Mass Minority launches brand measurement tool

Brett-Brent

Mass Minority CEO Brett Channer (left) and president Brent Rivard.

Mass Minority is making a platform that helps clients measure marketing effectiveness available on a subscription basis to other brands.

The agency’s Brand Attraction Monitor (BAM) allows clients to view how their communications are performing against those of chief competitors. It does so by measuring brand expenditures against metrics like consumer emotion and influence on in-market behaviours, creating a comparative brand attraction score.

BAM went into beta in September 2016, developed over three years by an agency team consisting of data scientists, analytics specialists and some outside mathematicians. To date, all of Mass Minority’s clients are using BAM except for Monster Mortgage, Asus and Parachute Accident prevention, and four additional customers have signed on under a subscription model.

Mass Minority-Introducing BAM- Brand Attraction Monitor

Mass Minority CEO Brett Channer says offering BAM on a monthly or quarterly subscription basis is meant to align with individual brand needs. Players in more fluid and fast-changing categories such as retail, grocery and fast-food are likely to be more interested in a monthly subscription, he says.

The underlying algorithm is now patent-pending in the U.S., Channer says. It’s one of three tech-based platforms, including its human values technology and brand mapping technology offerings, that the agency hopes can exist independently of the shop. “We want to make data as available to the market as possible, and we find that being attached to an agency makes that difficult.”

Since February 2015, Kantar has been working with ComScore on an offering similar to BAM in a few European markets. In January, Unilever announced its plans to lead the development of a similar cross-measurement tool with the backing of the World Federation of Advertisers, Google, Facebook and Twitter and support from Nielsen and Katar Media.

“Other major marketers, like Unilever, are declaring they are going to build a tool that measures performance across media channels to better understand their overall marketing efforts which will better inform their ROI,” Channer said in a release. “This is to announce, we’ve already built it and we’re using it in-market today.”

Over the next twelve months, Mass Minority will look to bring the offering to Europe, before expanding to Asia through a partnership at a later date.

Over time, it hopes to build out the platform even more, adding deeper geographical targeting, population data sets, as well as three to five psychochromatic data sets that would allow BAM to report on “universal beliefs in a category,” such as an overwhelming preference in a market for value over premium retail. In essence, brand would be informed if such demographic larger trends are impacting their individual brand rankings.

Mass Minority-Introducing BAM- Brand Attraction MonitorBAM currently incorporates data points from paid mass and digital media, social channels, sentiment scores, search, keyword and advocacy metrics. It shows how these specific data points affect one another in influencing the behaviour of the consumer in comparison to category norms and key competitors. It also comes with a custom sales monitoring plugin is also available on a per client basis.

Channer describes the work being done with BAM as the next step in Mass Minority’s development. He founded the agency in 2015 after noticing “a severe adjustment had to be had to get brands closer to consumers.” Since then, he says it has become focused on “bringing certainty to creative” through bridging the gap between creative work and big data (large, sweeping numbers representing broad trends) and small data (which track a brand’s day-to-day behaviour in the market).

“The closer you get to the big data and small data, the more accurate communication can become,” Channer says. “I actually think it frees the creative process up.”

Earlier this month, Mass Minority has struck a strategic partnership with Dynamic Mind, a tech-driven creative agency, to help accelerate the development of its digital and tech offerings. It has also made a number of recent hires, including Jack Perone as chief strategy officer in January.