Follow the White Rabbit
How to use audience curiosity as a measure of success
So I was getting ready for seven hours of uninterrupted football a couple Sundays ago (thanks RedZone!), and, while watching the pregame coverage on ESPN, I came across this Quicken Loans ad for Rocket Mortgages.
Yes, rockets are cool, but one thing stood out to me in particular from a marketing perspective: tachophobia.
How many of you know the definition of that word offhand? Was your immediate impulse (like mine) to Google it?
This is a really clever way to measure not just audience attention, but audience action. Put another way, did people recall the ad and have any inclination to follow up on it? It’s a tough thing to measure, especially when you’re dealing with multiple platforms, such as a television ad that points you to a digital platform.
So did it work for Quicken Loans? Luckily for us, we can find out the answer with Google Trends. Here’s the search frequency for tachophobia from earlier this year, before the Rocket Mortgage ad started airing.
The results lack a meaningful pattern, and are low enough in frequency that the chart actually bottoms out twice to zero (Reminder: Google Trends is indexed to the highest frequency of searches in any given time frame. The “100” high water mark in searches for Jan-Feb 2016 could be different from Jan-Mar 2016). These are people who may have come across the word in an article, heard someone actually bring it up in conversation, or who tried to describe why they don’t like driving with me in my car.
But here’s the search frequency after the ad launched.
On the far left and right side of the graph is that “normal” distribution of people who are naturally searching for the term — relatively low just like in the first chart.
But what you see starting in the second week of April is the impact of the advertisement — the most people who have ever searched for this term on Google (if you search Google Trends as far back as 2005).
This is the White Rabbit: a seemingly minor thread that acts as a built-in indicator for how engaged people are with the whole of your content.
It’s a great diagnostic metric for your next campaign. Where KPIs measure direct business outcomes, diagnostic metrics provide a glimpse at the overall health of a campaign. True, people aren’t signing up for a mortgage directly, but for this example in particular, this meaningful blip in Google Trends may be an indicator that people are absorbed in the Rocket Mortgages ad (and may be inclined to take further action).
And as long as you’re aware of any other externalities that might cloud the results, you can isolate for the background noise and get a look at the impact of the campaign. Even better, if you’re using a similarly unnoticed keyword like tachophobia, you could inexpensively set up Adwords against that keyword to make sure you’re grabbing these interested audiences when they search for it.
So who else is relying on this technique? I couldn’t find a whole lot out there in terms of brands, but there is certainly a prominent pop culture example: Dr. Lyle Evans. No, not the Professor of Practice at VCU’s School of Education. I’m talking about a famous red herring from AMC’s Mad Men.
If you loved watching Mad Men, you’re probably into the myriad 1960’s cultural references sprinkled throughout the series. So you might remember an obscure reference dropped into the fourth-season episode, “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.” In the midst of a heated argument, Roger Sterling belts out the name Dr. Lyle Evans with such vitriol that you are forgiven for assuming that you should instantly know who that is. So viewers’ natural impulse was to Google it. And Google it they did.
Some people at the time called it a clever marketing ploy, which it was, but moreover I think this was a great proof point for the creators of Mad Men to show television executives the results and say “these are the people who we have directly reached.”
Now I’m not naive — I realize that most organizations aren’t dropping sly references in front of a primetime audience. There are a couple key things to think about to take advantage of audience curiosity.
1) Make sure you have something waiting at the end of the tunnel
This was a missed opportunity for Quicken Loans. When I searched for tachophobia in Google, there was nothing there on Rocket Mortgages waiting for me. I got the thematic link to the speed of applying, but a link to their digital presence (whether as an organic or paid link) would have been more useful in the moment.
2) Don’t get too cute
Rocket Mortgages literally tells you to look up the phrase. Pete Campbell directly asks Roger (and the audience) “Who is Dr. Lyle Evans?” Don’t assume your audiences know which rabbit holes to explore — it won’t hurt to give them a nudge.
3) Don’t promise too much
A White Rabbit could be a word, a name, an interesting stat, or something else entirely. It just has to get them thinking, and, ideally, spark their curiosity. Just make sure it’s grounded in something solid — no one appreciates clickbait.
So when you’re creating your next campaign, think about whether there’s a way for you to use a White Rabbit. What is your version of tachophobia? It might be more effective (and interesting) than counting impressions or page views.
Effective campaign measurement is just one of the many things we think about for clients at Atlantic Media Strategies. Sign up for our weekly newsletter, the Digital Trends Index, and get in touch with us on Twitter.
