Wassup HYPE fam, welcome to HYPE Academy, the content piece that keeps you up to date with all things creative industry. Today, I am joined by Mellissa Mc Nelly from Kagiso Connect.
What is the gap you ae aiming to address with the Soundinsights platfrom?
Specifically with SoundInsights, we are looking at addressing the human truth, but also bridging the gap with context and culture in research and insights specifically in a South African context.
SoundInsights talks about moving beyond demographics and audience numbers to understanding the “human story behind the data.” What does that look like in practice?
In practice it is a combination things that we utilise from a research point of view where use qualitative work. We are on the ground speaking to people. We have a number of tools and we have a panels as well. Basically, we are in touch with our listeners or general consumers too. We look at human tension and often that tension create the best kind of insights you might have. It’s often things you don’t want to hear about your brand that are really important cause that’s how you grow.
The offering is built around creative intelligence, audience intelligence and attribution intelligence. How do these three areas work together to give advertisers a more complete picture of their campaigns?
We often do a lot of creative testing for our clients but what we like to say is that we balance the art and the science. With the creative side of the business, we look at neuromarketing. Within that product, we actually look at attentional metrics for our clients and for brands alike. We get to understand where people have their attention fixated during an advert or a concept. From there. We also fine tune it, utilising other data that we might get through our panel work, and then over and above that, our attribution provides real ROI measurement for a lot of our clients especially cause our work with radio and audio products. FM is not always measurable in terms of the human behaviour aspect. SoundInsights gives us this kind of view.
South African consumers are shaped by unique cultural, social and economic realities. How does SoundInsights ensure that its research captures the local context rather than relying on generic global consumer models?
We do a lot of customised work and like I said, it’s always localised to our context. I think that is incredibly important. A lot of people forget that we are so unique and so diverse. To your point, the socio economic divide shapes our reality and context shapes that reality in the moment. What we tend to do is get on the ground with the listeners and consumers. We get to understand their current reality. At the moment, we know that its rapidly moving so we have to have our finger on the pulse at all times. We do that with a range of techniques and we’ve got the neuromafrketing that we use a lot from a context point of view but there is also just generally talking to people. What I say to smaller brands and entrepreneurs is that you have to have 10 conversations with your consumers. It might just be a current consumer set, potential consumer set and even people that wouldn’t consider your brand. Those are people you need to talk to understand what relevance you brand will have today.
With the tool, is it skewed more to larger agencies or can smaller agencies utilise the tool too?
Its definitely not only for larger agencies. SoundInsights also caters for brands of all sizes. We do it for larger clients as well but it certainly has its place for smaller brands with smaller budgets.
One of the partnership’s key promises is connecting media activity to measurable business outcomes. How will SoundInsights help advertisers demonstrate that their media investment is actually driving actions such as website visits, store traffic and purchases?
We always take into consideration that we need metrics. I think it’s incredibly important because every business has different needs. I’d say a lot of businesses have access to a lot of metrics and a lot of those metrics speak to ROI’s. We like to look at human performance indices. We often try measure the revenue output and not the impact on the consumer. We do look at the behavioural changes of the consumer. I think that’s important but I acknowledge that we are in a business field and we do need to have a return on investment. With that being said, that’s where attribution comes in.
We ran a campaign called ‘a million and change’ that ran over East Coast and Jacaranda. We had over 190 000 uniques just during that campaign and we were able to measure that live with our attribution tool. We looked at the spikes and we could identify which days worked better, where we needed to adjust programming, how we had to adjust creative on the fly and that’s how we try optimise campaigns.
With AI, automation and algorithms increasingly influencing how marketers understand consumers, what do you believe SoundInsights can reveal that purely data-driven approaches might miss?
I’m never going to say that AI doesn’t have its place from an automation perspective. AI really gives us an edge in this space. One thing we encapsulate as SoundInsights is human insight. Human insights is going to be critical for brands moving into the future.
Looking ahead, what does success look like for SoundInsights, and how do you expect this partnership to change the way brands in South Africa use research, audience data and media intelligence to make decisions?
For SoundInsights, success is going to look like being a strategic tool for businesses, providing them with insights beyond the numbers. We want to look at the numbers and acknowledge that these are humans at the end of the day. We want to provide that human context, truth and cultural relevance. For us, that is where we are going to sit. I think it’s also about where are going to grow and that’s from metrics evidence based research for our advertisers.