The Drum Awards: Understanding the buzz from conversations
This year, Audiense had the honor of sponsoring The Drum Awards’ Social Buzz night, an evening amongst the schedule of events and celebrations held in London between the 21st — 29th of November 2018. Two of our team members donned their glitzy gowns and had a fantastic night, as well as presenting the award for Best Use of Twitter. If you would like to see who else was nominated and picked up a drum, you can find out here. Or if you would just like to see this year’s, and last year’s, Social Buzz nominees and winners, you can find them here.
It was great to follow the event on Twitter and hear from my teammates, but to learn more about the attendees…I chose multiple methods of looking at this data using our platform. From using social listening to understand what people were talking about, to creating an audience, to using the data to put together one of our Audiense Insights reports. Anyone who had mentioned The Drum Awards was now visible to me.
To get a quick, basic, grasp I turned to the demographics page, there was an expected high percentage of UK members (71%), but also a relatively large 10% dedicated to the USA. With smaller but still respectable numbers were Spain (1.7%), India (1.5%) and Netherlands (1.5%).
When looking at the gender differences, males are pushing in front with 57% which is a 10% increase from last year’s Social Buzz Awards. In comparison, the actual attendance at the Social Buzz Awards this year was split between 46% male and 54% female. It would have been great to see this gap a little closer together within the report data from The Drum Awards as a whole.
And, if we’re comparing stats to last year’s report, 69% of the Social Buzz were aged 34 or younger, compared to this year’s Drum’s at 57%. Either, some employees have just hit their mid 30s, or the Social Buzz teams are particularly youthful.
Now that we have a good general idea of who these people are, and how things have shifted since last year, the next port of call I wanted to see was their social media presence. When looking at digital agencies and brands, it’s always interesting to see the behaviour and usage of those that spend at least 8 hours a day working with these platforms.
LinkedIn leads the way, being almost 11 times more relevant and popular to this audience than the general UK audience. It’s not too surprising considering that many of the nominees at the event are relatively young companies, and many using the event as a chance to network too. With more than enough articles to satisfy a daily hunger of knowledge and opinion pieces, Medium comes in close second. And, evidently, it was an event worth sharing as Snapchat scores highly, confidently surpassing Twitter and Instagram.
As mentioned, there is a high interest for articles and blog posts, which corresponds with a large percentage following plenty of written digital media brands. There is a particular focus on business and the media industry including Campaign, Ad Age, Wired, Creative Review, and Oglivy, amongst many more, popular, outlets. This likely explains why the most relevant media format happens to be links, as a quick way to access the next nugget of information or 3 minute read.
Similarly to last year, the impact of social media and online ads scores way below the baseline, yet targeted ads are also a key way to engage with this audience, as well as almost ⅕ of the audience are twice as responsive to campaigns than the UK average. In regards to the buying mindset, having a strong brand name and personality is paramount to gaining the attention of and drawing in this young audience.
Then I thought I would take a closer look at their personality, as provided by IBM Watson. The Drum Awards audience really stood out when it came to their Adventurous, Energetic, Driven and Trusting of Others qualities. Despite the fast pace of buzzing environments, The Drum Awards members are about 15% less neurotic than the average person in the UK.
Then I returned to the full view of the segment distribution.
What I had done was a very detailed overview, but now I could narrow my focus even further and look into the insights of each segment. I would be able to find the specific influencers for each category, and begin to create perfectly balanced messages to send to them, and pick up on the networking began at the awards ceremony. What would you do with this data?
