Unruly ties up with MediaCom for its Cultural Connections Research Data

MediaCom has partnered with video ad tech company Unruly to provide the News Corp-owned company with unprecedented insights into differing cultural preferences of consumers around the world.

Access to the agency’s proprietary ‘Cultural Connections’ research – which defines culture quantitatively for the first time – will allow Unruly to build on the data and insight from its existing tools to gain a better understanding of why video content resonates in some markets and not others. Additionally, it will allow the potential for video specialists to predict which additional markets advertisers should be targeting to maximise the impact of their content.

Such insight has become increasingly critical at a time when brands expect messages and campaigns to travel far more widely than in the past.

Cultural Connections data will enable Unruly to provide a clear explanation of the underlying cultural expectations and attitudes in any given market, allowing it to advise clients how to adapt video content for maximum effectiveness at the pre-testing stage and inform advertisers’ distribution strategies by market.

Unruly will also incorporate the cultural insight into its first-party data segments, meaning advertisers will be able to target individuals within a specific territory that are more likely to have a cultural affinity with their video content through cultural private marketplaces (PMPs).

Unruly will officially launch its new offering across APAC next month, before rolling it out across Europe and the US later in the year.

MediaCom launched the Cultural Connections research project in 2016, working with The Hofstede Centre to create the first 21st century database of the cultural dimensions that change response to brands and brand content around the world.

Ian Forrester, Global SVP, Insight at Unruly, said, “Unruly has been tracking the different cultural responses to video advertising around the world for years through our content testing tool Unruly EQ and trends platform Unruly Pulse.”

“However, this new partnership with MediaCom takes this insight to another level. For the first time, we have the capacity to provide an objective and quantitative explanation for the differences we’ve observed between markets.”

The study is based on interviews with more than 60,000 consumers in 52 countries around the world. MediaCom has exclusive rights to apply the new data and develop client benefits in the field of marketing communications.

He added, “Not only will it give our clients access to totally unique and ground-breaking data that will increase the effectiveness of their video campaigns around the world, it will also streamline our testing processes. While before we would need to test a video in each market to establish whether it would resonate in a territory, access to this new data source will mean we only need to perform one test to measure its impact across a number of different markets, making it the quickest way for brands to know where their ads will fly and where they will flop.”

Unruly gets videos seen, shared and loved across the open web for brands that want to move people, not just reach people. Unruly has a decade’s data of consumer responses to video and uses that to hone content, model audiences and deploy ad dollars in ways that heighten emotional response and maximise brand impact. Unruly was founded in 2006 and acquired by News Corp in 2015. With 300 Unrulies across 20 locations worldwide, their super power is emotional intelligence and secret weapon is passionate people on a mission to #DeliverWow.

Pinaki Dutt, Global Head of Applied Connected Intelligence at MediaCom, said, “We’re thrilled that, like us, Unruly has seen the unique insight of cultural understanding as a way of making brand content more powerful and more effective. This partnership is a validation of the application of our Cultural Connections study and its new dimensions for explaining differences between markets around the world.”

Matt Mee, Global Chief Strategy Officer at MediaCom, said, “Cultural Connections has been a key element in MediaCom’s planning process since the data was analysed and it’s helped our teams build more effective campaigns and our clients benefit from more powerful messages. We’ve generated powerful insights and seen new opportunities for transferring content and strategy between disparate markets and we are delighted to have Unruly on board, to reap similar benefits for their own clients.”

Info@BestMediaInfo.com