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We are now living in a world where media consumption is shifting and people’s attitudes are growing more complex, because of that, agencies have been calling for a deeper, broader multi-market analysis. As a result, The Drum, a digital marketing agency news agency, spoke with Julian Newby of YouGov to learn more about the steps that have been taken to enable marketers to acquire a deeper, broader understanding of their audiences across the global market.
Brands are increasingly looking for high-quality audience intelligence to help them drive forward their international campaign planning. However, there is a rising dissatisfaction alongside this demand, which is that reliable, rich, and cost-effective customer data isn’t available in one location to achieve this.
Mastercard’s chief marketing officer and president of the World Federation of Advertisers, Raja Rajamannar, says in a recent interview with The Drum, “if you go out and spray advertisement and pray that people will respond, or that they will connect, that’s very inefficient for the marketers and annoying and irrelevant to the customers.
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YouGov has launched the Global Profiles to address this advertiser demand need. The new dataset aids businesses and their agency partners understand their global audiences. The Global Profiles Tool includes over 1,000 questions asked of respondents in 43 global markets, and provides a consistent picture of people’s views, sentiments, behaviors, and habits, allowing targeted campaigns and partnerships to have a greater impact across all media channels.
In a tough world where media consumption is shifting and people’s perspectives are becoming more complex, Julian Newby, global sector head of agencies and media at YouGov, discusses how businesses can acquire a deeper, broader understanding of their audiences across global markets.
With the debut of the Global Profiles Tool, how are you satisfying the needs of brands?
The feedback we’ve been getting is that there’s a lot of frustration in the marketplace due to the thinness of the global dataset available. Now we are offering something that will help to alleviate a lot of that frustration.
According to our agency partners, they love Profiles, our local market product, but found multi-market analysis more difficult. So we took a thousand questions, made them globally uniform where possible, and has everyone answer them to create a fully-squared dataset.
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What does the product add to the market that isn’t already there?
We took those thousand questions and turned them into a single product that is updated quarterly, has its own dashboard and interface, and is available in 43 countries. It’s large in comparison to previous offerings – three to four times the number of questions as the next rival using a completely global dataset.
People used to have a lot of options, but they didn’t have a lot of depth. We have a lot to give here. With what came previously, it was tough to obtain any insight, but this is big enough – you’ve got all the attitudinal questions, together with more than 150 pretty robust media questions.
Could you elaborate on the scope of these audience questions?
It is particularly strong in two areas. The first is attitudinal statements, which you’ll need to create sophisticated segmentations. Global Profiles has over 700 of them, covering everything from electric automobiles to the latest technology, travel, entertainment, and the environment.
Then there’s the question of media consumption, which we’ve fully overhauled. We collaborated closely with some of the major outlets to cover all of the major channels, as well as newer ones like music streaming and podcasts, and to raise tough questions about social media. We looked at key indicators including frequency, recency, and time spent across all channels, as well as device and format usage.
Will this have an impact on local markets as well?
Absolutely, one of the most intriguing aspects is that the respondents are also the backbone of our local markets. So if I’m a global marketer or an agency person generating an audience and audience and writing a beautiful multi-market strategy, which this tool is ideal for, I can then provide that exact audience to my local markets and they can copy it exactly since the dataset is the same.
Local markets may then combine it with the massive volumes of data in local profiled to give it texture and strength, feeding into the granularity of the publication, TV shows, and social media that people consume. That’s a very strong aspect.
The quality of customer data provided is a hot topic in the industry. What steps have you made to improve the quality of your work?
Any survey that takes more than 16 minutes to complete has a significant decline in respondent number and quality. So, in a YouGov-style manner, we’ve divided the questions into a total of 11, 15-minutes surveys. To be included in the dataset, people must answer all 11 questions, however, our method ensures that we obtain as many as possible completed with high quality as a metric.
Furthermore, having and maintaining a research panel of over 17 million people gives us a significant edge because we can devote a significant amount of time and effort to producing a high-quality product. In my opinion, no one else could have done this as well as YouGov has in terms of quality and care we’ve taken.
Global Profiles was also created in collaboration with our large agency partners, who have really helped to construct it in such a way that it might be highly valuable to them.
Finally, how are you making the Global Profiles Tool available to agencies and advertisers? Have you innovated in any way?
We normally sell to our local markets on an enterprise level. If you purchase Profiles as a client, you will only have to pay once, and everyone in your organization will be able to use it. However, with Global Profiles, we’re selling by the seat, if you buy a minimum of five, you can put them anywhere in the world. That’s a departure from our usual model which is more flexible and cost-effective, and it suits the need of global planning units within agencies and brands, which often operate out of two or three global hubs.
