comScore, Inc. (SCOR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us for today's webinar, Social Media Tune-Up: Best Practices in 2022. My name is Farina, and I'll be your moderator for today's webinar. Before we begin, we'd like to review a few housekeeping points. Due to the large number of attendees, all attendees have been placed on mute. [Operator Instructions] Also to note, we sent a follow-up e-mail with a link to today's presentation to all attendees over the next 3 business days and will also be available for download on comscore.com. Our first speaker today is Jason Clough, Director of Client Insight at comScore. He has spent the last 5 years working with some of the largest brands and publishers across the CPG in media and entertainment verticals, turning partner dreams into action. Previously, he spent 17 years running digital content teams in the local news industry from Boston down to Tampa. Our next speaker is comScore's Senior Director of Partner Insights, Danan Ren. Danan Ren leads the client success team on all things social. She loves partnering with clients to help them craft and execute the best strategies for reaching and engaging their audience. Previously, she spent over 10 years on the brand marketing side, working on household names in the CPG and BD spaces. And with that, I'll pass it over to our first speaker, Jason Clough.

Thanks, Farina. Thanks, everyone, for joining us today. We have an action-packed half hour today and a lot to get through. I'm thrilled to be here with Danan, who I have the privilege and honor of working alongside each and every day. And I think it's a gift when you get to work with people that you love, data that you love. And hopefully, by the end of this call, you will all become a part of our extended family as well. Today, we're going to cover a lot of different topics, everything around social media strategies, those fundamentals to measuring the holistic space. We are in a state of flux. Post-COVID, post-pandemic, we're seeing a lot of shifts in the overall consumer behavior patterns that are happening out there. And understanding how to sort of give your social media strategy, that oil change and tune-up could not come at a more important time. We'll explore the powers of storytelling and what your brand's audience is looking for, the things that you should be thinking about as you go to market, whether it be in your content strategies or in your marketing efforts out in the larger ad space. We'll dive into some of the ways in which data is being used these days through partnership opportunities, and we'll even give you some tips and tricks sprinkled throughout the webinar to help give you some framework ideas for success and supercharging your social. So if you're looking for those, they won't all come at once. You'll have to stay with us all the way through the end. Lastly, we'll talk about understanding your audience. This is a time where remaining relevant and connected to your consumers is so critically important. I'd like to begin with a quick poll that the team is going to pull up for you on the screen. And as we were building this, we sort of wanted to understand what are the priorities that you're thinking about as you think about social in 2022 and even beyond. How are you thinking about that strategy? And what sort of things are out there for you to prioritize around? Is it around making money? Is it the branded content space? For the publishers on the phone, is it to drive tune-in? For the non-publishers on the space, is it just get them to live streams to sort of use that video creative vertical to get to them? Driving to your website or your monetized website traffic to be able to then further build that loyalty down funnel. Is it to engage with current consumers or to reach new audiences? So we'll give you a quick few seconds just to roll through that. Shouldn't take you more than just a moment to do. And then our fabulous marketing team is going to reveal the results, which is always fun for Danan and I, because we never know what everyone is going to say. We all have our hypotheses. Danan, I say, I think the biggest challenge right now is really 2 things. I think it's about driving the organic engagements to reach current consumers as well as new consumers. I think downstream of that, we get into the monetization space. What do you think the answer is going to be?

Yes. I think one of the key questions right now that I've seen from a lot of brands is we have an audience, how do we continue to engage them, get them to come back and get them to share the word about the brand, creating that virality, creating that sense of community, and ultimately, creating those brand influencers. So I think really excited to see the results, say no doubt all of these are pretty much burning questions.

I feel like this is the drumroll moment. Marvelous marketing team. What does the survey say? All right. All right. We're right on the money. They're driving traffic to the websites, so sort of using it as a vehicle to deepen that funnel. Net-net split between engaging current consumers and reaching new audiences. All right. Very cool. I will tell you that, if I may, I believe that 2022 from our side is actually about the bottom 2 buckets here: the reaching new audiences and connecting and engaging with the current ones. And hopefully, by the end of this webinar, you'll see why that's so critically important because it will ultimately be the reason that we get to your #1 answer, which is the being able to sort of move them downstream into your monetized websites. Thank you, everyone, for taking part in that. That's fun. Let me give you just a quick brief introduction to the Shareablee data sets. I think it's always good for those of you who know us. You're like, "Hey, I know this." But for those that don't, our pure bread goal here is to be able to say, how do we create data that is currency in the marketplace help brands, publishers, advertising agencies really just connect better with the customers and move them down that funnel towards the commerce side. At the end of the day, everybody wants to be relevant. Everybody wants to be meaningful. But in order to get there, we have to sort of have a strategy to do that. And that's really where the data comes in. It's the purest most unself-conscious data set that exists out in the space, but it's also because it's the largest. 15 million, now closing in on 20 million brands, publishers and influencers that we have under continuous management and measurement 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It's unmatched in the space. And the great news is, is that there's no setup, right? So as our clients come on board, they already have access to this large depth and breadth of a database that can look at everything from automotive and telecommunications down to travel and leisure and M&A. One of the things that Danan and I get asked almost every single day is how do people use your data. This is designed to give you sort of a 360-degree view of what that looks like. Some of our clients will use us for the competitive intelligence, holistically reporting in that cross-platform environment. Some folks will use us for sentiment and total analysis to understand the impact that, that content has on your audience. Some people will use the data for partnerships and influencer identification, who should they be working with. To Danan's point, it's about understanding who that audience is. So are these the new people that we're just starting to get into the funnel? Or are we returning engagers? And then how do we build upon that? How do we unearth who that sort of almost silhouette of a person is that we call the engager behind the scenes that gets you into some of the persona stuff? We're going to try and cover off all of it today. But the good news is the data that you see in the platform and that we talk about today is covered in some of these most powerful tool sets out there. From power rankings to partnership explore, to helping you sort of de-risk your campaigns, affinity data that is cross-platform and allows you to understand where your audience is in the space, it just keeps getting better in terms of what the data can tell us. Why is all of this so important? If I had a [ $0.05 ] for every time that I got an e-mail that said, "Hey, social is dying." I assure you I would be on a yacht in the Caribbean enjoying the beautiful sun. But the reality is, it's not. In fact, it's growing. If I just look at the core platforms, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, the number of people, the fans and followers actually grew from COVID to post-COVID, so you're looking at 2020 versus 2021, and it grew about 16%. So oftentimes, we sort of go, where is that? We're seeing the biggest growth still surging on Instagram and Facebook, Twitter taking up a smaller piece of the pie but still very much in the space. I mean these numbers have been pretty consistent through the years as we've sort of grown. So if it's a big space and it's growing, then does it matter? The answer is, yes, it does. The majority of the people, nearly 90%, so almost all of us that are on social, are consuming content at least once a week. Many people, if you start looking at heavy, medium and light propensities on these social platforms, are on social daily and multiple times a day. This is a highly connected on-the-go audience. 74% of people, though, that were part of a dynamics panel that we ran just recently, said that they are very or somewhat likely to check out a brand social media page when looking for a new product. This is super important because that means that social becomes the first and probably a critical component to brand discovery. For the publishers on the call, for the linear folks on the call, it's actually also the way that they're discovering new shows and series that they're consuming as well. Social is that first touch. The great news for the marketers, the advertisers, and most importantly, the ad agencies on today's call is that more than half -- this is the highest number that we've seen through the years, are more likely to actually try out products once they see them as part of branded integrations, part of influencer activations on social media. Here's the rub. In a post-pandemic world, it's all up for grabs. Market share, particularly from retail and CPG, is most assuredly going through an evolution, whether that be from limitations of what was available on store shelves, product pipelines, worker shortages and trying to get physicians filled. The fact of the matter is that a majority of people are trying new brands and that 73% of them actually found the brand equal to or better than sort of that stable legacy brand that they'd always been using. So when we think about this, this is critical to them because then social becomes ever more important to being able to discover new consumers. And it's really important because there's really 3 verticals that control the lion's share of all the engagement that we spend our time with on social. M&E, media and entertainment, publishing and sports and recreation command north of 85%, now pushing upwards of 88% of all the social engagement in 2021. As a result, everybody else, all of the automotive brands, the CPG brands, the retail brands, they're all equaling roughly 12% of the space. Tune-up tip #1 is evaluate your platforms. I cannot stress this enough. This is an actual data from an actual user from data in the platform. And if you think about it, what we're looking at is the audience, the amount of content that we put out and where we get our return for investing on that, right? 70% of this particular brand's audience is on Facebook, if they only get 50% of the content. But look at Twitter. 20% of the audience gets 28% -- almost 1/3 of all of the content and nets them less than 2% of all their engagement. So are you targeting the right customers? Are you prioritizing the right platforms? Are you optimizing the content on them? And are you monitoring engagement rates for each platform? The ER is one of Danan's favorite metrics, but don't tell her I told you that. And best of all, are you posting at the right time of day, right? This is an area where, because we're now working from home, people are in a still not in real life scenario. How were lives have become more flexible? Being able to sort of see that there's a shift. Traditionally, we would see nighttime engagement really, really high. But instead, what we're seeing now is actually a surge towards the midday, that 12:00 to 4:00 zone when we're all on and connected as part of our daily job. My suggestion to you as part of this tune-up is to evaluate where the hot zones are for your brand, for your publisher to make sure that you're putting up the content at the right time to maximize engagement. The great part is, is that you can actually use this from a competitive standpoint as well because all of a sudden then if you see that a competitive or an aspirational audience is active at different hours or different times of the day or even different days of the week, you can use that intelligence to create marketing, make the switch type conversations that go after those competitive eyeballs and help you increase market share. Part of being able to do that is knowing the persona of your audience. And what we've generally found? Now this isn't to say that it's everybody 100%, but generally and directionally what we've seen through this last 1.5 years is that there is a split between, if you look at all the content, 2 kind of key pillars. The stuff that's intelligent, that informs you, that drives awareness around either a particular event or a particular influencer or a particular news coverage, something like that. The other is sort of the funner and lighter side of social media, which is sort of the things that make us laugh, the things that make us realize that before we go to bed that we'll wake up tomorrow, and the world will still be okay regardless of all the problems that may be going on in the news or around the world. And when we look at that, generally speaking, the females will look for the useful and resourceful information. The men will look for more of the lighthearted, need a break from the current focus sort of narrative, whereas the usefulness was not as necessarily high and important for them. When we look at this through the CPG lens and the retail brands, for instance, and we look at this from -- for the ad agency folks on today's call, like, why do you engage with these brands on social? 64% of Gen Z are purchasing items online weekly. That means from a social perspective, they are superactive, super engaged, and they are highly connected. And they're doing that with brands on an everyday basis. But this is about community. They want to share that experience. They want to see the opinions of others and what they think about the products. They want something that's going to spark a curiosity, and they don't necessarily always want to have to visit a store. Remember, this is that connected audience that can, quite frankly, order online and have it shipped to their house. It's one of the reasons why, in 2021, we actually created these data-driven personas because clients kept asking us, "Who are these people?" We talk about the big numbers, the big actions, the biggest shares. But who are they? What do they do? Here's an example that we blinded for the purposes of today's webinar where we can actually look in at this, in this case, brand and understand who are these people that they are over-indexing with? Are they more likely to be new parents, for instance? Are they likely to be pro home cooks, people that are looking for potentially recipes or things that they might do as maybe even potentially stay-at-home? And on the right, we shouldn't be able to dive into some of those personas and go, well, then what brands are they spending their time with on social and actively engaging the content on? In other words, that these brands stop the social scroll enough to be able to get them to engage with that content. Knowing this can now help you inform not only your marketing strategies, but it can also help you with your content creation. And from that, you then create this knowledge portal of the thematic, the writing style, the personality, the tone and the tenor of your creative and what will then mimic or emulate the things that people are already doing. It's one of the reasons why also that social listening space is important. One of the things that we started to see then is the ability to benchmark some of the conversations and the chatter that are going along. This is an example of just 2 or 3 different shows that we looked at in advance of today's webinar for the publishers on our call today. And what you're starting to then understand is what parts of the creative are driving that owned engagement that's out there that ultimately could become informative to your organic strategies, all things to think about as we get there. And why? Because online shopping is surging. How we consume and engage with these brands online are critically important, most critical in the millennial pocket, the 25- to 44-year-olds, where, generally speaking, they're purchasing items online on fairly -- at least a weekly basis, but in many cases, multiple times a week and having those items ship directly to them. One of the other things that we get asked a lot is around what stops the social score. We're getting it with so much content every day. And we actually are consuming and engaging with it more than ever before, but algorithms across the social platforms play a key driver in that. So they're looking for signals, those engagements, those likes, those shares, those comments and video views and click-throughs to try and understand how many people we should show this creative to. The things that overwhelmingly jump out are short and sweet catchy grabbing headlines. Get to the point, this is the marketer's dream. Tell me the key elements of this in 5 to 7 words, or as Danan would say, in 3 seconds. If I only had 3 seconds to get you, how would I grab everybody and pull you into this webinar and say, "You have to be here." I would say my 3 seconds are, I want to make a difference, okay? The first few seconds of those videos are incredibly important. We see this time and time again across the base where you'll have a 30- or a 40-second clip. The first 10 seconds are just sort of idle video and creative. And what happens then is we're seeing the drop-off rates steep as people go, I don't know what this is about. I'm moving on. They want to know that other people are engaging with it, and they want to know that they can trust and care about that content as well. Short-form content has most assuredly risen in the pandemic. This is driven by Reels, IG Stories, TikTok, all of it now vying for creating more content that we can engage with in a shorter amount of time. That doesn't mean that everything else should fall away. But overwhelmingly, you should be thinking about how can I spend just 1 minute with my consumers, my engagers in order to create a moment with them. And the reality is, is that there's a lot to consider as part of your marketing plan. Particularly for the brands out there, we have to evaluate the fact that people are holding all of us to a higher standard, brands and publishers alike. Sustainability around packaging, critically important, more than half. And more than half of the shoppers out there right now in a post-pandemic world agree that they're more likely to purchase some products that take social stances. This was an enigma. This was the don't do it. It was the #1 thing in every playbook pre-COVID. Now the data shows -- and we've got additional slides that we just couldn't even get into today's webinar. Happy to share them with you post this particular time frame, though, that we can actually dig into it and show that it's the younger generations that are holding those brands to the higher stance and that the negative repercussions from it are only if you get it wrong, if you're not authentic, if you're not genuine and if you're not consistently driving that message through, which means we have to come to this critical moment in the marketing funnel that changes how we do things, and that's where Danan is going to come. Danan?

Thank you, Jason. So everything is about the consumer. Where will social be without an audience, without a consumer? And the beauty of social is it enables us to reach a new audience, engage with our audience and then get them to come back and become a true brand ambassador and create that influencer index stream of influencer. So make sure you show up the right way. Here, you can see there's a marketing funnel, and it goes all the way from awareness through the retention. Your first touch point and the aha moment, that 0 moment of truth with the consumer is likely going to be on social. So make sure you show up the right way and make a great impression. Then as you walk that audience deeper down the marketing funnel through consideration, conversion and retention, that's where engagement comes in. You want them to come back for a second touch point, a third, a fourth before you finally convert them and then get them to come back for a second trip. All right. So now that you know about engagement, why did engage matter? And how can we move from simply viewing to engaging and walking them from that conversion to consideration to final purchase? So fans and followers, everyone knows what they are. We want to move that metric from simply being a fan or a follower to being an engaged audience, someone the minute you post on social, they like, comment, they take any action on the post. Total action. You can get to -- I'll just throw a number out there -- 100 actions or engagements through 100 posts. Or what about if you could get to those same actions with a single post? So driving that engagement efficiency. Impression. We want to move from simply, okay, I can purchase an impression to driving engagement, which takes into account how large you're following it and how engaging a single post that you created. So we're going to move the needle from simply being passive to being an active engager with your content. Okay. So let me talk about engagement. How do we measure that? We had a proprietary metric, it's called a uniquely engaged audience. And the way I'd like to explain it is this. If I am in your audience and I hit like 5x, do I count as 1 person or do I count as 5? It only count as 1. So we actually go in and de-duplicate that. And you can see here, as an example, Delish is doing extremely well because it has almost 2.7x uniquely engaged audience versus EatingWell and Epicurious. They're winning that engagement battle there. So next up, affinity. Talk about uniquely engaged audience. Double-click, Jason is going to lock it and take it to the next level. How do we now measure the cross engagement with 2 brands? How do you determine, "Hey, if I'm at iHeartRadio, who do I want to partner with? Is it Amex? Is it Visa, the Mastercard?" And the way I read this is, my audience is 44x more likely to engage with American Express' audience and vice versa. So they are already a great partner on social. And next one. All right. And for American Express, look at it from their end. They have a great way to say, okay, I want to create an advertisement at iHeartRadio. That audience is already likely to engage with my content like my brand, so I can more easily walk them further down the marketing funnel and maybe got one extra touch point, that's going to get them signed up for a card with me. And finally, here's what I would say is really critical. You might say, okay, I get it about the high affinity. What about the low affinity? Well, guess what, if they don't already have a strong cross engagement with your brand, then that is a brand-new audience for you. So I like to look at it both ways. Who already engaged with my brand and who is that white space audience opportunity that I can then partner with and basically expand my universe versus just deepening the relationship with those already in my universe? Content best practices. I would say I'll go through this quickly, but we will also share the deck afterwards. Format. Strongest post impactful first spring like Jason said, get me in 3 seconds, stop to scroll. Strong short-form video as well as images perform the best. You want to be able to say, "Hey, I'm scrolling through my phone. Oh my gosh, let me see what this is, and let me stop and engage with it." Content. People, relationships matter. It's really about, "Hey, can I resonate with that brand? Can I see myself in there?" People do really, really well. Social is about those conversations and those relationships. We'll put a little bit of depth in there. And finally, from categories, the audience likes to be in the know. So whether you're providing a product sneak peek, a sneak peek for a new episode from behind-the-scenes shot, as long as you make your audience feel like they are a stakeholder in their brand, they're going to like you more, they're to engage with you more, and then they're going to come back. And then collabs and partnership. Always a great way to create the audience reach and capture a new audience. Back to you, Jason. Play some baseball here.

So I found out before this call, Danan actually played softball in a previous world. I'm working to gather additional details. But I think from it, the timing was quite right, right? I would challenge you as part of the next tune-up tip to think about creating a social baseball strategy. No game is won or lost off of the backs of any one player. You all as creators of content are the coaches. Develop your thresholds, including total actions. Look at the metrics that matter to your business unit. Identify the total volume of creative that you're going to post every single day. Keep a bullpen of additional stories, those evergreens that you think might have a similar or higher batting strategy. Think about those calls to action that Danan spoke about. Make your predictions as staff about how well you think each creative post that goes out is going to perform, and then the next day evaluate whether or not it actually did it. Here's just a quick example. These numbers are here just for illustration purposes. But all of a sudden now, if I'm putting out 20 posts per day as this particular brand is doing, then you can sort of see some of the delineations around the engagements that they're hoping to get for each of those creative and also understanding that not every baseball player is going to step up to the bat and knock it out of the park and hit a home run. So there are certain things that are just going to perform average run of the mill, and that's okay. They need to be a part of the strategy, but balance that out against what your expectations are to make sure that you're set up for success. And then you have to know about who you're talking about, right?

Yes. And I know up until now, we've talked about owned organic. There's another part of the world out there that we never want to forget about. It's knowing who else is talking about your brand when you're not talking about your brand. And this is just a quick decision matrix for, "Hey, when do you want to put more resources into perhaps launching a stand-alone handle when I know that earned conversations, earned engagements are already surpassing what I'm posting, and I need to put more resources, more energy and more posts behind driving my brand because people are really talking about it on social." And we have a great tool to let to measure, not just your own engagement posts, but every post from those social who are talking about your brand. Okay? Next one, when you -- everyone hits like for any campaign. So what's really important is measuring the efficacy of your campaign. And one great way to do that is to have a set of benchmarks and show how your campaign performed by format, by platform versus similar campaigns during the same time frame. So you don't benchmark against yourself. You benchmark against your best competitor so that your team moving the needle forward, right? And we also have a great survey capability. For me, surveys are a great way to understand your social audience and see if I'm running a campaign. And I'm not seeing the actual purchase yet. I have that awareness. What about everything in between and that consideration conversion stage? So what we can do is measure for those who engage with the campaign. How are they shifting in familiarity, opinions, purchase intent, and then finally, recommendations for those already existing brand efficacy.

Yes. And Danan, the thing is, is that there's data in there as well that unveils those competitive threats. This is a blinded one of a publisher that worked with a financial institution in this case. And they wanted -- one of the questions was, do you currently have an account with our bank or with another bank? And they had defined their competitive orbit. What was alarming for them was that they discovered that there was really only 1 competitor that their audience was currently engaging with, and that -- in this blinded example, that was Chase. What was really alarming for them though in the power of social is that 45% of their audience is in that gray space that they're not currently with their own bank. They're not with that competitor. They're not with any of the competitive orbits. They're with somebody else, which means their competitive threat got a whole lot larger as a result of this research. And the publisher in this case actually took this intelligence back to the ad agency, talk to them about it and created an additive campaign to do incremental efforts at sort of trying to shrink, if you will, that 45% down and raise overall awareness to the brand and ultimately drive them down the funnel. How did they do that? We had asked a question that sort of said, generally in the public over the next 6 to 12 months, what are you thinking you're going to use a financial institution for? And while the campaign actually really hit home on mortgages, the non-engaged audience really was focused on automotive loans. So if you think about this, we did this campaign, and we were raising awareness for auto, basic banking and financial planning. Yet the general public, those who are not with us, so that would be the Chase competitors, that other 45% in gray, they're all focused on mortgages. That was relatively low in our bucket, right? Using that intelligence from the surveys, they were able to actually then relend a second campaign that ultimately then went into market and help them pull on customers for things that were meaningful and relevant. Those are 2 words that you're going to hear a lot in social, meaningful and relevant. Who is the most meaningful and relevant in the space? Please take a moment if you don't have the time right now to visit the Insights folks, comscore.com/insights. We've published as part of our special download today who won social in 2021 with a lot of insights. But we know we're a little over in time. Danan, take us home.

Yes. So really quick to wrap up, some key takeaways. Really, your social might be the first touch point you have with your audience. So show up the right way, put on their grade first impression. And how are you going to do that? Short, sweet videos, impactful visuals, focus on quality over quantity. There are algorithms at play here. So look at the engagement. Drive that engagement. That's going to be a key factor and put you at the top of the feed. Use interactive and immersive elements. What -- put yourself in your audience [indiscernible]? What's going to make you stop, wow, let me learn more? That's what's going to engage them. Humanize your brand. Focus on people. Showcase those relationships, your audience, your people, so they like to engage with content that they can relate to. And finally, brand accountability is higher than ever before. You're holding brands accountable. They want brands that have a stands, that stand for something that they can feel, oh, wow. I have the same value as this brand. So if you have that, showcase that. Don't hold it back. And with that, that takes it to the end of our webinar here.

Not bad. We're only 5 minutes over. Apologies for anyone running late to the next meeting. A lot to pack in.

Thank you. So we would -- before I get to Q&A, we'd love to hear your feedback on today's webinar. So if you can please take the poll that's appearing on your screen now. And of course, like given our time today, we may not be able to take all the questions that are coming in. But let me start with this one that came in.

How do you calculate unique engaged audience? Is that available on multiple platforms? How does that differ from engagement rates?

Danan, I'll let you take that one. That's all you.

Okay. So our uniquely engaged audience is tabulated across multiple platforms. So we have it for Facebook. We have it for Instagram. We have it for Twitter. And we have it for YouTube. And the way I tabulate it is, if someone engages with a post, say, we are able to see [indiscernible] and they're assigned a unique ID. Based upon that, we know if that engager comes back a second time and we're able to see, okay, is that a single engagement? Or is that one person engaging twice? So that's how we tabulate our uniquely engaged audience. And this metrics send streams into our affinity, measures our cross engagement between 2 property or 2 brands on social. And our affinity metric is actually a cross-platform view. So it's not by platform. It's across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

I think some of the other questions are answered directly. So looks like that is all for today. So many thanks to our speakers, comScore Director of Client Insights, Jason Clough; and comScore Senior Director of Partner Insights, Danan Ren. We'd also like to thank today's attendees for joining us. As a reminder, we will be sharing the recording and a copy of the presentation with you. So if you -- please be on the lookout for an e-mail from us over the next 3 business days or you can check back on our website at comscore.com. We appreciate your participation and hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. Thanks, everyone.