Our new eBook further explores the TV tradition of the Upfronts, the gamble for marketers during the ad buying frenzy, and how social insights provide a unique advantage for brands to stay in-sync with their target consumers.

We also produced a short video that goes behind the scenes of Outsmart the Upfronts, which includes interviews from studio executives and marketers taken during the Upfront presentations. This video gives you a great idea of how marketers really feel about the Upfronts:

For more information, please visit www.networkedinsights.com.

Last Tuesday, Microsoft unveiled its next-gen gaming platform – the Xbox One. Building off of a history of successfully selling gaming consoles featuring many popular gaming franchises, gamers were excited to see where the future of gaming was going. During the press conference, we analyzed over 500k real-time conversations, which during the day eventually grew to be over 2MM+ consumer reactions and related conversations. In our subsequent analysis we were able to understand the reaction consumers had to the reveal, identified what keys features were driving consumers’ intent to purchase the Xbox One, and discovered insights that informed recommendations to help Microsoft reach key audiences that disagreed with some of the Xbox’s new messaging.

Overall, the average consumer reacted positively to the reveal and we saw discussions appear across the entire social web.

Twitter was the best source to understand the overall reach of Microsoft’s live press release, but to delve deeper into whether or not Microsoft’s current marketing strategy was working or not, we looked at other outlets. We found that the Gamer-centric blogs and forums like IGN.com and Penny-Arcade.com were crucial in understanding what newly announced features were driving consumers to want to purchase the Xbox One. From our analysis, we were able to understand in real-time what the top three leading factors in purchasing the new platform were:

1. The new games and their exclusive content – Call of Duty Ghosts had consumers the most excited. The “dog” gameplay mechanic drove much of the engagement.
2. The Kinect – consumers love the voice and gesture controls the new Kinect enables.  Conversations particularly spiked when The Price is Right popped up on the big screen.
3. The Controller – the new D-Pad and the “impulse” are considered by consumers to be great innovations.

Of course, not every consumer was happy with what Microsoft unveiled during the event. In order to discover whether Microsoft made the right marketing decisions, we dove deeper into the conversation to identify the features that were disappointing to consumers and how particular consumer segments opinions differed. Using social data we focused on what Teens, Millennials, and Gen X’ers thought about the Xbox One. 

When we analyzed what Teens thought about the Xbox One, we saw the conversation become far more polarized for both economic and utilitarian reasons.

Teens

Teens’ largest complaints about the Xbox One were:

• The cloud-based delivery method for the games
• The lack of backwards compatibility
• The secretive stance on the ability to play used games (This is important to them because most Teens lack the purchasing power required to buy every new game)

Recommendation: Publicly discuss the benefits that consumers will have because of the Xbox One relying on a cloud-based gaming service. For example teens no longer have to get their parents to drive them to the store, or wait until midnight outside a store for the early release. Teens also never have to worry about losing their games or having them stolen since they are all digitally stored on their Xbox Ones.

Millennials

When we analyzed Millennials, we found out that they were as equally mixed about the reveal as the Teens were. As we dove deeper, we discovered that Millennials felt that the presentation and the new features were not gamer-centric enough. They felt that Microsoft was focusing too much on being the next-generation entertainment platform, and not enough on being a gamer platform. Some even felt that Microsoft was almost being disloyal to the consumers that made the Xbox 360 the gaming juggernaut it is today. Other Millennials also had concerns about the Kinect being a requirement for the Xbox’s operation. Many gamers had experience with the current Kinect not being precise enough for hardcore gamers.

Recommendation: Refresh messaging for E3 to make a bolder statement directed to gamers. Focus on more of the technical features (like the accuracy of the Kinect), hands-on demos so gamers can discuss with others about feeling comfortable with the device, and release a list of more games and stop relying upon cinematic videos in lieu of actual gameplay when presenting to gamers. In-general curating a number of fan-events that involve early access to products would dramatically increase the number of brand advocates for the Xbox One.

Gen X’ers

Out of the three audiences we analyzed, the Gen X’ers were the most positive towards the new platform. What they disliked though was the form factor of the Xbox, because it reminded them of the early oversized VCRs from the ‘90s. In this case nostalgia was not winning with Gen X’ers

Recommendations: Since the Xbox One has been officially revealed its form factor is not going to change until later platform evolution’s (as was the case with all of its predecessors and competitors). What should be done then is to leverage the formerly negative feelings towards the Xbox One’s design and rework those comments into a humorous advertising campaign that plays with the concept of the Xbox One’s resemblance to an old VCR. Examples could be “This isn’t Your Mother’s VCR” or “In 1983 all it could do was play tapes and lose the remote – today you can control what you watch with two words and a wave of your hand.”

Overall though, Microsoft’s reveal of the Xbox One was successful with the general consumer, but in these early days having this much discontent building within the hardcore gamer communities is not an advantage for a strong product launch. If Microsoft wants to take the lead and continue to push the forthcoming PlayStation 4 out of the picture they need to adjust their messaging and re-assure the gamer communities that they are for them. This goes beyond presenting cinematics from games and passing them off as actual “game-play.” There’s still time though and with E3 only a few weeks away, we’ll see how consumer conversations around the Xbox One evolve.

We wanted to make a strong statement about how counterproductive the Upfronts are for brands and marketers. In a few words, making gut decisions months in advance in a data-rich, real-time world is an unnecessary advertising gamble, not to mention that 65% of the pilots shown at the Upfronts will be cancelled by Christmas.

That’s why we introduced Operation: Outsmart The Upfronts to fight back against the status quo.

Networked Insights parked a mobile data center outside each network’s Upfront venue, broadcasting “Buy” and “Don’t Buy” decisions for the schedules the networks had just shared with their audiences. These recommendations were placed on three large, twelve-foot electronic billboard attached to our data center.

Networked Insights CEO Dan Neely along with our mobile data center.

Our buying recommendations were possible because we had gathered real-time consumer data across the social web, using SocialSense, our marketing decisions platform.

Networked Insights’ mobile data center outside FOX’s upfront presentation – Beacon Theater.

To symbolize this gamble with ad dollars, we also had street teams distributing lottery tickets that illustrate the risk for marketers.

Operation: Outsmart the Upfronts  had agencies, brands, marketers, and even celebrities taking notice during Upfronts week. It was a great display of the power of data-driven analysis. You can see all the action by watching the video or reading our eBook.

To date, leading publications including Fast Company, The Hollywood Reporter, and many more have reported on our campaign and our Buy and Don’t Buy recommendations:

Fast Company

The Hollywood Reporter

L.A. Business Journal

Broadcasting and Cable

Worldscreen

To learn more about how Networked Insights can help you better connect with your consumers using real-time data, please contact us.

This week is an exciting one to be a TV fan.

It’s Upfronts week for the major broadcast networks, which means finding out which shows have been renewed and which new pilots will be added to the fall schedules.

While the excitement for TV fans is reaching a fever pitch this week, brand marketers should be feeling another emotion—resentment.

The Upfronts are an institution deeply embedded in the TV industry. Each year, networks offer a discount to marketers that commit to buy advertising in their fall season months before the programs premier. Despite the glitz of each Upfront presentation, it all boils down to the same message from the networks: “Buy now and we’ll deliver an audience later.”

The premise is that buying at the Upfront provides marketers with better rates and access to premium inventory.

In reality, it’s a tremendous gamble for marketers. There has to be a way to change this. Thanks to advances in technology and the advent of the social web, marketers can both save money and execute more effective marketing by making real-time, data-driven decisions closer to when their advertising will appear.

To prove that point, Networked Insights has decided to make a stand for brand marketers forced to participate in the yearly Upfront trap.

Using SocialSense, our marketing decisions platform, Networked Insights will be demonstrating how real-time data can help brands and marketers cut through the network hype and understand which shows will be winners.

At the Upfront presentations, Networked Insights will be displaying “Buys” and “Don’t Buys” determined by SocialSense on a mobile video billboard. Since the upfronts are such a gamble we thought we would provide attendees a gameble with better odds, the lottery. Street teams will distribute lotto tickets that proclaim our position on the Upfronts. While there is some risk to every decision, Networked Insights can dramatically improve a marketer’s odds of making smart ones.

Networked Insights will be live tweeting our analysis of the fall show “Buys” and “Don’t Buys” throughout Upfronts week. Please follow us at @netinsights. For more information about our analysis, please contact info@networkedinsights.com.

The amount of information that Big Data refers to is massive. Brands now have access to terabytes upon terabytes of data, accumulated from consumers in a variety of ways. For marketers, CMOs, and business leaders, that mountain of data is the key to better understanding who your consumers are and what they want.

The “social” portion of Big Data provides the biggest benefits to marketers because that data is universally available and accessible in real-time. Every second, consumers are expressing a nonstop flow of unbiased opinions about products and brands across the social web. Savvy brands are leveraging this real-time data to create better marketing decisions.

Networked Insights is a company that helps brands and marketers leverage the social aspect of Big Data. We’ve had some incredible successes with it.

Our CEO, Dan Neely, recently presented alongside other industry leaders at the Chicago AMA “Big Data, Big Relevance and ROI” conference on just this topic.  His presentation “Big Data: A Revolution in Marketing and Media” is now available online, see below.

To learn more about Networked Insights or leveraging Big Data for marketing, please download our whitepaper “Big Data Can Mean Big Insights” and visit our website www.networkedinsights.com.

As TV’s biggest events are being broadcast, viewers aren’t just tuning in to watch–they’re playing an active role in the TV broadcast “story.” Their interactions all across the social web are shaping how press outlets cover these big TV events.

More press outlets are looking to get the full story about how online social conversations are playing out, both before and after big TV moments. Fortunately, Networked Insights can provide just the type of insights they need.

In the first two months of 2013, press coverage of Networked Insights has skyrocketed. Numerous national news organizations have relied on Networked Insights and SocialSense for a deeper understanding of the biggest TV events of the year so far—Super Bowl XLVII, The Academy Awards, and The Grammy Awards.

Leading media outlets focused on entertainment, technology, business, and sports have used our analysis to provide their audience:

• Insights about the content that resonated most with viewers
• Brands that made the biggest impact and;
• Themes driving conversations online.

To view highlights from 2013′s biggest media wins so far, check out the following presentation:

More and more, marketers are using social media to tap into influencers to bolster reach and sway their audience to see a product or brand differently.

Yet, they spend very little time and energy into the pre-informing stage of evaluating influencers. According to a recent Technocrati study, Facebook likes ranked as the most important metric when evaluating influencers followed closely by Twitter followers. I am fearful for marketers that rely only on these shallow metrics to create an influencer program.

While these are the base foundation of analyzing the potential of an influencer, there are many more criteria that a marketer needs to consider before commencing on a long-term engagement. And yes, it is going to be a long-road to generate value from an influencer marketing program in social media and this road is paved with a financial investment, resources, agency engagement, and a content plan. Influence isn’t a stand-alone one-time marketing program.

Extensive research and analysis is required to set up an influencer program for success. There are recommendations for validating influencer programs where there is no “paid” element for the endorsement.

An influencer program requires extensive validation. Most marketers aren’t investing enough time and energy in this area of pre-informing. Through social data analytics, marketers have the power to truly understand the power of the influence of an individual.

While influence tools like Klout, Kred and PeerIndex are valuable to gaining context to an individual, they are simply an exploratory tool to start the research. Identifying influencers is a start, but validating them requires in-depth insights and rigor aligned to your brand and marketing objectives.

Leveraging social data, there are other areas a marketer can look at to ensure the influencer is valid. These include:

1.    Affinities and Affluence
Exploration of the influencer’s interests in the past-six months to ensure brand and content alignment. This step is about a validation of topics that this person is influencing versus relying solely on the algorithms of influencer tools. Recently, I was deemed to be influential about Portland in an online tool. In fact, I was just posting music from a few area bands that happened to be from Portland. I have never been to the city, but I would love to go!

2.    Platform Pros
Discover their reach and engagement across social media platforms. For instance, an influencer may have more engagement on Twitter, because they are retweeted than on Facebook, where they have more Friends/Fans but limited engagement with content. And if they are retweeted in Twitter often, what type of content do their followers most often share.

3.    Content Resonance
Understanding how often and what content their followers engage around. For example, you may have a great advocate for your brand but they have a stronger influence in Instagram than in Facebook and therefore you need to adjust your cross-social channel content strategy.

4.    The Influencer Circle of Influence
Explore the quality of their “friends” and followers. Is your influencer’s audience the one your brand needs to activate against?  What is their audience interested in? Through social media analytics, you can evaluate their followers’ conversation to ensure there is alignment to your overall marketing objectives.

5.    Success Metrics
Understanding what metrics you want to set up to measure success. Leveraging social analytics you can predict the reach, engagement and impact of the influencer before activation.

This is modeling your influence program before you commence with the long-term marketing investment. It ensures you are creating a program that is set-up on information and not just a “Klout” score that could have been gamed.

Real-time marketing is about understanding your customers and prospects in real time and having the ability to use the resulting insights to make smarter, more timely marketing decisions to answer the needs of those customers and to outflank your competition.

The Marketing World Runs on Real-time Data

Arguing as Sarah does that this capability is not right for every brand is a typical agency perspective based on the belief that agencies know better than their clients what clients need.

At Networked Insights, the most common response we get from senior marketers when we show them what real-time data can provide is, “This is what I have been asking my agency for and they haven’t been able to deliver.”

We think every client should be empowered to deliver in real time. Whether they do or not is a question of situation-specific judgment that separates the good marketers from the great.

360i’s response for Oreo to the Super Bowl blackout was smart and real-time. It just had nothing to do with social data and insights.

What we are talking about is whether all clients should be enabled break free from out-of-date, small-sample research and benefit from a unified source of marketing intelligence that can inform the full spectrum of marketing decisions.

It’s that simple and that revolutionary.  These are the true basis of real-time marketing.

We don’t propose that clients toss out those old ways, but we certainly have the data to show that markets and consumers move in real-time and CMOs and their peers need to and can make the leap to an “Always On” stance.

@THHartman

From music to films, Hollywood has brought out its finest glitz and glam during this phenomenal awards season. Of course, anytime massive amounts of media dollars are on the table, Networked Insights is there to provide insights for our clients, sharing our best practices and analysis with marketers and the media. This award season, many well-respected publications have turned to us for insightful analysis to drive the content in their stories. So, in case you’ve missed some of these great stories, check them out below:

Publications that have relied on our analysis for the Oscars include:

Adweek: Samsung and Grey Poupon’s Oscars Ad Win on Twitter

Adweek: Host MacFarlane May Get Last Laugh as ABC’s Preliminary Deliveries are Up

Variety: Jennifer Lawrence Most Tweeted Celeb During Oscars

The Hollywood Reporter: Oscars: Most Tweeted Moments Include ‘Argo’ Win, Adele’s Performance

Business Insider: Social Media Insights – Oscars 2013

Business Insider: Instagram Is Doing Just Fine Without Twitter

SocialNewsDaily: Oscars 2013: Social Media Reacts To Hollywood’s Biggest Awards Show

SocialNewsDaily: 2013 Oscars: The Social Media Conversation Pre-Ceremony

Examiner.com: Oscar winners 2013: Most tweeted celebs

Examiner.com: Oscars 2013 predictions on social media: What’s the current buzz?

Media Life Magazine: Oscars’ big social media winner

Publications that have relied on our analysis for the Grammys include:

LA Times.com: Grammys 2013: Jay-Z joke, Rihanna top social media buzz

Zap2it: Grammys 2013: Rihanna, Justin Bieber, or Frank Ocean – Who won the Twitter wars?

SocialNewsDaily: 2013 Grammys: Social Media Activity During Last Night’s Awards

Business Insider: The 10 Most Talked About Celebrities During The Grammys

Examiner.com: Grammy Awards 2013: Top social media conversations

CBS Local News: On Social Media, Jay-Z’s Jab Trumps Katy Perry’s Cleavage

Clevvr.com (video clip mentioning Networked Insights):Beyoncé Behind Jay-Z “Swap Meet” Joke Grammy Acceptance Speech 2013

CNET: 7 social media lessons from the Grammys for organizers of other events

Marketing Profs: The Social Media Winners of the 2013 Grammy Awards

Hollywood came alive during last night’s 85^th Academy Awards ceremony, where the stars wore their best and the industry’s finest were honored. The excitement of the glitz and glamour was in full force on social media during last night’s Oscar ceremony as well. Fittingly, many advertisers capitalized on the increased interest, using the show as a launchpad for ads that catered towards the Oscars viewers.

Networked Insights analyzed the activity across the entire social web related to the ads and celebrities that were in the spotlight during last night’s Oscars. Overall the event garnered more than 8.9 million conversations and the highest spike was when Michelle Obama announced Argo as the winner for Best Picture. Social predictions, made earlier by Networked Insights, also correctly projected this win as well as several other winners.

Of course, the big night was filled with discussions around the celebrities. Winners got a large boost in conversations as viewers commented around their acceptance speeches, but there were many other standouts in the top 10 most discussed celebrity listing as well.

Top celebrity key-points:

• Jennifer Lawrence’s antics involving tumbling on the stage stairs and a fist-pump (all of which were instantly turned into GIFs and shared on Twitter and Tumblr), helped her become the most discussed celebrity at the show
• Conversations around Anne Hathaway were very polarizing and many disliked her acceptance speech for Best Supporting Actress
• Kristen Stewart’s conversation skewed negatively, with many disliking her “stiff” on-stage performance
• Channing Tatum got a huge boost in conversation for performing a dance number in the opening bit
• The camera cut to Charlize Theron during Seth MacFarlane’s song about onscreen nudity provoked a surge in conversations

The celebrities weren’t the only things discussed last night either. Seth MacFarlane was mostly well-received, driving more than 200k Oscar-related conversations.

Not to be left behind, advertisers spent upwards of $1.8 million for a 30 second spot to capitalize on Oscar viewers. Some launched massive new marketing campaigns (like JCP and Grey Poupon) that inspired consumers to share in real-time their thoughts about the ads.

Update 2/25/13: Check out how Adweek leveraged this data.

Top advertiser key-points:

• Samsung had the highest positive sentiment and volume, driven by Tim Burton’s cameo in the final “unicorn apocalypse” ad
• Apple’s conversation was very polarizing, with the discussion revolving around the number of ad slots they used, which repeated the same commercial
• Coca-Cola’s conversation was very polarizing—many thought their “calorie count” ads were misleading
• Grey Poupon saw 4 times its daily average number of conversations
• JCP’s ads were well received, but some viewers expressed reservations about JCP’s rebranding attempt from department store to lifestyle brand

Before the show even aired, Networked Insights also performed an analysis to uncover insights about the actors and movies winning the “social” Oscars race, as well as reactions to Seth MacFarlane’s hosting gig.

We looked at conversations that took place online, after the nominee announcement (1/10 – 2/14), which revealed a heated debate, and depending on the audience you looked at, the results were split for some categories.

Below is a quick summary—for a detailed analysis, with post numbers and sentiment numbers for each category, check out our full analysis at the end of this blog post.

Quick facts:
Only 16% of Argo’s conversation was about the Academy snubbing Ben Affleck for Best Director
Only 5% of Zero Dark Thirty’s conversation was about the polarizing torture scenes
More than 37,100 conversations about Seth MacFarlane as Oscar host
14% love that he’s hosting
Conversations among all movie fans pointed to these winners:

Best Picture – Zero Dark Thirty
Best Actor – Bradley Cooper
Best Actress – Jennifer Lawrence
Best Supporting Actor – Christoph Waltz
Best Supporting Actress – Anne Hathaway

Among fans of the Oscars:

Best Picture – Argo
Best Actor – Daniel Day-Lewis
Best Actress – Jennifer Lawrence
Best Supporting Actor – Tommy Lee Jones
Best Supporting Actress – Anne Hathaway