Unruly / News / Unruly Launches Data-Driven Tool To Predict ‘Shareability’ Of Ads Before Launch

Unruly Launches Data-Driven Tool To Predict ‘Shareability’ Of Ads Before Launch

Powered by proprietary algorithm and in collaboration with leading academics, Unruly ShareRank cracks code for social video success.

LONDON, NEW YORK, PARIS, BERLIN, STOCKHOLM, — January 29, 2013 — Unruly, the award-winning global platform for social video advertising, today launches an algorithmic tool that allows advertisers to predict the ‘shareability’ of their video content, repeatedly and at scale, before it is even launched.

Unruly ShareRank™ allows advertisers to optimize their content marketing strategy by calculating the amount of earned media their videos are likely to attract across the social web and how much paid investment should be deployed.

Advertisers who use the predictive tool will gain insight into the psychological, social and content triggers that affect the success of their video content and, more importantly, they’ll know the word of mouth potential of their video before they spend anything on media.

The algorithm has been developed over 6 months at the Unruly Social Video Lab by our team of statisticians, who have mapped a variety of sources into one solution to predict social video success. These include:

  • Technology: The Unruly Viral Video Chart uses proprietary social tracking technology, which has been collating video sharing data for seven years and now stores data from over 300 billion video streams;
  • Academic research: Collaboration with leading academics, particularly Dr Karen Nelson-Field, of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, on the key variables that drive video sharing;
  • Consumer data: Analysis of thousands of consumer panel responses, measuring their emotional and social reactions and motivations to share video content.

Unruly ShareRank helps brands create contagious content and optimize their paid media distribution accordingly. Some of the world’s top advertisers and their agencies, including ZenithOptimedia, have been beta testing the product.

Sarah Debnam, head of digital planning worldwide at ZenithOptimedia, said: “With brands operating in an increasingly cluttered environment, it’s more important than ever to get cut-through. By using Unruly ShareRank, our clients will be able to optimize the earned media potential from their level of paid media investment.”

“It’s been a lot of fun collaborating with Unruly on the science of sharing. Predicting a social video hit is no longer about luck. Videos that elicit high intensity, positive emotions are three times more likely to be shared than videos that elicit low intensity, negative emotions. It means CMOs can now confidently predict the effectiveness of their content marketing investment,” said Dr Nelson-Field.

Unruly CTO and co-founder, Matt Cooke, added: “We are currently tracking over 2 million video shares each day. We have mapped this data to viewer responses to train the Unruly ShareRank algorithm, which is the only metric on the market to predict the shareability of a video based on seven years’ worth of video sharing data. Scrutinizing views is not enough – in a digital world, brands need to understand what drives consumers to engage with their content.”

Sarah Wood, Unruly COO and co-founder, said: “A wildly successful video ad is usually seen as a black swan, an outlier that’s unpredictable and unrepeatable. For leading brand marketers, discovering how to create and distribute highly shareable content, repeatedly and at scale, is at the top of their wish list. Unruly ShareRank does precisely this.”

With Nielsen finding that 92% of consumers trust peer recommendations (Global Trust in Advertising Survey) and research from McKinsey stating that “a high-impact recommendation from a trusted friend conveying a relevant message is up to 50 times more likely to trigger a purchase than a low recommendation”, Unruly ShareRank is a vital indicator of sales as well as word-of-mouth potential.

For more information about Unruly ShareRank, please visit: www.unrulymedia.com/svl.

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