Associating your brand with a pop culture trend is a great way to appear relevant to your audience, but measuring the results can be tough. What’s a marketer to do?
In addition to popular TV shows, Black Entertainment Television (BET) has high traffic websites and big social followings—more than five million Facebook fans and nearly 1.75 million Twitter followers. As its online footprint has grown in recent years, BET’s leadership realized that it needed a way to analyze conversations unfolding on different social platforms all in one place.
BET’s former senior director of social media, JP Lespinasse, explained how BET monetized social interactions to support its larger goal of a TV audience. He gave the example of simultaneously tracking two different digital properties, one posting about a hip hop artist and another about a movie star. From there, he analyzed whether the people reading about hip hop were more likely to watch BET, as well as whether posts about hip hop had more views because they were more interesting to BET fans or because they were on a digital channel that had a bigger audience.
BET’s answers came in the form of Adobe Social—software that can measure show-related social mentions across many different digital channels and identify the topics and people BET viewers care about most. For example, when BET looked at the data on its scripted drama “Being Mary Jane,” it discovered that the second most popular character was Avery, a relatively minor figure who only appears in four episodes of the first season. “We never anticipated this,” Lespinasse said.
Before BET had a way of integrating data from different digital channels, it was nearly impossible to determine the value of one piece of online content relative to another. Now, Lespinasse says, BET can “cross-pollinate the data,” as “Being Mary Jane” perfectly demonstrates.
The discovery that the Avery character resonated with viewers wasn’t just an interesting insight. It was actionable data that could add value to the network—pop culture analytics translated into marketing. BET quickly updated its promotions for the show: Advertising clips were reedited to include Avery; the network’s social strategists put more focus on Avery; and the actress who played Avery was invited to live tweet the episodes in which she appeared. Consequently, ratings shot up for the final episodes of the season.
All of this is a great example of how to do cross-channel marketing right, but it’s just one example. Every industry can cross-pollinate its data. Video game creators can now shape their games based not only on data gleaned directly from the games themselves, but also on data from conversations taking place across the web. Smart cars are now providing automakers with data on driving habits, and this data can then be combined with data from other channels to create a unified picture of what each customer truly wants.
The data is there, and it contains millions of stories for marketers. Cross-channel marketing puts all those stories into coherent narratives about customers—much like pop culture provides a narrative to a generation. And that, ultimately, makes marketing much less intimidating and a lot more entertaining.
