’s get to value. Let’s get to relevance in a person’s life. Let’s get to what helps marketers plan. 

Rewind to just a few weeks ago… I was in DC at the CTAM Research Conference, a group gathering for the cable TV industry vying for ways to prove their value as a medium. Sure, great ideas were shared. But the industry problem was blasted on a megaphone during a panel when an established player in the business made this comment:

“We need to get to a single currency, and try to get to value.”

She literally paused and then offered the second statement of “try” to get to value.  She was explaining the real problem, accepted by almost everyone in the room, is to get a metric that works across all mediums to capture the numbers of people exposed and amount of time they spend.  

The former EVP of planning at media agency Carat went so far as to explain that “a number is a universal truth.” Her position epitomized the attitude of networks and those on their side of the business:  It’s all about quantification of consumption, then I have something I can sell to you for more or less money based on that “number”.

I thought this can’t be the prevailing attitude of the innovators in the category.  But, to my surprise, an even more archaic sentiment was offered the next day by the head of analytics/research at ESPN:

“We need solid measures of reach and solid measures of time, that’s essentially it.”

You’ve got to be kidding. But he certainly was not.

Luckily, there was someone in the room who cares about more than monetizing the latest cable TV blockbuster show. It was so refreshing to hear Tony Ambroza, head of men’s marketing for Under Armour, respond to the researchers and cable execs in the room:

“If you can deliver information around the consumer and what your content means to them, that’s what we’re interested in knowing.  You all are looking at data and research to help sell your content and programs.  I’m interested in something different.”

Sure… he’s looking to be relevant. He’s looking for value. He can’t afford to “try” to look for value in deciding what strategies and tactics to implement for his marketing activities.  

We still have a currency calculated off anything but value because the money in advertising is controlled by the content providers. Where else do you see a product increasingly less valuable become astronomically more expensive? Think TV :30s spots.

The argument made at CTAM was that it is too complex to go beyond reach, frequency, time spent, and a little into engagement.  But the resources and money they are putting into these observational, data fusion, and usage patterns research suggests they know how to deal with complex issues. 

The real issue is too much money is riding on the big, old-school mediums for mass consumption. The mediums have real value. But the way they are measured and sold today has very little to do with marketing value to the advertiser. They have even less to do with relevance to the average person (you and me) watching.

What if we sought to understand how a person goes about making a purchase decision–buying a car, eating out, shopping for school supplies, etc.? What if we looked for what that person wants or needs along that journey? What if we even knew where they might look for, find, or get that need met? What if it was all about adding value to that person’s life?

This approach puts the person first. In this way, we can measure the value of information, content, and experiences with/from/through a channel (think TV, radio, online, game, FSI, word of mouth, etc.) in the context of real value.

Marketers, armed with this insight, will be in a much better position to be relevant when making channel decisions. Networks (and other content providers / channel asset owners) will be in a much better position to differentiate their value to marketers.

Most important… you and me will be treated as people and not consumers. The information we get through the channels we use will be increasingly on our terms, and we won’t quickly look for the skip button. 

But, I guess that’s still far off when it comes to network and cable TV players and the media agencies they negotiate with for rates.  I mean, this same former EVP from Carat made this last most insightful comment of the conference:

“Online video is just TV on a box, it’s nothing different.  What I love about it is there is only one commercial at the beginning, it makes it easier to watch.”

The irony of it all!