Visible Intelligence Successes in Campaigns

Message Refinement

You know what’s good about your product. And you think you know what customers want. So you target your marketing and advertising to that place where your product’s strengths overlap with what you think customers want. But if you’re off the mark, your campaign might send entirely the wrong message.

Working with their ad agency, the client, Pace Salsa, wanted to make sure they got it right. So before launching a new ad campaign, they decided to get a better understanding of customers’ current attitudes about salsa. In particular, they wanted to know whether their ads were delivering the right message to customers.

Working with Visible®, Pace reviewed data culled from social media. They found out that “fresh” was the most important word associated with salsa, and that “out of a jar” had negative connotations—it was a derogatory term in the salsa world. As a result of this insight, Pace changed the way it talked about salsa to use the terms its customers use. Pace also changed its ad to finish with an image of a bowl of salsa and chips, rather than a jar. Now, that’s the right message.

Optimized Ad Spend

You know the expression “the left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing?” Well, a major wireless carrier noticed that one of its handsets seemed to be really popular—it was moving well online and in the stores. And there seemed to be a lot of online buzz about it. So they asked their agency to come up with a campaign to promote the handset for the Christmas season.

The agency was using Visible and realized that the online conversation around the handset had to do with lack of availability. That’s right: people wanted the phone, but there weren’t any in stock—not online, not in the stores. So there was a lot of talk—but not the kind that meant that more promotion was a good thing. An ad campaign for a popular, but unavailable, phone would have made things worse.

The result? The company used its holiday ad dollars to promote a phone that it did have in stock. And it was educated about the disconnect between supply and demand.

Social Buzz & Feedback

A major auto manufacturer was set to unveil a new car at the prestigious L.A. Auto Show. The look of the new car was a closely guarded secret.

The manufacturer’s agency had carefully developed a campaign to promote the car. Campaign assets included—among other things—a video. The beginning of the campaign was to coincide with the unveiling of the car at the auto show.

But someone outside the U.S. released the video a week early, and this gave the agency an opportunity to gather valuable feedback before the actual launch. Working with Visible to monitor the buzz on social media platforms, the agency heard that people didn’t like the video. More specifically, they weren’t happy with the fact that the video didn’t contain any images of the car. Using what they learned from the social media chatter, the agency was able to edit the video and other campaign assets ahead of the auto show.

The early release of the video had given the agency a chance to test the waters and adjust the campaign. They continued to monitor the buzz during and after the auto show. And, they learned some things about how to optimize for future campaigns.