Tapping into the global zeitgeist

The advertising and marketing industries are constantly changing, driven by new technology and people’s behaviour, writes

Across Africa, advancements in technology and increased internet penetration are revolutionising the advertising landscape. The use of language models such as OpenAI’s Davinci and ChatGPT is making it easier and more cost-effective to engage with people from different cultures and languages.

Globally, artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the game by making it possible to deliver a customised customer experience at scale, and generative AI is taking this even further. This technology can do key summarisations for a specific audience and can generates creative content based on individual customers’ preferences and behaviours, leading to a more personalised experience.

Dentsu Data is at the forefront of these changes, with its Zeitgeist technology using language models to monitor trends and explore the use of generative AI.

Can you forecast exactly when your concepts will trend UP or DOWN in real time - or, are you able to find out exactly what is being said about your brand across the various platforms in real time? Zeitgeist can!

To date, brands have only been able to track past events; Zeitgeist moves into the future and allows you to predict where your brand’s concepts and conversations can, and will, go.

This gives brand and marketing teams the ability to change, redirect and capitalise on where their connections and conversations are landing.

Zeitgeist offers a deeper understanding of target audiences around a concept in time, allowing you to identify your concept across all the mediums where buyers are in Africa. It allows the capacity to connect the authors, and influences driving concepts. Moreso, it has the powerful ability to predict the relevance of a topic, and when it becomes not so relevant, while allowing a deeper understanding of how content is syndicated.

TargeTed insighTs

Zeitgeist monitors radio, TV, digital and social channels in real-time, to find what new conversations or opinions are currently trending, and the market segmentation or demographics associated with these. It answers key questions such as: ‘Do South Africans still want to hear about load shedding?’ Or: ‘How relevant is load shedding to South Africans? Should a brand still be talking about a topic such as load shedding? Where in conversations is load shedding relevant, for example sporting events?’

Unlike any other traditional tools that just highlight trending concepts, Zeitgeist is powered by dentsu’s propriety Customer and Consumer Survey (CCS), which means that it can connect offline interview data and demographics to online trending concepts in real-time.

Timely connecTions

Zeitgeist’s network view allows content generators and curators to visualise how their content is distributed, who connects to it, who the authors are across all platforms, and who is interested in the content. Zeitgeist also gives you the ability to modify or change the content or conversation.

It gives you an immediate deeper understanding of your content and minimises paid aggregation wastage instantly, as you can track it hourly, daily, or even weekly – effectively allowing you to change the content leading or influencing conversations without the need to see results down the line.

Real Relevance

How many times has a brand’s content or marketing department jumped onto a trending concept or conversation only to find out that the concept is no longer relevant; they have missed the opportunity and wasted money? Zeitgeist operates off unique, powerful prediction algorithms that determines if a concept or conversation is outgoing or incoming –it is even able to take seasonality into consideration.

all-media moniToring

Reporting is typically associated with social and media monitoring teams. Zeitgeist uses natural language AI and visual AI to continuously scan and monitor radio, television, socials, online and offline media, to find the concepts and conversations that your brand might be connected to. Unlike traditional media monitoring tools, it does not solely track a hashtag or brand mention; it is able to read, contextualise and understand when and how your brand is mentioned. Zeitgeist uses erful clustering machine learning and builds programmatic stories about concepts and conversations happening around your brand across any platform in real-time.

Paul Stemmet is chief data officer of dentsu SSA. He holds an Honours Degree in Information Systems from UCT and a diploma in Artificial Intelligence from MIT. He has an extensive background in the field of digital marketing and is the founder of numerous start-ups in the digital marketing and audience field. At Dentsu Data Labs SSA, his focus is on unlocking value from internal client data to assist Dentsu in delivering increased performance to clients.