The Inside
After the launch of Emap Advertising’s new research panel, Richard Fero, insight manager for marketing at Emap Advertising, explains how invaluable consumer findings were revealed through polling more than 10,000 respondents…
As anyone who conducts research will tell you, technological developments have meant that the rate of change in our markets has accelerated. Our business is built on high quality insight; we need it to help develop our products, and we also use it to help advertisers better understand their target markets.
The acceleration of change means that for us to continue to supply our advertisers and agencies with cutting-edge consumer insight it is necessary to have a faster moving, more reactive insight capability. To address this need we have set up an insight panel using our brands to recruit 10,000 consumers from a wide range of backgrounds. This gives us an incredibly powerful research resource, which enables us to track consumer attitudes in a far more responsive way than was previously possible.
Our first topic of enquiry, naturally, was to investigate the very sorts of technological developments which have both made it necessary and possible. All traditional media businesses, including ours, are thinking hard about how we move forward given how consumers are reacting to, and within these new spaces. One of the topics for investigation was the rise of the blogosphere – we’ve all been reading about the power of this new form of communication, but exactly who is looking at these blogs, and how often are they doing it?
The first thing we found out from our survey was that reading blogs was not a niche activity among our consumers – just over half of the respondents had read blogs, and of those who read them, most read them about once a week or more. Even when allowances are made for the biases implied in an online panel, this is still a huge figure, and tells us that the rise of the blog cannot be ignored. However, our research also told us that consumers are reluctant to trust bloggers – 61% of respondents said that they take what bloggers say with caution, and only 13% of the respondents said that they necessarily trust the information contained within them. Whilst people enjoy reading blogs for entertainment and information, there is still a need for trusted voices with real authority – a role which we believe our brands are in a great position to play.
This “trust deficit” seems to be characteristic of many people’s interactions in the online world – many of us are still nervous of giving credit card details over the web. We also found it reappearing when we looked at the world of social networking websites – only 14% of our respondents said they fully trusted other members of these sites. That isn’t to say that people aren’t embracing these websites – over half of the respondents in our research had visited social networking sites, and of those who visited them, 60% visited them at least once a week. What this shows is that although people enjoy these environments, they are still cautious when within them. Another interesting finding is that women are just as likely as men to have used these social networking sites, in fact they are more likely to be heavy users (using them everyday) than men. So what does this say to advertisers? Well, given that this problem with trust exists, advertisers need to consider carefully the channels they use in the online space – there are many exciting opportunities out there, but advertisers need to think about how they build credibility for their brands.
The rise of user-generated content on the web was a further area of investigation, and one major finding was that unlike the world of social networking sites, in the area of UGC it was men who were leading the way. Consumers were asked about their usage of sites like YouTube, where consumers can upload content to the web, and the data shows that 75% of men had visited these sites, whereas the figure for women was only 52%. It is interesting to note the gender gap here – women are embracing those areas of the web which help them interact with their social groups, whereas men are more likely to spend time on the web hunting for cool content – a more solo activity.
It was also important to us to get a gauge on what consumers thought about advertisers intruding into these new areas – do they accept advertisers placing content on sites like YouTube for example? What we found was that the rules of engagement in cyberspace are much the same as they are in the real world. That is to say, only 19% said that they resent it when big companies place content on these sites, and over half (54%) said that they don’t mind it as long as the content is good. To say that advertisers can provide content in these new spaces, but that they have to be careful to give something that has real value, isn’t new – it is what good advertisers have long realised to be the case in more traditional media too.