Audience Origin unlocks rich consumer and media insights in SA

GroupM, in collaboration with Wavemaker, Mediacom, and Mindshare, has launched its revolutionary data-driven audience product, Audience Origin, in 12 African markets including SA.

A first on the continent, Audience Origin connects different data sets to provide a deep understanding of consumer attitudes, preferences and behaviour, which can be used to inform local and regional market strategies.

As research in Africa is often limited and outdated, the data gap that Audience Origin fills is invaluable in helping organisations target their messages and communicate more efficiently and effectively.

How Audience Origin works

“The data landscape is constantly shifting and evolving. Consumer behaviour will continue to develop in unpredictable ways. To understand these changes better, we had to completely rethink how we collect audience data [when developing Audience Origin],” says Delia Condé, head of analytics & insights at Wavemaker.

“For Audience Origin to be successful, we needed to enable local market and client flexibility by moving from a single source to multiple sources of data, creating a 'global data spine' connected to local panel, digital and client data,” Condé explains.

“This approach is based on building up different layers of audience data and insight to meet global and local client needs.”

There are four layers to the Audience Origin global data spine:

1. Core survey

This is the globally consistent foundational layer that focuses only on the data that is hard to ascribe or to fuse, but essential for planning. This is the data that must be collected by asking people.

As Audience Origin is available in 74 markets globally, it can tap into a core data set comprising more than a million consumers, across 60 different categories, segmented into 18 different personality archetypes, covering 22 touchpoints and 48 attitudinal and lifestyle attributes.

2. Ascription

This is data that can be ascribed or modelled to everyone at the right level of accuracy if a proportion of the questionnaire is only asked to some people in the sample.

3. Fusion

This is the data that will be fused onto the core survey. This includes data sources that are locally relevant. For example, data from Fusion (an SA industry survey) or Target Group Index (TGI) data.

4. First-party data

This enables an enriched view of audiences as first party data (1PD), such as customer relationship management data, is connected.

“This audience data becomes the glue that connects strategy with activation,” says Condé. “An integral element of this is panel data, which lets us connect key components of audience insight at the individual level to link attitudes and demographics to media and category behaviour. In effect, this provides organisations with the ability to use more flexible local targeting solutions that support persona-based targeting or ID-based targeting.”

Along with SA, Audience Origin is available in these African markets: Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Uganda, Morocco, Egypt and Tunisia.

This article was paid for by Wavemaker.