Because I run a company that pioneers new advertising technologies, I think a lot about what factors drive brand loyalty. On reflection, my own brand preferences are driven by a diverse set of factors.
I buy Nike shoes and running clothes because the company was the pioneer in the field when I was a kid, and after all these years, I still think it makes the best running gear. And, though the competitive runner in me tries to dismiss it as a factor, I also love its style. But my loyalty to Nike is quite distinct from my loyalty to other brands. JetBlue, for example, is the airline I feel most passionate about. Its personality is joyful, energetic, and playful; the entire staff is committed to making air travel fun. I've developed a loyalty for these brands that makes them the go-to sources for athletic gear and flights.
As marketers and data scientists, we face the challenge of predicting the brand affinities of consumers like me at scale. And naturally, we look to the data made available to us online for the key to solving this challenge.
There are three intersecting trends that have opened up the floodgates of data that can be harvested from the web. The first is the explosion of social media. The second is the democratization of news and information -- more sources and a higher share of consumption from the long tail. The third is user-generated content, driven by amateur blogs and shared photos and video.
All three of these trends have produced an ocean of what we call micro-content -- web pages produced by the masses and consumed by small, often socially connected groups. Of note to marketers, micro-content holds surprisingly strong signals for brand affinity.
There is a progression of content sites in any given domain that moves from general interest to highly targeted. This narrowing effect is how micro-content is reached. In sports, that might mean moving from a broad site like NBA.com to a vertical site like a team's fan page to a specific site like a player's Twitter feed to a microsite like a particular fantasy league of 10 players. In weddings, the progression might be from TheKnot.com to the wedding announcements at the Times to an invitation site for a particular wedding to a photo-sharing page viewed by a handful of guests.
Micro-content at the bottom of the funnel is where the strongest brand affinity clues are stored. Micro-content by its very nature is rarely visited. So, two people who show up at one or more rarely visited destinations in common indicates a personal connection, and this connection results in the likelihood that these individuals will be equally receptive to the same brand messages. Thus, marketers benefit by reaching consumers who are more open to receiving their message, and, as a result, these campaigns deliver a significantly higher ROI.
And with micro-content, the good news for marketers is that there is lots of it. By anonymously mining billions of those signals a month, it's possible to figure out which of my "friends" -- the people with whom I share micro-content -- are likely to share my preferences for Nike and JetBlue. This is accomplished without knowing anything about the people being targeted, including the nature of the content they're consuming.
The real beauty of this technique is that it scales. You can take a million brand loyalists and use their micro-content consumption to generate 10 million or more great prospects for that brand message. And, with only the most rudimentary segmenting of micro-content -- into social networks, media sharing, URL sharing, and blogs -- we can tune that targeting and develop predictive models that are unique for each brand. With the advent of ad exchanges and real-time bidding, we can then go find those audiences across the web, targeting only those browsers specifically connected to our brand loyalists. This approach eliminates wasted impressions, and using it to predict future customers results in campaigns that far exceed other targeting methods, often by five times or more.
So it turns out that we have discovered one of the great ironies of digital media -- that micro begets macro. The great over-arching digital media trend -- away from mass media and toward micro-content -- is also the great enabler of brand marketers, allowing them to deliver their messages with precision and at scale as never before.
Tom Phillips is president and CEO of Media6Degrees.
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