iMedia Connection Blog

To read the marketing industry press around the Super Bowl, you’d think the game was a sideshow, a delivery system for the real show: the ads.  Much has already been written by pundits and pollsters on which ads were the “best.”  The idea of arts-like criticism of ads is pretty hilarious.  An uncreative ad that sells the more product than the most creative is a very worthy version of “best.”
Because the ads for events like the Super Bowl are a part of the show – and a major part for many people – we at Taykey turned our powerful monitoring technology on all of the ads that ran between kickoff and the final whistle.  We pulled in data from over 50,000 sources, from the big boys like Facebook and Twitter to blogs to comment sections on sports and news sites, to see which ads received the most conversation and achieved the highest positive response.
Here are the Top 10:

Though we honored the ads that inspired the most conversation in our graphic, we gathered data on every commercial that ran.
Nine ads achieved our top sentiment score, meaning the language used in tweets and status updates and other posts around the brand during... Read more

Movie studios have a huge advantage over most brands in that their marketing materials are sought after by the audience and consumed as content rather than as commercial.  One anecdotal example you my identify with: though my wife and I are committed time-shifters and we make a sport of skipping commercials, we always stop the fast forwarding when a movie spot comes on.  That situation doesn’t make the marketing job simple, and there are plenty of occasions where the audience shrugs at or shuns the movie despite their openness to materials.  I thought it might be interesting to take a look over the next few months at how one studio markets one picture.
Last month, Paramount began their marketing of the next Star Trek movie, the second from director J.J. Abrams.  Star Trek presents opportunities and challenges.  The franchise is over 40 years old.  Though Abrams’s first go with the Enterprise was a reboot of the franchise, the characters hadn’t been current for audiences for a long time.  And despite the existence of a reasonably large group of alpha fans, those fans, Trekkies or Trekkers depending on your age, are perceived by the general public as nerds (at best).
At the marketing... Read more

We are so awash in data that we seek simple ways to find meaning in it all.  But simplicity is not a virtue if it undermines your ability to derive a realistic understanding of your subject.  To illustrate, let’s look at the way social media has been reported on during the presidential election.
During the primaries earlier this year, it became apparent that the media was going to tell the social story quantitatively.  Hence, candidates were judged on their numbers of Twitter followers, Facebook likes, and Klout scores.  More recently, coverage of the two conventions attempted to quantify enthusiasm through the lens of the number of tweets generated during each three-day infomercial, which drew a rebuke from Stephen Colbert: “These numbers are out there and it’s the media’s duty to report them without the liberal filter of meaning something.”
At Taykey, we have the technology to look not only at the volume of conversation – tweets, status updates, blog posts and more – but to analyze the sentiment associated with each.  We can understand a little better how to interpret unstructured online conversations.  Consider the following graph:

This shows the volume of conversation during Tuesday night’s debate from 9pm to 11pm.  During the... Read more