Millward Brown claims tool extracts actionable insights from digital noise

The brand, media and communications research firm touts the proprietary tool's ability to provide businesses near real-time access to actionable insights on brand health and marketing campaign performance.

The product is now available in Australia, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines. The company said that DBA will be made available in more markets in the coming months.

Yee Mei Chan, regional director of brand performance programs and business transformation at Millward Brown, said that the company expects DBA to be “highly relevant” to all clients who are active in digital marketing and want a faster response system for measuring their efforts.

“A lot of the social media monitoring or digital monitoring that goes on today relies on the absolute volumes [of mentions] without much consideration to the ‘noise’ in the data and without understanding how to judge whether movements upwards or downwards, are significant or not,” Chan told Campaign Asia-Pacific.

Chan added that through the company’s modeling efforts, it is able to decompose and understand the different levels making up the social buzz or search volumes—whether consumer interest is significantly above the baseline or due to seasonality or just within the normal expected fluctuations.

“This is why we can be confident that DBA can be a more sensible ‘alert system’ to marketers, because we can detect with confidence when movements are truly meaningful—i.e. really indicating something extraordinary requiring the marketers’ attention,” she said.

Yee Mei Chan

She added that the company was already talking to a number of automotive clients who have indicated interest.

DBA uses changes in online behaviours to give advertisers real-time feedback on the in-market performance of specific campaigns, allowing them to identify and act on emerging issues and opportunities.

It also monitors long-term health of brands through changing trends in interest and opinion over time, and can identify when brands are over- or underperforming versus expectations or the category.

These ‘always on’ analyses provide marketers and business managers with consistent metrics that enable them to optimize campaigns and feed long-term strategic decisions.

The global pilots so far have been done using Twitter to establish social buzz levels and Google search data to gauge search interest levels for most countries.

“In China specifically, where the digital ecosystem is quite particular, we are using alternative data sources such as Baidu and other vertical portals,” said Chan.

Asked what differentiates DBA from other similar offerings in the market, she said that the globally scalable solution was built on extensive R&D and validated to actual business performance.

“The solution is designed to show immediate opportunities for action with a quick-turn ‘always on’ system and is capable of showing both short-term and long-term brand effects from digital signals,” she said.

Chan said that solution could also deal with non-English languages, as long as there is access to appropriate data sources in the respective markets.

“We’ll be analysing the levels of brand mentions in social conversations or search volumes for the brand in that respective market, hence language is not an issue,” she said.

The company is offering DBA as a one-off, deep dive report, or as an ongoing dashboard with live-feed of the digital signals (post-modelling), which marketers can access in real-time.

It can be used as a stand-alone or integrated into a company’s core brand tracking platform.