INSIGHT
THE AUDIENCE-FIRST
OPPORTUNITY
Social media platforms have turned the advertising world on its head, says Affinio’s Philip Macartney,
who argues that social data is key to engaging new customers and driving down acquisition costs.
GAMING IS A VERY PERSONAL
INDUSTRY. People matter in gaming.
Understanding people is at the core of
the most successful gaming companies
in the world. In general, the data used
to understand behaviours and predict
actions is limited and myopic. Gaming is
too reliant on what happens after people
become clients, rather than before. Gaming
relies on action-based or demographic
segmentations, which limits the scope of
the insight available.
Media reports, industry questionnaires
and sampling are not fast enough for this
industry. They don’t react quickly enough
for sportsbook and they don’t get enough
data for other parts of the industry.
We need insights at the speed of modern
culture and to achieve this we need to
look at social data.
Social data has shown that engagement
on social is two-way. A consumer can learn
about our product, service or brand, but
equally, we can learn from the consumer.
With this approach advertising can move
from “mallet over the head” blunt to “laser
surgery” accurate, taking communications
from “blanket covered” to “personally
delivered” and insights from “market
research” to “market reality”.
Social platforms are very much like a
sponge. They soak in the residue from
marketing campaigns, sponsorships, PR
events, influencer programmes and other
communications and create an audience
very much reflective of life outside of the
platform. For the first time ever, we now
have a data source that helps us understand
our audiences in a richer way and without
the inherent biases that come with
traditional research methodologies.
Why start with the audience?
Our hyper-connected world now means
that our customers are our audience before
they are our customer. We can “meet” them
first. We can get to know them before they
buy. Watch any good salesperson in a retail
environment and they practice this face-to-
face all the time. The best sales professionals
ask questions. They ask what the person
does, who they are, what they are interested
in. They get to know them and then they
sell to them based on those insights, “this
car will fit two sets of golf clubs in the
boot and will make them jealous in the
clubhouse”, etc.
The core premise of the audience-first
approach is that when you know a person
by what they are interested in or passionate
about, you know a person enough to sell
to them. You also know who not to sell to
or pay attention to. What age someone is,
where they live, and what they searched
last on Google are not what defines them
and are not enough for you to personalise
your message to them. If you want to
engage someone, know them. Knowing
the customer and putting them first is fast
becoming the key mantra of the largest
companies in the world. Indeed Keith
Weed, chief marketing officer at Unilever,
summed it up with: “We need to go from
marketing to consumers, to mattering to
people.” In that short quote from his speech
at the Festival of Marketing in 2016, Weed
shows the direction that Unile