Ad Week 2017: Communication Is Shifting from Words to Images to Sound

It is hard to wrap your head around the myriad events associated with Advertising Week.  This year the excitement ratcheted up for all things technology, specifically augmented reality, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and especially audio communication.  All these efforts are currently impacting and will continue to impact the media industry, placing strains on traditional business models and enabling new cutting-edge companies.  But a simple overview of all these technological bells and whistles belies some crucial brand and media oriented trends on consumer behavior. Here are some takeaways:

Communication is Changing from Words to Images
Just like the early cave paintings, images today are taking on a major form of communication and storytelling.  We are moving from the word to the image to express ourselves in the forms of photos, videos and emojis.  In fact, according to Lydia Daley, Senior Vice President Social Media and Branded Content Strategy, Viacom, "Visual imaging is currently the major form of Millennial communication."  Millennials value experiences over material things and are seeking authenticity in their interactions with brands.  It is simply not enough to talk the talk.  Brands need to demonstrate that they are good citizens with a compelling story.

Audio Is Not Only Not Dead, It Is Poised to Rule
As technology advances and households continue to adopt voice activated appliances, audio is slated to become even more popular as a way to communicate.  Just as Millennials are gravitating toward images, Gen Z is moving to audio.  Why bother searching the Internet when you can simply request Alexa to find the content for you?  "Podcasts will explode," as part of this audio-ification of communication, said Susan Panico, Senior Vice President, Strategic Solutions, Pandora.  Marketers will have to consider how they can best leverage podcasts and other audio formats to reaffirm their branding and best reach their consumers.

Gina Garrubbo (pictured at top left), President and CEO, National Public Media, emphasized the importance of what she termed “host driven authenticity” as an essential ingredient in both the strong connection that listeners have for audio content and in turn the efficacy of program advertising.

Data Buzz Continues
Data and its related topics of measurement, attribution and blockchain technology were discussed at many panels because, as the old saying goes, if you can't measure it, you can't monetize it.  Simulmedia's CEO and Founder Dave Morgan believes that "the biggest advancements in advertising over the next two years will happen in measurement and attribution."  This is already happening "as advancements in matching media exposures and purchase data at real scale" are leading to "real ROI analysis at a tactical, per campaign level," he said.

But there is still some trepidation concerning data quality.  "Advertisers can buy an incredible array of very precise customer targets now, but no one really knows what they are buying," noted Scott McDonald, President and CEO of the ARF.  "We need much better standards around data quality to provide better guidance to the market.

"An unambiguous rating system that can offer an independent 'grade' on the quality of data sold for ad targeting," might be possible in the next two years, he optimistically added.

Viewing Patterns are Evolving
According to Cindy Davis, Executive Vice President, Consumer Experience, Disney | ABC Television Group, the multi-platform environment is evolving into a new way for families to co-view.  Her department launched a new research study called "Togetherish" that examines the evolving way that households watch, share and engage with content.  "Consumers are changing very rapidly," she noted.  "We must understand what viewers want and what motivates them.  We want to know where viewing is going across devices and platforms."

What the study revealed is that there are eight types of households each with their own viewing dynamic.  "All types watch over 20 hours per week and all types find value in ad-supported content," Davis explained.  While 57% of all of these homes watch TV alone, this is deceiving.  Because of the plethora of devices, no one really watches totally alone anymore.  In fact, of that 57%, 21% are actually communicating with others virtually while viewing, leading to the term convergent viewing.  "Convergent viewing heightens engagement," Davis noted.  "They watch virtually together. They watch more deeply and feel deeply connected to characters on an emotional level.  We also see higher brand metrics across the board with convergent-viewed shows."

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Viacom Velocity Unlocks Emotional Analysis for Marketing Campaigns and Identifies True Social Influencers

Viacom’s Lydia Daly, Vice President of Social Media for Velocity, spent most of her career to date in agencies. Two years ago she joined Viacom Velocity, the award-winning integrated marketing and creative content team and her work looks at the amplification, measurement and distribution of digital and social media for marketing campaigns.  Her focus on social media research has led to a range of groundbreaking projects and a recent collaboration with Canvs in emotion-based research. How does Velocity track emotions in campaigns and how does Viacom use that to help their clients? Lydia explains it all here.

Charlene Weisler: What is the Echo Social Graph?

Lydia Daly: The Echo Social Graph is our proprietary custom analytics dashboard that measures the effectiveness of our social marketing campaigns which was created in partnership with Spredfast which is based in Austin, Texas. Before this dashboard was created, we tracked social campaign performance very manually using excel spreadsheets. With the Echo Social Graph we created a sophisticated tool that allows us to automate measurement of the entire social conversation including and beyond our owned content across multiple platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, and more.

The data visualization has three sections. The first focuses on Campaign Metrics and how the audience evolves over the lifetime of a campaign in terms of impressions and engagement. The second section takes a deeper look at Content and identifies the most engaged pieces of social media content and the most influential influencers. Finally the third section looks at Demographics, identifying hot spots for engagement around the country and delivering directional insights about demos that can help our marketers further customize campaigns for clients.

Charlene: What are the demos that you use? Are they the standard ones?

Lydia: We look at all demos depending on the client and the campaign. In terms of social influencers, Viacom Velocity uses a casting process that matches social talent, the target audience, our brand voice with that of our advertising partners. Demos like age are a factor here but it’s also important to look deeply at the audience they appeal to and the kind of content that they create to ensure a good fit. You can have someone older who attracts Millennials and they could be a good influencer target for us even though they themselves fit outside of our target demo.

Charlene: What are the most important metrics in social media research?

Lydia: Reach and engagement are the perennial favorites. However, the Echo Social Graph tool allows us to delve much deeper than that. It enables us to track campaigns that are social by design and includes components that give us insight into the top performing posts as well as an hour by hour deep dive into how those campaigns played out. 

Charlene: Who are the influencers of today?

Lydia: In the past, they were predominately celebrities but that has changed massively. Now, social media influencers are breaking through and generate a lot of buzz across  specific social media channels like Vine, YouTube, Instagram and more. They influence all types of genres and industries and there are so many different types of social talent for partners to tap into. Every clients’ brand is different and the explosion of social talent in recent years gives advertisers more ways than ever before to customize and tailor one-of-a-kind campaigns.

Charlene: How do you match influencers with brands?

Lydia: It is both an art and a science. Some data helps in identifying certain types of influencers as it pertains to the demographics of the audience but we have an in-house team that is specifically charged with casting social influencers and identifying the players in the space who add that layer of art to the data science.

Charlene: Can you talk about your work with Canvs?

Lydia: The Echo Social Graph launched over a year ago  and we have always wanted to add a layer of sentiment analysis to deepen our audience insights, especially around millennials. However, Millennials use nuance, slang, irony, jargon, misspellings and more in their social conversations – this was always a hurdle for traditional sentiment analysis. Our partnership with Canvs expands our campaign measurement capabilities to incorporate emotional analysis. This means we can now interpret reactions to marketing campaigns and then qualify them into 56 emotions. This allows us to decode that conversation for our clients and understand how these audiences are responding to content.  

Charlene: Is it really possible to measure emotional responses to marketing campaigns?

Lydia: Yes. Canvs has developed a methodology to measure emotionality and this offers us a way to look at social conversations quantitatively to understand the feelings behind them. We can do this with marketing campaigns because we are already pulling all of the relevant campaign data as qualified by hashtags, phrases and keywords through our Echo Social Graph. The Canvs tool then analyzes that pool of data. This integration means that we have the ability to measure emotional reactions to our campaign content and that’s what our partners are looking for. 

Charlene: What do you consider to be engagement?

Lydia: There are so many ways that our fans engage with our content but for measurement purposes we have a way to group these. Our Echo Social Graph measures social engagement in three ways by Action, Creation and Shares. Actions include likes and favorites, Creation includes the physical creation of a social post and Shares represents shares and retweets. This gives us a good overview on a campaign and how content is igniting on social.

Charlene: Where do you see all of this new and ground breaking research going in the next five years?

Lydia: Social media measurement will continue to grow and evolve. Engagement will remain a key metric as everyone wants to understand the actions taken on their content. Tied to this will be more widespread emotionality research since this adds such a compelling layer to engagement numbers.

In terms of the world of talent, I think that the idea of social influencers and celebrities will converge as online influencers move to linear and the big screen thereby increasing their fame. Mainstream celebrities will get more sophisticated when it comes to promoting themselves via social media channels.

This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com