2019 Social Insights Report for Ad Agencies and their Brands

If you’re on an ad agency team, you know the stakes.

Your clients are the lifeblood of your business. You need the best insights and strategies money can buy to keep them happy.

Whether you work with smaller clients, huge enterprise brands, or somewhere in between, social listening offers the most robust solution for capturing real, actionable consumer insights for your agency and its clients.

Using this technology enables your team to understand the success of your efforts and build strategies capable of outwitting the competition. No easy task.

To show what this data is made of, we’ve selected some of the world’s most reputable ad agencies and created the ultimate social insights report for some of their top client brands.

The research question that guided this report was this: which ad agencies were finding the most success for their clients and how can social listening be used to analyze that success?

This report covers insights from analysis of millions of online consumer conversations over the last year looking at sentiment analysis, audience personas, performance of specific campaigns, brand health, linguistics and more.

In the report, you’ll find analysis and observations for agencies like Ogilvy, Grey, and TBWA and their client brands such as Dove, HBO, and Gillette.

Here are some surprising takeaways from our social insights report for ad agencies and their top client brands:

Dove’s Real Beauty Campaign Earns Consumer Trust with Themes of Diversity, Authenticity and Love

Trust is the top currency in the world of brand-to-consumer relationships. The correlation between consumer trust and brand success is well-documented.

We’ve demonstrated before with our previous social listening analysis that online audiences  express trust in a brand at the same rate that they express intent to purchase.

Inside our 2019 social listening report for ad agencies and their top brands, we took a deep dive at Ogilvy’s client brand Dove and their campaigns and success amongst consumers over the past year.

Is Dove a trusted brand? 

They’re definitely loved by consumers. Dove garnered high levels of the love emotion from consumers in the aftermath of their diversity-lead campaigns “My Hair My Crown”, #ShowUs, and “The Real Beauty”, which promote confidence among women by redefining what feminine beauty means. 

Agencies like Ogilvy can use social listening data to better understand what drives consumers sentiment and feelings towards brands, what they expect brands they’re loyal to say and do. 

These types of insights accomplish 2 powerfully important goals:

1. They help you see what’s working and what’s resonating with audiences
2. They help you make data-guided choices about the types of messaging and branding to reach the right people, rather than relying on assumptions and guesswork

According to the analysis featured in our report, Dove was able to meet those consumer expectations and drive positive conversations about their brand.

Download the report today to see the full social listening analysis as well as fascinating insights for other brands and agencies.

Gillette Garnered a Mixed Reaction for Ad Calling Out Toxic Masculinity According to Sentiment Analysis

Making a campaign with the understanding that it will be polarizing is always comes with risks for brands, especially in the age of always-on microphones and social media trolls. 

But if you want to know how well your message is landing with specific audiences, social listening tools provide the most precise and holistic measurements of those audiences to give you a clear picture of your success, while also drowning out the noise.

Take this year’s ad by Gillette which challenged masculinity norms such as “boys will be boys” and “locker room talk” with the message “Is this the best a man can be?” 

The ad not-so-subtly puts a spotlight on how men treat women, and predictably, some men didn’t take too kindly to it.

But did the ad have the desired impact for the target audience?

Much like last year’s Nike campaign featuring NFL star and activist Colin Kaepernick asked the audience to “believe in something”, Gillette called upon their audience to stand for something. 

Social listening tools allow agency teams to filter and adapt consumer research on the fly to hone in on custom audience segments, and that’s a game changer because measuring campaign performance can now be done for more in-depth and accurately than previously possible.

Zeroing in on specific audiences using social listening can help Gillette teams and agencies they work with see how various groups reacted to their campaigns. 

Here’s the analysis featured in the report, showing how male vs. female audiences within different generations reacted to Gillette’s online ad:

It’s clear women of all ages overwhelmingly expressed positive sentiment toward the campaign, more so than their male counterparts.

Looking at the sentiment analysis of the campaign, the largest gap was seen between women and men within the Gen X group. 

Furthermore, emotions analysis (which you’ll see when you read the report) showed that men responded with more anger and disgust to the ad. We found that women, on the other hand, expressed the emotions of love and trust towards Gillette’s ad.

You may applaud Gillette for being outspoken about a serious topic. 

From a business standpoint, Gillette may have angered some dudes out there. But in the end, the campaign accomplished something important: getting people to talk about Gillette.

This is an interesting case study. While the most positive reaction to the campaign came from those outside of their typical target consumer base, women, the conversation about shaving brands was still altered in a way that helped reroute consumer interest in a positive trend.

Up until the polarizing ad launched online, Gillette lagged behind upstarts like Harry’s, the direct to consumer “shave club” brand that was winning consumers by way of innovation and convenience. 

Gillette, as the stalwart brand of men’s shaving and grooming, successfully nudged the public conversation back in their favor. Whether it was negative or positive, it’s clear that the “best a man can be” campaign got people talking about the brand again.

Giant Spoon’s OFFLINE Activation with Game of Thrones and Red Cross Drove Consumer Conversations About Blood Donation 

A huge advantage that social listening tools like Infegy Atlas have over other social analytics platforms is their unparalleled ability to provide accurate insight on events and campaigns that happen offline. 

So, if you’re an ad agency and you want to track your brand’s South by Southwest activation, like Giant Spoon did for Game of Thrones last year, you can create a campaign targeted at the right audiences, then track its success by monitoring the online conversation.

How do you get people excited about donating blood?

Giant Spoon’s clever activation asked festival goers to donate to the Game of Thrones characters’ need for blood-- which really was a donation to the Red Cross.

The week following the event, consumers talked about the Red Cross and donating or giving blood at an increasing rate, which is one of the goals the agency hoped to achieve. 

Our data shows that Giant Spoon achieved its goal of spreading awareness for the non-profit: following a spike in conversations about the event itself, consumers talked more about donating and the Red Cross than at any other point in the prior fifteen weeks.

This is a win-win. The agency affectively drove conversations about both the show and an important cause. It’s no easy task to get people excited about donating blood. But the SXSW event is proof in the power of meeting your audiences with innovation and then tracking your efforts with smart data.

By analyzing your offline event using the online consumer conversation, agency teams can provide social proof of their efforts. They can use social listening data to measure the performance and understand the context of its success, providing data for reporting within the larger agency team and to showcase success with their client teams.

The insights available to agency teams proves the impact having intuitive data can be used to enhance the work agencies do on behalf of their client brands.

The rest of this advertising agency report is chock full of must-read analysis and applications for social listening just like this.

Download it and share with your team today to see how the agencies and brands stack up, and how your team can use social listening to win big for your brand or agency.