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Would you tell us about yourself and your role at Affinio?
As VP, and Managing Director of NOW Affinio Social, a division of NowVertical Group, I oversee Affinio’s original social platform. This role comes after leading Affinio product development for the past 6 years, where the team enabled global brands to better understand their audiences through social data or owned data. Prior to Affinio, I held product roles in global enterprises and start-ups in Canada.
How would you describe Affinio?
Affinio is an audience intelligence platform designed to segment social users into like-minded communities - not just the active tweeters, but also the silent ‘lurkers’ - based on their underlying passions. The resulting deep insights power personalization at scale for marketing campaigns and content strategies that genuinely resonate.
Example of Affinio's Audience Visualization
How does Affinio help companies understand their consumers?
Affinio caters to many organizations and sectors. Agencies, for example, have been using Affinio for years to perfect their pitches for winning new business, by showcasing their detailed knowledge of target consumers to prospective clients. Various brands - especially those in CPG, Media & Entertainment, and Retail - leverage Affinio for all kinds of strategic purposes, including segment discovery, competitive intelligence, influencer selection, and partnership identification. We’ve even been told by clients that our insights have factored into Mergers & Acquisitions decisions.
We have a Guide to Competitive Intelligence if you need more information.
Let’s take a movie example. A studio that’s looking to maximize ticket sales for its upcoming release can use Affinio to identify the people on Twitter who viewed an early trailer video. Then break them into affinity-based segments, and use their resulting media interests to find the best domains for reaching them (and even use their music interests to inform the soundtrack). They can then leverage Affinio’s behave-a-like capability to target in a scalable fashion an ad campaign at not just these people - but others with similar interests - as the box office date grows closer.
What do you think are the biggest challenges companies face now, and how does this partnership help solve them?
Marketers need scalable insights on both existing and prospective customers, and they need them fast. The power of Talkwalker’s social listening, layered with affinity-based segmentation, can help marketers tackle any deep analysis in a fast and self-serve way. Personifying social authors lets companies and organizations take the pulse of thousands of real-life ‘respondents’, without the time delay and bias associated with traditional surveys, polls, and panels.
“Our partnership with Talkwalker allows marketers to take their audience full circle, from the point of online conversation to interest-based segmentation. Ultimately, completing the customer picture. The NOW Affinio marketing team has been using this solution to build our own marketing strategies, taking the insights from our own platform and using them to build tailored campaigns that win.”
Cody Shankman - Chief Marketing Officer NowVertical Group
How else can organizations and companies benefit from the partnership?
Not only can Affinio accept a list of topic-specific authors from Talkwalker and use our social data and AI to detect their segmented personas and affinities, Talkwalker can also accept these Affinio segments and assess their ongoing discussion topics. Putting these flows together gives a powerful full-circle audience perspective, especially when considering sentiment or seasonality. Beyond these rich insights, Affinio and Talkwalker can help with actual audience campaign activations by teaming up custom audience targeting and post-campaign performance.
“NOW Affinio gives me the opportunity to dive into the nuances of what makes individuals within clusters similar and what makes them different, who they follow, and how I can better understand them. This informs what their behaviors might be and how I can utilize that in social listening and planning.”
Alex McPhersonVP at Methods+Mastery Agency
