Amanda (Zuniga) Baskett talks about the final product January 21, 2010
Posted by Mark Blei in : Places you wish you were, Staff posts , trackbackThere are many aspects of my job that I really enjoy. However, there is nothing that tops the end of a project when all the data has been cleaned and weighted and it is sitting there waiting to be understood. Sometimes I think I must be a pretty sad person to be so excited about this (my older brothers reassure me that this is true), but then I also tell myself that this is the reason that I’m a researcher.
I love to tell stories – which isn’t surprising given my journalism and English background. In this job data serves as the basis for my story and the words are intertwined to shed light and explain what the data reveals.
In some cases, there are end results that are perplexing at first glance. However, by taking a deeper dive into the data as well as understanding what environment the campaign is running in helps to clarify the results.
For instance, the final results in one of my recent projects were negative especially given that the mid-way results showed positive movement. Instead of simply looking into various data cuts and writing a report based simply on the numbers I began my investigation with the numbers and quickly moved onto scouring secondary resources to help me explain what happened.
In the end I determined that the overall impact of the campaign was masked by negative results from a particular timeframe. Negative press surrounding the product category combined with respondents’ exposure to the ads triggered severe responses to the brand. Thus the overall poor results were not due to ineffective creatives or off-target messaging, but were driven by outside factors beyond the creative, media and brand teams’ control.
Nonetheless, a key lesson was learned. The results and insights have led the client to further investigate whether it makes sense to put a hold on a campaign if presented with a similar scenario in the future.
As a researcher we are not only tasked with understanding what the
data reveals, but to also shape a story that is meaningful for the client. There are often projects were there are different nuggets of data which you can mold an entire story around. It then becomes important to recognize what story would be most beneficial to fashion for your client. As we are all aware a media agency and a brand team have differing interests and markers of success. At the end of the day it is the combination of unraveling the data, finding the golden nuggets, and crafting a client-minded story that makes me enthusiastic about my job as a researcher.
In my spare time I like to eat and run – everyone always teases me for taking vacation days off to run a marathon or doing relay races through the mountains. I guess it is not everyone’s version of vacation. However, I know how to relax too the picture below is from my recent honeymoon in Hawaii.
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