Category Archives: Advertising

I am a big believer of people being honest, truthful and good in general. But we humans also have a tendency to live in denial. To fix this and keep you on the way to success, what you need is something to measure your performance and optimize it.

Where I am going with this? I had a long pitch the other day, to convince a client to use MavenMagnet to evaluate their campaign performance. The argument client had was that our advertiser, who is running the campaign, is reporting on how well the campaign is doing, so why use MavenMagnet?

So here’s the scenario: An agency that developed your campaign and bought media for your campaign would also do reporting on how the campaign is doing. I was perplexed on why we even had to convince that you need an unbiased service provider, whose expertise is to evaluate campaigns, do the evaluation for you. Why burden the advertising agency, whose expertise is to run the campaign, with evaluating it and maybe fall in the trap of self denial? (Update: We were able to make the case using the superior and cutting-edge features of our product and got support from the advertising, media and PR agency for that).

MavenMagnet campaign evaluation product is the best service out there to measure your campaign on a competitive scale using years of benchmarks. Advertising agencies do a great job using the feedback from this campaign evaluation and course correct to improve the impact of the campaign. The idea is simple and win-win for all: let us partner with you to evaluate your campaign and provide you the analysis of what’s working, what’s not working and recommendations on optimization based on our expertise. Use the evaluation and optimize the campaign and be successful!

How do you choose a hotel? By the quality of service? The view? What your friends might think? How about the water pressure in the shower? Don’t laugh.

Brodeur Partners looked into the heart of what really matters when it comes to online conversation about hotel choice and has come up with intriguing answers. “We wanted to go beyond speculation and opinion, and really see what drives online behavior – in this case, conversation – around different hotel brands,” said Brodeur Partners CEO Andy Coville.

The study reveals that Hilton, Marriott, and Four Seasons (in that order) have the highest Conversational Relevance™ in online discussions among leisure and business travelers. The conclusion is based on an analysis by Brodeur Partners and MavenMagnet of what is “relevant” in online brand conversation.

The Conversational Relevance™ scale is a measure of how much people are talking about a brand and how impactful and positive that conversation is. Brodeur and MavenMagnet parsed more than 18,000 online conversations between May 2012 and October 2012 across social networks, profiles, forums, news websites and blogs.

“We looked not only at practical considerations but at how the brands resonated with hotel guests’ senses, values and social needs, which are the other dimensions of Brodeur’s relevance model,” said Jerry Johnson, Brodeur executive vice president of strategic planning. “When a brand is engaging all four dimensions, it inspires strong feelings and an abiding loyalty in those who experience it.”

“Using our proprietary technology, we tap into the collective intellect of engaged consumers—in this case, consumers sharing their experience about travel and hotels,” said Aditya Ghuwalewala, MavenMagnet founder. “Our zero interference approach eliminates the risk of respondent conditioning thereby delivering actual insights focusing on what’s relevant in the space.”

Four Elements that Drive Relevance

The top hotel brands in the analysis displayed highly positive overall Conversational Relevance™ scores based on positive/negative buzz differential, with Hilton earning a 58 percent score followed by Marriott (56 percent) and Four Seasons(51 percent).

The analysis dug much deeper, however, looking at each of the 10 brands’ attributes through Brodeur’s four relevance pathways:

• Functional – Practical attributes people care about like service, location, rooms, recreation and rewards programs. Comments in this area dominated the conversation about hotels. Marriott, Hilton and Sheraton were the winners here.
• Sensory – Attributes that appeal to all five senses like the view and water pressure in the shower (which surprisingly eclipses bed comfort in online attention).
  Ritz-Carlton and Hilton led the category.
• Values – Attributes that reflect personal values such as the hotel’s service ethic and commitment to indulging patrons. Four Seasons dominated.
• Social – Attributes related to customer status, such as the brand’s cachet. Four Seasons dominated here, too.

The analysis further broke down results between leisure and business travelers. Room cleanliness, for example, means more to business travelers than leisure travelers. It’s the other way around for recreation.

Leisure travelers were broken down further still, between those traveling with children and those without. The Ritz-Carlton was particularly popular in conversations in the former category, and recreation was paramount for families.

Key findings
The Conversational Relevance analysis was able to specifically identify strengths that some brands could leverage and weaknesses that held other brands back. In addition, it identified a framework that all hotels can use in managing their online and social communications:

• Service and location are the biggest “functional” conversation drivers.
• Accessibility – both to the hotel and nearby amenities – drives nearly two-thirds of online conversations about the “functional” attributes of a hotel.
• When it comes to conversations about rooms, size matters, closely followed byconnectivity and technology.
• While there has been a lot of investment by hotels in the quality of beds, the subject that most people talked about in the “touch” or “feel” category was the shower, specifically thewater pressure of the shower.
• Room noise was a hot topic in the “sound” category, particularly among family travelers. Most of that conversation was negative.
• People talked about the “values” of a brand in terms of what kind of service they received, i.e., having a “service first” culture and being responsive. A particularly important element that drove online conversation was a hotel staff’s responsiveness and personal attention to individual needs.
• The biggest driver of social conversations is whether a hotel is “referenceable” – that is, something travelers would recommend to others.
• That a hotel’s “luxury” or “indulgence” is a symbol of status and achievement drove a considerable amount of conversation among business and leisure travelers; however one-third of that discussion was negative.
• By far the biggest driver of conversation among business travelers is whether a hotel is considered “best in class.” Social relevance for leisure travelers derives more from peer reviews.

Why Conversational Relevance?
This study on the hotel industry is the first demonstration of Brodeur’s new Conversational Relevance model. Applicable to any industry, organization, brand, person, idea, candidate or cause, the Conversational Relevance methodology measures buzz volume, impact and positivity/negativity across four relevance dimensions. At the same time, it identifies hot topics, positive and negative, uncovering hidden strengths on which to build a business and risks that could devolve into crises.

The Conversational Relevance methodology has a number of advantages:

• It relies on real people freely sharing thoughts with others who have common interests about things that matter to them.
• Since it finds conversations where they occur, there’s no location bias.
• It’s devoid of any response bias that could occur through a survey questionnaire.

“Our relevance strategy is founded on the principle that creating a dominant, relevant brand is as much a science as an art,” said Coville. “Relevance can be quantified and, more importantly, systematically improved to support behavior change in the people you’re hoping to influence. Conversational Relevance is just one of our many services that deliver on this principle.”

For more information on Conversational Relevance and hospitality, visit http://www.mavenmagnet.com/Articles/MAVENMAGNET_Hospitality-Relevance-Audit-2.14.13.pdf

A few months back I wrote about excellence of the New York shuttle S campaign. Here I want to talk about a very similar theme based campaign done on another piece of public transit and its impact (yes, we have numbers to prove that it worked well!)

I am talking about the San Diego trolley theme campaign of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic during the 2012 Comic-Con. The promoters of the show took one car out of 4-5 cars of the trolley and painted it with themes from the TV Show. The impact was amazing because of a couple of reasons. When anyone saw all the cars with simple regular red color and in between a car painted with a particular theme, it instantly caught their attention. People entering the car saw the same theme of the TV show wherever they looked. Second, it was extremely targeted to get hold of the Comic-Con audience who were there to talk and listen about movies and TV shows. The idea was, as always, to get undivided consumer attention.

With hundreds of movies and TV shows trying to buy a few minutes of attention from 130,000 Comic-Con attendees, this campaign of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic created significant buzz by the attendees and left a lasting impression in their mind. According to a research done by MavenMagnet, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic ended up being the second most talked about TV show on social media by the Comic-Con attendees!

Check out MavenMagnet report Comic-Con 2012: Movies and TV Shows that dazzled the social world.

Last time New York Giants met New England Patriots in the Super Bowl was four years back. Though the last two minutes heroics of Eli Manning still led the Giants to win the game, much has changed in the world since then. In the social world, the landscape in 2008 was comparatively smaller. For example,there were about 100 million Facebook users and 30 million tweets a month. Fast forward four years, in 2012 there are more than 800 million users on Facebook, more than 300 million tweets a day and 4 billion videos being streamed on YouTube every day. If nothing else, this completely changed the biggest television advertising day of the year.

For the first time, the brands did more public campaigns to gear up to the Super Bowl than any time before. Whether it was in form of contests to make audience vote for the best of the commercials or post teasers online to what to expect this year at Super Bowl. For example Chevy ran a Super Bowl ad contest. The 40 finalist ad spots were viewed on YouTube more than 35 million times and people voted and discussed them for a month. Doritos on the other hand asked people to make ads and submit in their contest. The prize being the winning entry getting airtime during the bowl. Volkswagen building up on the last year’s Darth Vader success dropped a teaser of their this year’s ad titled the Bark Side. It got about 10 million views before the game day.

The entire phenomenon of Super Bowl advertising is taken to another level this year and in many ways, the $3.5 million that advertisers shelled out for 30 seconds had much more impact this year than ever before. Social media enabled the 30 second spot to be a month-long advertising campaign.

But then there was Chrysler’s Halftime in America. No one saw it before, no one heard about it. So when the voice of Clint Eastwood came at the halftime mark, people paid attention to the ad like the good old times. The social media impact here: the official copy of the ad posted by Chrysler was watched more than 10 million times on YouTube within a week of its airing during the Super Bowl!

Science is a very general term. So is art. In some sense art and science are opposites of each other and in other cases you can think of them being synonymous to each other. Without going much in the theory of the words, by science I mean something that is based on systematic study. Something that has numbers to back it. It has reasoning and logic behind it. On the other hand, by art I mean something that is subject to aesthetic criteria. Something that is beautiful, appealing and presentable.

I am a big believer in science. Numbers are awesome (though subject to interpretation) overall they prove something. When you do data analysis based on large sets of information, applying scientific algorithms can do wonders. It can generate patterns and extract information that is not even visible by naked eyes. That is specifically evident when you work with social media information. The data is overwhelming and algorithmic processes do an awesome job identifying the hidden knowledge.

But when you try to sell this science, you need something that is beautiful, appealing and presentable to people who are going to use it. That’s the role of art in a science heavy world. No matter how sophisticated software programs you write to extract information or how well you can process data to gain rich knowledge, till you can communicate that in an easy to consume manner, it is of no use. Add a pinch of art to your scientific prowess. Think who your customer is. What do they need? What language they understand? Then put your scientific findings in a way that is appealing to them. That will make them empowered by knowledge and take action on it. That will make your work really matter and make the science in the background worth more than anything else.