Sign up for the Alpha of NextStage Advertising Intelligence – NSAI

It’s with great joy that I can announce the launch of the first NextStage product: NextStage Advertising Intelligence (NSAI), the product will be ready for you to use in about a month or so. We’re looking for companies interested in using our tool and provide us feed-back in exchange.

But before I explain you how you can become one of the lucky first companies that will use our tool let me tell you what you can expect:

NextStage Advertising Intelligence (NSAI) tool looks at any electronic information – a webpage, an email, a document, a press release, a marketing campaign, a print ad, … – and determines the “best fit” audience segment for that information.

NSAI provides five basic reports; Age Appeal, Gender Appeal, Clarity, Message Comprehension and Target Market Profile. NSAI analyzes material against a backdrop of over 250,000 “Rich Personae” (NextStage uses also the term “synthetic users”). These rich personae or synthetic users vary in age from 15-85yo, Male and Female, high school through post doctoral education, low to high level income. These 250,000 synthetic users are based on over 20 years of study and research on how different demographic groups interact with information. Common uses of NSAI include

• Before and After “audience engagement”snapshots of changes to websites, emails, press releases.
• A comparison tool between competitive websites (for example) to learn what works and what doesn’t.
• A design tool during media development to insure matching layout and content to the desired market.
• Fine tuning existing media presentations to improve performance (sales, click-throughs, repeat visitors, etc)

NSAI in its Alpha version consists of the following five elements:

1) Age Appeal: a measure of which age groups will find the overall presentation of your material attractive and what percentage of each age group will be attracted. Note that finding something attractive is not the same as liking something. People are attracted to traffic accidents but few people would want to take part in one. Information can be appealing because it’s genuinely engaging or because it’s so horrific people can’t pull themselves away.

The examples presented in this post are from the test of a web page design.  The image of the layout was uploaded into our systems and we created some graphs in Excel with the data that the prototype of NextStage Advertising Intelligence provided us with.

In the Age appeal report you’ll notice  that the people under 45 seem to be attracted by the tested design.

2) Message Clarity: a measure of which age groups will be able to readily understand your material. Note that understanding something is not the same as being able to make use of something. Someone may understand the sentence “Anthony is a pretty boy” but not be able to make use of it unless they know Anthony is a parrot and the sentence is how Anthony asks for a peanut.

We see that the tested design will be understandable by people between 20 and 44 years old.

3) Message Comprehension: a measure of which age groups will be able to use the messages conveyed by your material. Comprehension usually requires the ability to relate previously or otherwise known information with the immediate information to synthesize new information or perform a desired action. An example of Comprehension would be someone having done research into competitive products and realizing your price, product, service, guarantee, etc., are better and therefore your product or service is the one they should purchase or invest in.

In  the presented example we see that the younger audience will comprehend the message conveyed by the design.  The older audience (over 35 years old) will have difficulties and we can assume that will have a higher bounce rate and will be less satisfied by the website design, thus the website itself.

4) Gender Appeal: a measure of how well your material appeals to each gender as a percentage of viewing population.

As we clearly identify in the screenshot presented.  The website design analyzed will specially be appealing to females which was the intention in this case.

Let’s focus on the four reports examples that we’ve just provided.  In this case, our customer wanted to target young females, preferably under 25.  We see in the graphs presented, that regarding gender they are well on spot, the same can be said to the attraction that the design will perform upon their target audience and the comprehension of the conveyed message.  But if you look at the clarity report, you’ll see that some optimization can be done.  We’ve thus made some simple recommendations to improve this, in this case, we suggested changing the position of certain elements in the design to increase the clarity to the under 25 years old.

5) Target Market Profile: Our technology understands several thousands of personality traits and personality types, what we call “Rich Personae”. These different personality traits and types interact with information differently.  NSAI compares and contrasts its database of some 250,000 personality traits and types to determine which types of people would interact most favorably with the tested material. These “Rich Personae” become thus the tested material’s target market profile(s), meaning these are the types of people who’ll respond most favorably to the message’s presentation.  We categorize these rich personae by a letter and a number, but you can call them Pete or Mary if you prefer.  Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about.

In a test that we have done recently with NSAI gave us as best target audience the rich personae K23 and K15.  NSAI gave us also what were the characteristics of these two types synthetic users:

• prefer to experience something firsthand
• prefer to have things demonstrated to them only after they’ve demonstrated that they can handle the basics (imagine someone who will only take Drivers Ed after they’ve driven a car a little bit)
• will listen to a discussion or explanation usually to determine when the speaker/teacher makes a mistake (according to their own experience, as described above)
• will learn most quickly if the experience mentioned above results in an uncomfortable or undesirable outcome
• tend to ignore positive-based information as either unreal or unsubstantiated
• will intuitively decide negative-based information is “real” and/or “what actually happened”
• have a poor sense of time or involvement
• have no, little or a poor concept of time and/or process, and are rarely aware of what’s involved in getting something done
• pay little to no attention to arguments, strategies or plans which reference or rely on specific, time-based events
• are more likely to be swayed by arguments, strategies or plans which reference general and/or on-going events (events which have remained fairly stable over time, like the sun always rises in the morning)
• often fail at time-based tasks such as time-lines and project plans, and have little use for project management
• create a strong inner focus on what interests them
• tend to have a “this is as good as it gets” attitude and “this” isn’t too good
• long-lasting decisions and learnings will be made based on an overall sense of what to avoid
• are unaffected by appeals to past or future events, regardless if they reference rewards or punishments
• base decisions on immediate experience and tend to be negative in nature
• are attracted to and will focus on demonstrations of problems or difficulties

So this is what you can expect in the alpha version of NSAI, but there will be more.

We’re preparing other insights that will be added to NextStage Advertising Intelligence in the future, among them, recommendations.  One of the reasons we’re looking for testers at this stage is to help us fine tune our recommendations capabilities thanks to their feedback.  We have used our tool for recently for a top 500 company before the launch of a new campaign website that will be released in over 30 localized versions worldwide. On top of the current NSAI reports listed above, we also provided with recommendations based on our technology and the customer told us when he read the recommendations:

We received the NSAI Analysis on a proposed redesign of a major web 2.0 web-initiative. The result was:

• easy to understand reports
• very valuable and clear suggestions for possible optimizations
• last but not least it was proving that we were on the right track regarding the design strategy for the specific target audience. But now we know how to be even better!

How can you be one the first to test this out?

You just need to send me an email or use the contact form explaining what material (or type of material if it hasn’t been created yet) you would like to analyze.

Need some examples of why should you use NSAI? It can help you decide among different options: imagine that you’re preparing a new website or a new print ad and that your agency has provided you with 3 different proposals, NSAI can help you to determine which one will best fit your target audience.  You can also use NSAI as a kind of ‘audit’ tool to check if your marketing materials are designed for your target audience.  Recently, I was having a discussion with somebody and he said that in the Internet designs were made by 20-40 years old and that often weren’t really appealing to baby-boomers, this is something that you can easily check with NSAI.  So what are you waiting?

We will be accepting 25 Alpha Testers.  Each tester will be able to use NSAI and get the reports of 5 different materials.  As stated, we’ll only ask you some questions after you’ve used the tool.  If after that, you want to continue using the tool during the alpha period, it will cost you only 49$ per usage.  NSAI during his alpha period will only be available to these 25 testers.

Looking forward hearing from you.

Cheers,

René

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