New Tools Announced for Maximizing Social Impact of Advertising

NEW YORK, Oct. 3, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- In an era when many marketers are focused on tapping into social influence online, new tools for influencing offline conversations were unveiled today at Advertising Week by CBS, Nielsen, and word of mouth experts the Keller Fay Group.

Marketers across the nation are seeking to find ways to maximize word of mouth about their products and services, recognizing that a recommendation from a friend, colleague or relative is the most trusted form of communications.  Many turn to social media solutions as the engine to drive their social strategies, but Ed Keller of the Keller Fay Group and Dave Poltrack of CBS released new research at a gathering of marketers at Advertising Week in New York that challenges whether this is the best way for brands to reach today's more social consumer. 

According to research by the Keller Fay Group:

• There are 15 billion brand impressions each week in the US that are created via word of mouth.
• 90% of these conversations are driven by offline conversations, primarily face-to-face.
• Television ads are the #1 touchpoint for driving these word of mouth conversations out of more than 20 measured.
• Primetime television viewers are prolific talkers, with viewers of top rated shows such as American Idol, Modern Family, and Two and a Half Men engaging in 700 million or more brand conversations per week.

To help marketers take better advantage of the opportunity to use television to maximize the word of mouth impact of their advertising, Keller announced a new, innovative research initiative that combines television viewing measures from Nielsen's National People Meter, the ratings currency by which all television viewing is measured in the US; with word of mouth measures from Keller Fay's TalkTrack, the only continuous research initiative that measures both offline as well as online word of mouth.  The system also includes a segmentation created by CBS and Nielsen that segments consumers based on media consumption and lifestyles, rather than demographics, and is available to all Nielsen clients.  According to Poltrack and Keller, one of the segments – media trendsetters – stands out for its disproportionately large role in word of mouth and a heavy reliance on paid advertising for brand conversation content. 

"The numbers of conversations generated by the audiences of television shows is truly staggering, but these statistics are not generally familiar to most media planners because the data have not been available before.   The integration of these measurement systems will allow planners for the first time to optimize their media planning with word of mouth as a strategic objective," according to Ed Keller, who is CEO of Keller Fay Group and coauthor of The Face-to-Face Book:  Why Real Relationships Rule in a Digital Marketplace. 

According to Poltrack, who is Chief Research Officer of CBS, "For some time we have known that TV far outpaced social networking sites when it comes to both reach and engagement.  Now, the Keller Fay/Nielsen fusion provides the media industry with the data it needs to usher in a new era of media planning, one that properly understands and values the social impact of television."

About Keller Fay
The Keller Fay Group is the first full-service market research company focused exclusively on word of mouth (WOM) and brand advocacy. The firm's founders, Ed Keller and Brad Fay are coauthors of The Face -to- Face Book, "a celebration of the supremely social nature of all human beings and how that drives the consumer marketplace." Launched in the US in 2006 and the UK in 2011, Keller Fay's TalkTrack® program is the only continuous study of WOM in all channels (online and offline) designed to closely monitor and measure the marketing-relevant attributes of actual consumer conversations.  For further information about the Keller Fay Group, visit our website: www.kellerfay.com.  And, follow us on Facebook (www.facebook.com/kellerfay) and Twitter (www.twitter.com/kellerfay).

SOURCE The Keller Fay Group