The live polling that USA Today performs annually with focus groups has proven itself meaningless. This year GoDaddy.com’s “Perfect Match” advertisement scored dead last on the newspaper’s Ad Meter meanwhile the company posted record sales for a Monday following a Super Bowl commercial. What is USA Today missing?
USA Today’s Ad Meter needs to be brought into the 21st century. Traditionally, they have focused on a small sample group of viewers to gauge ad performance. This year, in an attempt to update their analysis they opened up that sample group to viewers that registered on their online portal. It was likely an attempt to get a better read of consumer reactions, but with more than 8,000 participants, they still missed the mark.
The inherent flaw in their analysis—the same one they’ve had since the Ad Meter was first published in 1989—is in the way they measure advertisement success. Knowing whether a person “liked” or “disliked” an ad is no way to gauge if it got the job done for the advertiser. USA Today needs to go deeper to understand the winners and losers.
In Networked Insights’ analysis of the Super Bowl ads and celebrities, social data insights revealed a different viewpoint. GoDaddy.com was... Read more
Archive for Dan Neely 
Making “Real-Time” Marketing Easy
For some marketing professionals, the mere mention of the phrase "real-time marketing" inspires head scratching. Add the notion of "social data" and it is enough to make the average marketer start sweating. The reason for their anxiety is simple: The perception of real-time marketing is often far from reality. Many believe it requires a wealth of teams, resources, and technology, but in reality it doesn't need to be that complex.
Progressive marketing organizations have advanced from treating social media solely as a communications channel, to a data set that informs decision-making. Why not? After all, social data is really consumer data with some exceptional characteristics that I refer to as the 3 R’s: richness, regenerative, and real-time.
A cogent evolution of social media monitoring is applying the analytics technologies and methodologies used in Business Intelligence to social media data to uncover insights. This technology, known as a marketing decisions platform, can improve marketing activities across the entire marketing lifecycle – planning, activation, measurement and optimization.
When marketers graduate from questions like “what should I say in social media” to “what can social media tell me about my customer,” they begin to collect real-time intelligence about their target audiences. A marketing decisions platform moves... Read more
