What’s the Buzz?

Brand marketers eavesdrop on the Internet to track consumer trends. Cassandra goes online this month – and she’s not alone.

Trend Central, a Web site launching this month as a companion to research firm Youth Intelligence’s The Cassandra Report, is part of the newest wave in marketing research: online trend tracking. Savvy sites are using everything from teen chat rooms to customer complaints to take the consumer pulse on hot topics, then sell those insights to marketers. “The Internet is one of the world’s most powerful focus groups,” says Pete Blackshaw, ceo of Planet Feedback.

Customer relationship management is one element driving the trend. Marketers seeking more detailed information from individual consumers are realizing they can learn a lot just by eavesdropping online.

But synthesizing all those opinions is a lot of work, and that opens the door for sites to collect and collate millions of data points to determine which way the wind is blowing for a brand, a fad, or a particular audience.

Spending for online surveys and other research methods hit $254.8 million this year, up from just $3.5 million in 1996, according to industry newsletter Inside Research. However, the segment is still so new that no one has yet measured how much marketers spend just to observe Web surfers.

Some suggest online research will cannibalize traditional focus groups because it’s cheaper and faster to track consumer opinions online. “Marketers will end up spending far less on market research because the cost per transaction is much lower,” says Blackshaw, a Procter & Gamble veteran who helped set up P&G’s interactive marketing group.

Online trendspotters – outfits which act as “infomediaries” – go beyond consumer surveys. Sites watch what cybersurfers do, and listen in via bulletin boards and chat rooms, then aggregate their findings. PROMO put its ear to the rail to find a handful of such sites.

Trend Central Youth Intelligence, New York City, this month launches trendcentral.com with city guides, statistics, facts, and weekly updates on trends in lifestyle, entertainment, fashion, and technology. Data is gleaned from Cassandra surveys, Youth Intelligence’s Insider Network of observers in key industries, its 1,000 Trendsetter panel members, and other research not proprietary to the company’s clients.

Trend Central adds marketing implications to the macro- and micro-trend information found in The Cassandra Report, but doesn’t duplicate that four-year-old service, which has a $20,000-per-year price tag and about 40 subscribers. At $6,000 for an initial one-year subscription, “people who can’t afford Cassandra can afford [Trend Central],” says spokesperson Amanda Freeman.

Youth Intelligence built its reputation on Cassandra (named after the Greek figure whose visions of the future are not believed), a thrice-yearly survey of 300 trendsetters aged 14 to 30 in four cities: New York, Los Angeles, and two others considered hot at the moment. Phone surveys of 750 other youths nationally show what the mainstream is up to. Each report details trends and includes “lifestyle investigations” written by three survey respondents – complete with photos. (A macro-trend from April, 2000: “Group-ease,” the desire for Gen Y to belong to something, which is good news for brands – and cults.) Micro-trends are broken out by gender and age (14 to 18, 19 to 24, 25 to 30). An annual Brand Tracker gauges a brand’s coolness among hip kids. Youth Intelligence occasionally plays matchmaker between compatible brands.

Bolt.com Nearly all the content on this five-year-old site is written by its four million 15- to 20-year-old members. Upon registering, kids fill out a profile augmented by their on-site activities to slot them into one of five categories: Alphas, Alternatives (self-confident and rebellious), Achievers (education-driven), Assimilators (style-conscious followers), or Awkwards (“All our programmers at Bolt,” jokes ceo Dan Pelson).

Bolt tracks what members say on bulletin boards, in tag books, and during chats to spot trends among the five segments. The most influential, Alphas and Alternatives, also serve as “Modspotters” in focus groups and new-product tests.

There’s also Bolt Lab, 430,000 kids who opted in to answer surveys. The monthly Bolt Bus, for example, goes to 1,000-plus kids 13 to 19. Marketers pay a few thousand dollars per question. The company also does customized surveys that tap teens by segment, gender, ethnicity, or age.

“It sounds corny, but teens want people to know what they think,” says Pelson, adding that it doesn’t matter whether Bolt gives away T-shirts or gift certificates, because most kids “want to tell Coke what they think of the brand. They realize it’s market research, but they like to shape the way marketers talk to them.”

Bolt often overlays study results with general data extracted from the site. “Our team pores through the site to extract brand mentions,” Pelson says. “Sometimes we spur it on: `Hey, did you see this TV show? What do you think?’ The only way to get better information is to tap their phones.”

Marketers can simply buy data, but more often advertise or sponsor pages to tap the site’s equity among members. “We weave them into our relationship with teens,” Pelson says. In September, P&G signed a two-year deal for brands including Pringles, Pantene, Always, and Tampax to sponsor content. Pantene sponsors Hair Help, an advice bulletin board, while Tampax and Always host Fact or Fiction, answering questions on feminine health. P&G gets customized research as part of the deal.

Planetfeedback.com This 11-month-old site turns angst into insight: Planet Feedback helps consumers send letters of complaint or compliment to companies, then rates businesses based on the opinions of the letter writers. The service pools all letters for a rating database in 30-plus categories including airlines, restaurants, and telecommunications. Marketers get real-time reports on their brand, their category, adjacent categories, and competitors in a format similar to Information Resources, Inc.’s scanner-data reports.

“This gives marketers a tool for measuring word-of-mouth,” says Blackshaw, who left P&G to start up Planet Feedback a year ago. Marketers pay $25,000 to $150,000 for an annual subscription, depending on how much data they want. (Companies own the individual letters they get; Planet Feedback owns the aggregate data.) Subscribers get a formatted report as well as “report builder” software to tailor their analysis. They also get to see Planet Feedback’s huge “verbatim” database of comments consumers agree to share publicly.

The site has registered about 200,000 users and handles an average 1,500 letters daily. Blackshaw and his team began selling marketers in early December and “expect a busy first quarter,” he says. The site has handled projects for P&G, and ad agencies are using it to “get smart fast” for new-business pitches.

Financed by venture capital, Planet Feedback has turned down at least one investment offer from a marketer to protect its credibility as an objective third party. The company broke a $15 million ad campaign last October, when it also launched its first phone service in Milwaukee. (Consumers call 1-800-FEEDBACK and dictate a letter to an operator. It’s e-mailed or mailed, then resent in 30 days if the company doesn’t respond.)

Letter templates were upgraded last month to let consumers write to a specific brand instead of just the parent company. That refines data even more.

“Technology is redefining the feedback loop,” Blackshaw says. “In CRM, all feedback is gold. Marketers are just beginning to realize the opportunity to harness [it].”

About half the site’s letters are compliments. “Consumers are stereotyped as whiners,” Blackshaw says. “The Internet makes it easier for them to give positive feedback.”

Yahoo Buzz Index Yahoo leverages its dominance as a search engine with the Buzz Index, which launched in late September. The service ranks the most popular search subjects each day, listing leaders in music, movies, sports, and TV.

A subscription-only business site tracks 32 categories from education and religion to mobile devices and toys. Data is broken down by gender and age group (under 18, 18 to 34, 35 to 54, 55-plus). Marketers opt for daily, weekly, or monthly updates, and can set up personalized monitoring as well as campaigns that track demographics and other related information. Pepsi and barnesandnoble.com were among the first customers.

What’sHotNow.com Launched in April 2000 for the licensing industry, What’s Hot Now Exchange tracks both consumer and small-business owner interest in properties and brands as they shop for licensed goods in 280 “stores” for various lifestyle, entertainment, and sports brands including South Park, The X-Files, Alanis Morissette, MTV, and Comedy Central. (Marina del Rey, CA-based What’s Hot Now also brokers licensing deals.)

Shoppers are asked to vote for their favorite brands and properties, with results compiled for a Hot List updated four times per day. (Users can sort the list alphabetically, by rank, or by previous week’s results.) There are eight categories: movies, TV, sports, celebrities, Internet, toys and games, lifestyle, and music.

The site broke offline and online advertising last November encouraging consumers to come vote. Print ads in edgy magazines including Details and Stuff and postcards in 13 cities target trendsetters, whose votes earn them “Hot$” currency (at one Hot$ per vote) to spend on the site. Shoppers can vote up to 50 times per day and rank as many as 1,200 brands on a scale of one to 10. Both visitors and marketers can suggest brands to rank, and consumers earn additional Hot$ if their nominations fare well with other voters.

One final caveat on Cool: Make sure marketing messages ring true to the brand, not trends. As 17-year-old Alecia told Cassandra: “Whether the [self-image I’ve created] is accurate or invented, I figure the most a 17-year-old can do is admit that, whichever it is, I’m probably going to laugh about it in five years.”

How AT&T Wireless went from vanilla to Incubus. AT&T Wireless Services wanted to target young adults in one of its first forays outside parent AT&T’s mass-marketing initiatives. The idea was to pitch relevant products to tech-savvy users and engender ongoing product loyalty.

Trouble was, most consumers considered the brand “vanilla.” To reposition it as a hip technology leader among early adopters aged 18 to 24, New York City-based AT&T Wireless turned to music.

Parent AT&T had conducted traditional music sponsorships in the past, but “we needed something that wasn’t mainstream,” says Tina Hoffman, vp-account director at AT&T Wireless’s agency, Chicago-based Frankel. The company developed a two-pronged campaign featuring a series of Webcast concerts called the Artistdirect Acoustic Series and a six-city Artistdirect Ritual Expo tour.

Exclusive Acoustic Series concerts starring Beck, Foo Fighters, and Incubus aired October through December, supported by online ads and in-store P-O-P. Ritual Expo, which was expanded in 2000 from a Los Angeles-only show in ’99, brought cutting-edge fashion designers, artists, recording executives, and book publishers to L.A., Chicago, New York City, Boston, Seattle, and San Francisco.

As presenting sponsor, AT&T Wireless sampled products, gave away goody bags, and ran a Fly Away Contest sweeps awarding trips to the San Francisco show, PocketNet phones, and AT&T-logoed backpacks. Print, radio, outdoor, and online ads supported.

Early results show strong brand awareness: 1,400 viewers watched the Foo Fighters concert, and site traffic hit 165,000 unique visitors in the campaign’s first three weeks. Most importantly, AT&T Wireless got a halo of hip from three hot bands.

So how did a crew of forty-something marketing execs pull it off? Homework, homework, homework.

Frankel staffers immersed themselves in the 18-to-24 culture by reading magazines, talking with consumers, and consulting colleagues in the agency’s entertainment division. “I have two people on my team who are this age and others involved in the culture, so I let them be my conscience,” says creative director Elaine Love-Bragg. “Sometimes that was scary, but that’s what worked best.”

AT&T also relied on the judgement of partner Artistdirect.com, an online-only music company that links fans directly to emerging bands. The partner negotiated band contracts and executed both events. The mix of bands let AT&T test which performed best among the targeted early adopters while appealing to “different flavors of youth,” says Love-Bragg.

Tackling a new audience has changed the way Frankel pitches ideas, says Hoffman. “We explore the world for them and then say, `Here are the five trends that make the most sense.’ We made some risky recommendations. They get kudos for recognizing this as an opportunity to take some risks.”

“Being a good marketer allows us to not pretend we’re the consumer, but still recognize who they are and what motivates them,” Hoffman adds.

Spoken like a true voyeur.

Search engine peepholes

Ask Jeeves to Peek Through the Keyhole (askjeeves.com/docs/peek/)

byteSearch Agent 007 (bytesearch.com/cgi-bin/agent007.pl)

Epicurious Search Spy (epicurious.com/food_kwd/content.htm)

Excite Search Voyeur (excite.com/search/voyeur/)

Kanoodle.com Search Spy (kanoodle.com/spy/)

MetaCrawler MetaSpy (metaspy.com/)

SavvySnoop (search.com/snoop)

SearchLynx Recent Search Terms (searchlynx.com/cgi-bin/search/hsx.cgi? show=recent_searches)

Source: Yahoo Buzz Index