This week, Affinity Answers is pleased to announce the launch of a new application, ActivationPlanner™, currently available for free at https://activationplanner.affinityanswers.com.  ActivationPlanner™ is specifically designed to make it easier for Brand Media Directors, Media Agency Planners and Programmatic Buyers to discover and activate the digital advertising segments predicted to be most effective for programmatic branding by our TrueAffinity™ algorithm.

Before detailing the functionality and value of the ActivationPlanner™ application, a quick refresher on TrueAffinity™…

TrueAffinity™ is a proprietary metric created by AffinityAnswers to measure and predict the level of reciprocal social participation between two brand audiences. This powerful AI marketing tool finds the brands that your customers like, along with whose audiences have affinity for your brand.  To think of it in the simple terms of a middle-schooler, it is like finding out someone you like has a crush on you as well.  To measure TrueAffinity™, we use the vast amounts of public social data as the world’s largest focus group.  Social engagement provides a way to capture both the conscious and unconscious influence a brand has on consumers.  By analyzing the active engagement and affinities of this 2 billion+ person audience, we can predict – at scale – how effective a brand’s marketing will be at engaging their target audience.  TrueAffinity™ is measured on an exponential scale from 0 to 10, and we track it for nearly 60,000 entities.

Perhaps the best way to explain the value of the ActivationPlanner™ is to step through the functionality of how to use the application. First, visit the ActivationPlanner™ at https://activationplanner.affinityanswers.com/#TOMS.  This will take you to the application with the brand “TOMS” already populated in the search field.  Let’s say you run programmatic advertising for TOMS, the application will show you other brands, celebrities, teams, shows, movies, etc. whose audience would likely engage and respond to messaging from TOMS; see below:

Each of the brands shown in the semicircles is an audience segment recommendation for TOMs.  The inner semicircle displays top in-category segments (great for conquesting campaigns); the outer semicircle shows high affinity brands, media, and celebrities (great for extending reach).  These are not simply theoretical recommendations – these are actual audience segments currently available for purchase via Oracle Data Cloud (BlueKai).  You can find them simply by searching for them (or AffinityAnswers) in your DSP.

Mousing over each icon will provide details of the TrueAffinity™ score.  If you scroll down further in the application, additional details are shown:

First is the estimated total number of uniques from in-category and high affinity audience segment recommendations; in this case, 28 million.  Then for each segment recommendations the TrueAffinity™ score is shown, along with the uniques for each individual segment.  All this data can be easily downloaded for sharing with your team, inclusion in RFPs, or for purchasing segments from your DSP.  Also, once signed-in to the application, you can customize the audience using the swap or delete icons.

This is just the beginning of the audience modeling that AffinityAnswers can do for a brand.  If you would like more recommendations, to try some of our non-brand segments (like Black Friday or Christmas), or to have us build a bespoke segment for you, just send us a note at hello@affinityanswers.com.

And please feel free to use the same address to send us feedback on the ActivationPlanner™; our goal is to make it a useful resource for all marketers involved in the programmatic media buying process.