Brand Messaging For Real Human Connection. A Harvey Hierarchy of Needs.

The quest for better understanding of human emotions and behavioral triggers is a long and evolving one. Back in the 1940s, Abraham Maslow introduced his seminal Hierarchy of Needs, setting the stage for a deeper understanding the relative importance of need states in human motivations.  But in today’s world of big data, the impact of social media and the overall evolving nature of societal mores, an update of Maslow’s Hierarchy is sorely needed.

Enter Bill Harvey and his research company, RMT, which analyzed data from trillions of browser visits to websites by partner Semasio and millions of tuning events on set top boxes by predecessor Next Century 

Media to arrive at a 21^st Century version of Maslow’s hierarchy. 

Motivator Methodology

Using a sample base of 276 million Americans, Semasio with guidance by RMT mapped a person’s online content consumption tastes and captured keywords that were then appended to the content consumed by a specific browser. The result is an individual word cloud around each respondent which was then collected into 15 Motivational Type scores. 

“For example,” explained Harvey, “a specific person may be most strongly motivated by altruism and the pursuit of self-knowledge, while another may be most motivated by heroism and leadership and a third most motivated by the good life and power; Each unique individual having a personal motivational mix of the 15 types.”

The 15 Motivational Types are:

1.            Security - To feel safe rather than insecure; to no longer feel fear.

2.            Belonging- To be part of a group, know that one is not alone in the world, to have support.

3.            Achievement- A sense of accomplishment, do something significant in one’s life.

4.            Aspiration/Learning-Wanting to know more, to reach a higher level of understanding.

5.            Competency- Wanting to be really good at something.

6.            Fitness -Wanting to have a strong and attractive, healthy body.

7.            Status/Prestige- Recognition from others, consensus validation of one’s own importance.

8.            Wealth/Success- Affluence, freedom to spend on whatever one wants, ignore others criticism.

9.            Heroism/Leadership-Act heroically anytime, to speak up and take responsibility for situations.

10.          Experience/Sex/Good Life/Hedonism/Epicureanism- Want interesting and fun experiences, have a good time, enjoy the best of life, see the world.

11.          Power- Being able to control other people and situations to one’s liking.

12.          Love- Wanting to love someone and be loved by the same person.

13.          Creativity- Be creative, in arts, crafts, sciences, technologies, business, nonprofits, or any field.

14.          Self-Knowledge- Know oneself, who you are deep inside, master of one’s mind and emotions.

15.          Self-Transcendence/Service to Humanity/Enlightenment/Spiritual Awakening/Nobility- Make a positive difference in the world, to take care of other people.

In addition to the 15 Motivational Types, RMT further parses the results down into 86 Need States and then into 265 DriverTags^TM, “which are psychological attributes that include human values, character and personality traits, emotional and mood states, human situations, and content descriptors,” stated Harvey. These behavioral clusters adds further nuance to the motivational clusters. The Need States and then the Motivational Types were derived from the DriverTags^TM, which were derived from set top box data, a census of psychological words, and machine learning.

Motivator Applications

All of the data insights are privacy compliant while enabling brands to adapt their messages for maximum relevancy to specific anonymous individuals. “Because most of the 15 motivations are perennial higher human values and ideals, the use of these insights in this way will tend to raise the conversation level of brand communications to cover more of the most important things in life, and less of the more trivial aspects,” Harvey noted and added, “This inspirational and socially relevant flavor has already emerged as a trend in the most successful recent advertising and branded content.”

Fadi Karam, Chief Marketing Officer of YUP, concurred, “When I was VP Marketing at Nestle, people would come to me every day promising me better media plans, but none of them ever asked to see my actual ads before recommending media. When Bill Harvey came to me, he would not recommend media until he could analyze my ads. This recognition that the ad and the media must be looked at holistically, in retrospect, seems obvious, yet many of us are still locked into the old ways, and think that the ads make no difference, the same media campaign can be optimal for two brands whose ads are as different as they could possibly be.”

The early RMT results helped studios and networks develop new programs. But now with addressable advertising, the ability to better curate resonant messages to viewer households makes the 15 Motivational Types also invaluable to advertisers. Turner, under the leadership of Howard Shimmel, was one of the first network groups to seize the opportunity for their clients. Turner, Harvey explained, “proved that when you placed ads in programs whose psychological attributes made the commercials work better. Nielsen Catalina and 605 provided third party validation that these context methods actually resulted in double digit lifts in sales and branding effects and Simmons provided third party validation that the DriverTags^TM added to the ability to predict adoption of each of 3830 brands in the Simmons questionnaire.”

Motivator Next Steps

2020 will be a pivotal year for Semasio and RMT. They plan on rolling out the 15 Motivational Types for use as targeting variables for individual campaigns enabling agency and media DMPs to append the psychological characteristics to a company’s own database.

“It’s interesting to me that our ‘meme-ology’ work has led us back to something very similar to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Maslow used his own self-reflection and studies of the lives of self-actualized individuals such as Einstein to form his theory,” Harvey noted. But the path to the 15 Motivators was a more data-driven, calculated process.  “We started with every word in the Oxford Unabridged Dictionary, found 13,000+ words of a psychological nature, reduced these by attitude scaling and factor analysis to 1562 words, and then to 265 based on machine learning from the personalized program recommender based on set top box viewing data. We then created a semantic ladder up to 86 Need States and the 15 Motivation Types. The 15 types look a lot like Maslow’s 5 types, except that our 15 types are obviously more granular, and we do not claim that every human being follows the same sequence in development of personal motivations,” he added.

“Maslow’s work was more qualitative,” Harvey explained. “Ours is fully quantitative and based on passive measurements. Yet we both came out in similar places. The third party validations by Nielsen Catalina, 605, and Simmons show that our system is not merely tautological, it actually predicts behavior, which also reflects positively on Maslow’s visionary groundwork.”

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

DTC Advertising: Finding the Right Prescription

Direct to Consumer (DTC) pharma advertising has its advocates and its detractors. Some believe that it puts valuable medical information in the hands of consumers while others believe that it has a controversial underside, doing less to protect patients and more to spur sales. For planners in the DTC advertising space, a data-driven approach to the media decision-making process is imperative. Planners need to understand what opportunities are available for hyper targeting and in what advanced solutions they should invest as complements to the modern mix.

Targeting the right consumers with DTC advertising while protecting privacy can be achieved with a combination of different PII datasets and followed by a careful crafting of audience segmentations that combine both broadcast and cable. Some companies, like television media solutions company Cadent, use a blind match process through third party partners like Experian which combines anonymized subscriber data with other personal attributes such as purchase data or prescription data. This data is then ingested into their platform to create more efficient buys for their pharma clients.

"Cadent's pharma business has grown dramatically, especially in this past Upfront and we expect it to be a category of tremendous growth for us, in part because of our ability to use data-driven media plans for our clients," said Jim Tricarico, CRO of Cadent Network. "Our pharma advertisers have seen great results by using a combination of data-enabled plans alongside national reach campaigns, across both cable and broadcast, to reach their audiences at different points of the purchase funnel."

One of Cadent's data partners, TiVo, uses direct match. According to Bill Harvey of Bill Harvey Consulting, "The direct HIPAA-certified match is (in my opinion) the best of breed privacy protected pharma solution out there. Unlike solutions involving degrees of fusion and lookalikes, it's all direct match. Unlike the other solutions, it works both for post evaluation analytics of ROI and its leverageable components, and also for pre-buy and in-flight optimization for TV and digital."

"When HIPAA regulations prevent a 1-to-1 addressable solution, there is an option to add another layer of TV impressions that don't jump right to the traditional TV DMA," said Shelley Stansfield, Director Special Ops at demand-side targeted TV platform Centriply. "Rolling up audience counts with a certain condition to the zip, county or a custom region can preserve privacy while still achieving efficiency in TV media delivery by finding areas of high concentration across the country."

Targeting to the individual can easily be achieved in digital, especially mobile, making it a seemingly desirable medium for DTC advertisers. Digital's capability to hyper target, however, may skirt the boundaries of privacy. "In regard to privacy concerns on hyper-targeting patients, I see this in online ads targeted based on the patient's Internet searches," explained Dr. Bruce Rector of Rector Consulting and Doctors for America.
There is a regulatory reason for data hyper-vigilance in DTC advertising. The FDA's Office of Prescription Drug Promotion (OPDP) has, according to their website, "an active research program designed to investigate applied and theoretical issues of relevance to direct-to-consumer (DTC) and professional promotional prescription drug materials. OPDP's research supports the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) goal of science-based policy while maintaining its commitment to protect the public health."

According to Kantar Media, pharma spending on direct-to-consumer advertising in 2015 totaled $5.4 billion in 2015 compared to $4.3 billion in 2014. Not only was this a +19% year-to-year increase, it also equaled the high mark of $5.4 billion spent in 2006. Growth in DTC spending can be explained by the number of new FDA–approved drugs on the market, patent expiration and more competition in the market. These factors are generally trackable in the short term.

Share of spend is more revealing. While digital advertising for a range of consumer products and services is accelerating often at the expense of TV, the opposite is true for pharma. "Since 2011, the portion of DTC spending on TV has increased from 55% to 69%," according to the Pharmaguy at Pharma Marketing blog. In 2015, Pfizer allocated nearly 30% of its billion-dollar budget to network television while Novartis spent nearly half of its budget in cable.

Investments in television can also be explained by an older target demo. According to the latest Nielsen Total Audience Report, adults age 50+ spend the most hours with television a week. The Pharmaguy adds, "as pharma focuses more and more on drugs that treat diseases of old age such as Alzheimer's, it's to be expected that more and more of the industry's advertising budget is devoted to TV."
For DTC advertisers and planners, understanding how to unlock the full potential of television advertising requires an awareness of the data and solutions in market, not only because of the FDA but because the future demands it.

As Shelley Stansfield noted, "We were recently at a data conference and it was predicted that medical data collection is the next breakthrough arena for data mining and advancement. Disease states measured at the hospital level, clinic or office level provides trending data for predictive analytics. It was generally agreed that when predictive and cogitative data applications can drive awareness in media to both professional circles and consumers everyone will benefit."

This article first appeared on www.MediaBizBloggers.com

The Shift in the Data Discussion … Or Not? Questions From The ARF Measurement Conference

The annual ARF measurement conference is a time where researchers from across the media spectrum can gather, present and exchange their groundbreaking insights. As with previous years, one could walk away with a fuller understanding of the ongoing challenges our industry faces and acquire some actionable insights to help overcome them. And yet, this year was a little different in that the measuring of the creative, the sequencing of ad messages across platforms and applying neuroscience standards were also hot topics in addition to data. 

As with predicting the path of any changing environment, I came away with more questions. Here are some:

Demos Targets Are So Yesterday. Or Are They?

Instead of relying on demographic targets, why not use People Based Targeting segmentations? Dave Morgan, Founder/CEO Simulmedia, posed a provocative question and call to action, “Why are we sticking to inherently wrong protocols? We have to press the industry to do better.” Morgan then asked, “Have we started to make change?” Some, like David Poltrack, Chief Research Officer, CBS Corporation and President of CBS VISION, believes there is progress but it is slow.  “I think we are,” he said, “Look at the past year. There has been more progress in past 12 months than in past 12 years. But,” he cautioned, “We are not at the implementation stage yet. Advertisers are more comfortable about it than the agencies. It requires more manpower and systems need to change. This upfront people are doing the analysis and the learning and informing their buying. But the marketplace is still transacting on traditional data. The market is still demographically driven."

Could Reach Become the Measurement Standard?

If we start to move from age and gender proxy metrics, is there a way to either standardize segments or offer another standardize-able measurement? I believe that it will be very difficult to agree on standard segments which may even defeat the purpose of segmented targeting to one’s niche and unique consumer target. So agreeing on another, more standardize-able metric might be the solution. One suggestion was Reach, possibly Average Daily Reach which takes into account recency. According to Bill Harvey, CEO of Bill Harvey Consulting, recency is critical for the ad message to be more effective. “Advertising has most pronounced effect in first 48 hours,” he explained, “and average daily reach is the most critical test of recency.” Quoting the late Erwin Ephron, Harvey then advised, “plan and buy for continuous short term reach,” and concludes, “We as an industry should be looking at daily reach.”

Can You Measure and Push Creative Across Platforms Using Brain Activity Data?
Dr. Manuel Garcia-Garcia, SVP Research and Innovation: Global and Ad Effectiveness at the ARF, offered insights concerning the measurement of creative and how it should best be fed through the advertising funnel.  His neuroscience based insights include:

Ø  Customize creative for the specific platform. “You can amplify consumer engagement if you customize your creative for the specific platform and don't just repurpose creative,” he explained.

Ø  Two platforms are better than one. It increases percent purchase intent by 36%.

Ø  In terms of sequencing the messaging, generally start with TV. “We measure engagement through skin conductor response,” Garcia-Garcia said, “And if you start with digital, then go to TV, there will be less TV impact. But if you feed you ad in mobile before TV, that equals higher memory according to the neuroscience.”

Ø  TV messaging that is preceded by a different platform tends to get higher brand consideration.

Ø  A TV ad that explained product or service benefits resulted in higher purchase intent.

Ø  In adding digital to a TV raised brand consideration up three times.

Ø  Creative strategy is key to optimizing impact. “Do mobile first if the execution is customized to mobile,” Garcia-Garcia recommended, “But if your campaign is not there yet, start with TV when creative is being repurposed or is not unified.”

Ø  Finally, the “Platform does not determine strategy,” he warned, “Strategy should determine the platform.”

Which Way Forward?

Gayle Fuguitt, CEO and President of the ARF, energized the attendees with a call to action. “The time is now!” she exclaimed. “What are needed are fearless leaders to step up and not be afraid to ask the hard questions.” Much of what was presented at this year’s ARF Measurement Conference gives us lots of hard questions to ask. Let’s now resolve to work together to solve for the answers.

This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com

Getting Ready for the Upfronts with the PeopleFront

This year’s PeopleFront focused on three main pillars of the media marketplace – people, outcomes and ROI – and offered discussion viewpoints from “the street”, the research, the data and the buyers and sellers.

Dave Morgan, CEO and founder of Simulmedia and the host of the PeopleFront, presented the big picture when he said, “There is a consensus that the next year or two will bring significant change.  TV is continuing to make money and is expected to make money for some time. There are steps that TV companies can do to extend the duration and profitability.” 

Here are the different views on possible solutions:

View from the Street

Change, consumer behavior evolution and the limitations of the measurement in a world of ever increasing pools of data cause a confluence of challenges. “The nature of what is TV is fluid,” noted Brian Weiser, Senior Analyst, Pivotal, “Younger demos change behavior more rapidly. Some behavior is not currently measured that would make consumption data more healthy.” He explained that there was a recent CRE insights study that showed that TV is ambient in a world of multi-tasking. “There is still an important role for TV,” he assured, “but it is changing” depending on the degree of programming engagement.

On the ad side of the equation, Anthony DiClemente, Managing Director, Nomera, said, “The U.S. ad growth is robust and we have upped our forecast. TV is showing unexpected resilience.” That is this season. The projection may change in two or three years as Anthony admitted, “Automation of TV ad selling is causing concern.”

Affiliate fees are an area of current concern, however. There are persistent concerns regarding cord cutting and shaving and the further consolidation in the distribution space. “We are shifting to larger and more scaled companies,’ said Anthony, “What is media doing with their cash? Are they investing organically? Are they automating? Or are they buying stock back? We applaud companies organically and investing in the right way such as in infrastructure, programming etc.”

What the Research Says
The ARF recently completed an ambitious series of studies to measure how advertising works. "We collected 40 industry leaders together, committed $1million investment on three studies over 5000 campaigns, twelve years of data, $375B in advertising spend in 41 countries across over 100 categories  in the areas of Cross platform ROI, improve creative and mobile mastery," explained ARF CEO Gayle Fuguitt. The insights were that advertisers need to invest across platforms, combine traditional and digital media, optimize digital by capping frequency and unify their creative while keeping in mind the unique characteristics of each platform to optimize performance.

“Targeting purchasers by direct match at scale increases ROI,” explained Bill Harvey, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, TiVo Research. “TiVo Research proved it with multiple advertisers. Now Simulmedia is proving it by running 72 campaigns for advertisers in 2015 using the same methods and showing ROI improvements in the same range as TiVo i.e. up to +250%. Simulmedia is also reducing waste frequency and is targeting day of week for recency. An example of a campaign where the same brand’s other TV had half the impressions in the excessive frequency range, the Simulmedia campaign had fewer than 5% in that bucket,” he concluded.

Daniel Slotwiner, Director Advertising Research at Facebook, recently conducted a study with Neuro-Insight on the coordination of TV advertising with digital to get the best impact. “We measured memorability, brand linkage, likability linkage and found the most efficient way to drive awareness.”

Connecting the Dots with Data

There is more data available than ever before and research companies are actively engaged in creating tools to maximize the value of this data. But there are challenges. In the case of Nielsen, Steve Hasker, President and COO explained that, “We have been working with STB data for 7 years, matching it up with credit card data and working on an independent currency measurement using the panel with large databases.” But it has not been easy. “We are chipping away to get access to STB data,” he added, “Most of today's STB data owners can't supply STB data over night.”

Omar Tawakoi, SVP, GM Oracle Data Cloud, said, “We are running a data cloud. Having a census approach is very important. In digital everything is census based and things are starting to get really interesting in TV. We are connecting offline sales to digital activities and want to prove that TV ads drive sales offline.”

“My clients only care if we moved the needle,” said Wes Nichols, Co-Founder, Marketshare, SVP Chief Strategy Officer. “They really don't care about measurement or the brilliance of a campaign etc. There is a huge credibility gap between marketing and the C-suite. We are cobbling together data based measurement and need to get a fuller assessment of our investment.”

Buyers and Sellers of the Eve of the Upfront

What about content providers and buyers? From the sellers side, Arlene Manos, President national Ad Sales, AMC, said, “Data has begun to figure into our discussion. But as a single company, we can’t effect change alone. We are using data to change internally and to figure out how to get viewers acquainted with our diverse programming.”

On the buyers side, Yin Woon Rani, VP, U.S. Marketing at Campbell’s, noted that, “Traditional advertisers take a TV centric viewpoint.  But digital is changing the nature of expectations. It is not that easy to compare between mediums so the real task for marketers is deciding where dollars can go across the media pool.”

But, there has been “an evolution over several years. We are getting more find tuned beyond demographics,” according to M’lou Walker, CEO, Matrixx. Because Matrixx in is the consumer healthcare industry, M’lou said that “Knowing when our consumers are sick is more important for us. We need to find who she is at that moment of illness. So we take segmentation data and find consumers at different points and roll it all up.  TV plus digital gets us much further. We can get to consumer in her moment.”

As Dave concluded, the industry is now “More evolutionary than revolutionary but the evolutionary pace is picking up. We are swimming in data. How to can we best operationalize it?” That will remain the burning question as we are about to enter the next upfront.

This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBlogger.com