Not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, a big data approach – where everything is measured – is appropriate, but must for the sake of sanity and causal analysis, includes soft data sources like ethnography, cultural analytics and, anthropology.

In the field of marketing and media, where behaviours and consumer cultures are rapidly changing, these social sciences have an even greater role to play. The need for perspective in the context of media buying, consumer segmentation, customer communications and content development requires a ’softer’ side. On its own, a hard numbers game can’t deliver the insights to optimise current audience knowledge.

Values, life themes, brand communities (see Apple), even sub-cultures of consumption (see Harley Davidson), have as much legitimacy in audience selection and valuation as do TARPS, page views, CUME, frequency and unique users. Compounding the problem are antiquated segmentation processes based on socio-economic variables or postcodes which are increasingly seen as a blunt method of approaching the ‘mindset’ or culture of particular consumer groups.

Take for example a potential media buy with newspapers like The Australian or the Sydney Morning Herald. How many advertisers, let alone their agencies, would consider the paper’s respective tone, editorial line and general content priorities before executing a creative response? Is readership culture defined and quantified before or alongside readership and circulation? Not likely.

In 2009 a group of leading media and agency groups formed the “The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM)”. Members included the likes of Disney, News Corp, Starcom MediaVest Group, WPP, Time Warner  and NBC Universal. The CIMM was an act of frustration at the lack of innovation in audience measurement, especially in digital media, and by extension, cross-media measurement.

There can be no greater example of innovation than a consistent approach to the ‘fusion’ of culture and value profiles with hard audience data.

The most recent study by Joel Waldfogel at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, concludes by quantifying the displacement effect at between -0.15% and -0.28%, depending on the artist, genre and importantly, the music interest (music sophisticate versus mainstreamer versus lifestyler versus influencer) of the individual in question. That is, an additional stolen track reduces paid consumption by between a third and and a sixth of a song.

The methodology included sampling university students and their music consumption. The incidence of illegal music was obviously high, but so was the legal version of the same track. Interestingly, the first insight of the study revealed a definite positive correlation between the percentage of students who owned a legal copy and those owning an illegal copy.

Of the 50 tracks used in the survey, for example, Coldplay’s Viva La Vida had the highest incidence of ownership, with 24.5% possessing a legal copy versus 17.5% who had the shared copy. Lifewise, the legal version of M.I.A’s Paper Planes was 17.7% versus 22.5% for the illegal option, and so on. Interestingly, the average valuation placed on Viva La Vida by the students was $2.22 – well above the iTunes retail price of $0.99 (the consumer has achieved a real, legitimate surplus in this instance). Correspondingly, the average value placed on Miley Cyrus’ 7 Things was just $0.36.

On this point, but beyond the scope of this paper, much needs to be discussed about current pricing structures of digital entertainment products and their real market valuations (as determined by consumers). There is definitely room to discuss the deadweight loss of certain music offerings which are simply being priced well beyond consumer expectations.

To conclude, we have an instance here where consumers purchase an average of 5.54 songs and steal an average of 6.71, while purchased songs have an average valuation of $2.76! Based on a displacement figure of -0.28, and in the context of no illegal music filesharing, the number of purchases would rise to 7.42 songs, not the 12.25 songs (5.54 + 6.71) in a simple one for one scenario.

The fascinating aspect of this research, and subsequent analysis, is the implications for all digital entertainment offerings. While we assess the implications for digital music sales, we must also be aware of the implications and learnings for filmed entertainment and associated distribution options.

In the context of interactive media, particularly, there remains some breathtaking assumptions about youth and their engagement with the medium (and associated content/applications). For this reason, a recent study published by Fontys University of Applied Science in The Netherlands (authored by Antoine Van den Beemt and Sanne Akkerman), attempts to break down Net Gen into four distinct clusters. They include: Traditionalists, Gamers, Networkers and Producers. The study attempts to ask the following question: can patterns be found in the interactive media activities of young people?

Segmenting Young Users of Digital Media

The clusters are self-explantory, but the analysis has essentially segmented young people across both social space and cultural space; the latter rarely making its mark on current media thinking or planning. For example, Gamers, as the name suggests, are defined by an interest-driven participation. However, the study also invokes further sub-categories for Gamers which are tethered to psychological frames, namely Pretenders & Providers.

Interestingly, of the sample surveyed (all aged between 10 and 23), media such as myspace, wiki, podcasts, Second Life and Skype were rarely mentioned.

These findings, as well as further analysis on the ‘digital identity’ in the workplace, is published in a recent report by Australia’s Mailguard. The report is titled, Datacurve Report No. 1: Enterprise 2.0: Looking Inside Out

While the report’s emphasis is on the segmentation of employees based on how Internet active they are, and subsequently, the impact on productivity in the context of their responsibilities, there are some very unique insights into the workplace consumption of online media. The key point is that there is a higher intensity associated with digital content consumed in the workplace,  though this is shared by a relatively small number of publishers. In other words, once a news site, for example, embeds itself into the employee’s repertoire of daily ’surfing’, it is virtually locked-in over a relatively long period of time. Across an aggregated workplace audience, a publisher will experience higher averages for visitor frequency, page impressions and, consequently, session times.

Take www.news.com.au and www.smh.com.au as examples. In a typical month, their respective visitor frequency rates are approx. 9.2 and 10.9 (Nielsen Online). By comparison, the Datacurve project demonstrates that workplace-only frequency is 15 and 23 respectively (more than 50 percent higher in both cases).

The question remains: are AUS publishers securing day-part premiums which reflect this level of workplace engagement?

Now a group of researchers at China’s Zhejiang University are proposing that the typical contextually-based trigger of a topic word(s) be supplemented by a further trigger, namely a sentiment classification developed via a process of ‘opinion mining’. The proposal carries the acronym DASA, or Dissatisfaction-orientated Advertising based on Sentiment Analysis.

Sentiment-Assisted Ad Targeting

Once the topic words are extracted, the consumer’s sentiment on those extracted words is determined. The words used in a negative context are then chosen for advertising keyword selection. In other words, an ad is considered to be relevant to a Web page only if it is associated with the topic words towards which consumers have negative attitudes. The point of this exercise is to effectively ambush a brand which is experiencing negative sentiment with a competitor’s offer or message.

The research concluded that ad selection based on a DASA system delivered a more appropriate ad (i.e. more relevant offer or creative execution) almost twice as often as a system relying totally on keyword selection.

MySpace Music

An elegant piece of research from the University of California, by Judd Antin and Matthew Earp (2010), focused on MySpace Music and the ‘friendship’ practices of musicians. The study concludes that the more successful an artist, and the longer they have been an active member, the more likely they are to use a scarce resource like Top Friends to link to emerging music artists (friend down) as opposed to friending-up to other block-busters. There’s even a strong dose of value-based decision making going on when artists select their Top Friends.

The analysis concluded that up to 90% of the top 10% of successful artists (as evaluated in the context of MySpace Music using a combination of surface and network measures) would friend-down, with very few linking to either peers or artists more successful than themselves. Why? Part of the reason is that the risks of linking to an emerging artist are relatively low. Music substitution is unlikely, but the option to score a collaborative gig or recording session with a hot original artist working on the periphery keeps the ‘old guy’ on his toes and refreshes the brand.

What’s meshing here is a combination of pure altruism, the perception of credibility, reputation management and the very powerful dynamic called ‘competitive altruism’. This is a classic play on the conflict which dominates many discussions about contemporary art – authenticity and commercialism – but which has immense implications for any enterprise espousing the virtues of audience engagement.

Too often and too quickly an enterprise (and its agents) will single out ‘dialogue’ as the DNA of engagement, and if relatively sophisticated, will throw in some fragment of customer intelligence to round off the targeting argument. Yet in the case of this measured MySpace Music phenomena, the engagement process begins with a deliberate framework to support the development of ‘brand’ credibility and authenticity, not a superficial entanglement of links and friends to satisfy a project’s KPI.