Networked Insights Data Study

Background

Networked Insights, a company that enhances consumer data from the social web to be decision-ready for brand marketing professionals, helps companies make more effective marketing decisions by providing them with a real-time window into brand, consumer and competitor behavior. The SocialSense marketing decisions platform provides companies with easy-to-use and powerful technology to identify audiences, discover customer interests, get instant campaign feedback, assess brand health, track purchase behavior and measure sales lift. Over the past seven years, Networked Insights has provided solutions to enterprise clients such as GE, MillerCoors, P&G, General Mills, Revlon and Viacom.

The Challenge 

Preliminary research indicated that brands sponsoring the World Cup might be overspending as primary sponsorship had climbed to $75 million. Viewership was projected to increase from the previous year and several non-sponsor brands had announced how they planned to use digital media to more effectively reach the audiences. Research further indicated that brands were uncertain overall about their large bets on the World Cup and there was an opportunity for Networked Insights to separate itself from the pack of other analytics tools by providing clarity on these investments.

The Solution

Based on this research, Walker Sands and Networked Insights decided to build a series of reports that would identify which brands had made the most of their sponsorship and which non-sponsors had found a better way to capitalize on the World Cup.

Walker Sands dove into the Networked Insights platform to compile pre-World Cup reports across three areas: overall brand metrics, consumer reaction data and audience data. The team also put together numbers on brand and purchase intent to serve as a baseline for measuring which brands (sponsors or not) would see the greatest spike against a number of meaningful metrics.

As the campaign launched Walker Sands released several data sets:

• Early returns on which brands were “winning” or “losing” the World Cup, including how brands could “win” the World Cup even if they were not a sponsor.
• “Hidden” World Cup audiences advertisers could capitalize on including where they lived, what media they consumed and what their interests were.
• How media habits changed during the World Cup (ESPN engagement was up, for example as Netflix was down).

The Walker Sands team continued as the World Cup play started with analysis of campaigns as they launched. Reports on the #JCPFanaticas campaign and other brand campaigns demonstrated the power of the platform to provide real-time data that could be used to adjust targeting or strategy.

The Results

The campaign resulted in 16 major placements and 71 million impressions. Highlights include coverage across The New York Times, Travel Channel, Bloomberg TV and trade coverage from Adweek and Marketing Profs. Social shares for all placements totaled 750 on Facebook, 1,744 on Twitter and 1,139 on LinkedIn.

Most importantly, the coverage resulted in several inbound leads from World Cup advertisers with a potential of over $1 million in new business for Networked Insights.