Q&A with Dr. Anthony Palomba, Leading Consumer Behavior Strategist and Audience Measurement Expert
Effective measurement and cross-category learning is essential for brands to better understand media engagement behavior by consumers. And yet it has become increasingly challenging for brands to accurately measure which aspects of their marketing investments across various tactics and channels are generating positive returns (ROI), especially as consumer behavior and preferences evolve.
In the Q&A below, GBK Advisor Dr. Anthony Palomba, Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, shares his thoughts on how media, advertising, and technology innovations influence consumer behavior and media selection decisions. He also discusses what companies can do to improve measurement and better predict outcomes with target customers.
Q: To kick off, tell us more about your background. What led you to study consumer behavior and audience measurement?
Initially, I thought I was going to be an entertainment lawyer and help protect clients’ intellectual property and trademark rights. Toward the end of my undergraduate collegiate career, I went to work as a legal assistant at a small boutique entertainment law firm in New York, which specialized in Broadway and other theater productions. However, I graduated with my undergraduate degree in 2009, around the height of the recession, and the legal market was no longer appealing to me.
Undeterred, I became interested in pursuing TV production, which led me to pursue a master’s degree at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. In the fall of 2011, a professor was talking about data points with art, and I was completely captivated by this simple premise. What if you could decompose why masses and masses of people, unknown to each other, came together to experience content? Is it possible to optimize art for audiences? Can we peer behind the creative curtain to understand why content resonates with consumers, going beyond whether someone viewed something?
I quickly realized this was an emerging marketplace, and I could still pursue my overarching interest in aiding artists, content creators as well as other business stakeholders in understanding audiences. This set me off on a journey that included earning a master’s degree, a doctorate degree, and a master’s in business administration degree, to closely understand the creative process, how to measure and understand audiences, and how to be mindful and empathetic toward business key performance indicators. My research is focused on the intersection of media, entertainment, advertising, and technology. There is always so much to sift through, and it continues to change. I’m never comfortable being called an expert, and it spurs me to continue to push and challenge myself to ask deep and thoughtful research questions.
Q: The media landscape is constantly evolving with new advertising and technology innovations. What are some of the emerging trends that stand out in the next 3-5 years that will influence consumer behavior and media selection decisions?
When I think about the biggest emerging trends, one that stands out is that brands only have a 15-second window to hook their audience. Up-and-coming generations such as Gen Z and Gen Alpha are more media savvy than any previous generation. They are also more skeptical, fast to look up things and make quick comparisons and contrasts before swiftly executing a decision.
We’re living in a “swipe culture”. And it's not just with dating apps such as Tinder or Bumble - it's with consumer products and every type of content we consume. Audiences today want content that speaks to them and is honest. They want experiences that have preemptively strived to first get to know them.
They have less patience for taking a risk on anything. There’s a shorter window for content to set up a quick premise, hook, and convince an audience member to take a chance on it.
Our “swipe” culture has institutionalized radical and affirmative snap judgment with just about anything consumers are exposed to. You’re asking me to follow this influencer? I’ll give her fifteen seconds and see if I want to watch the rest of the video first. What’s the Rotten Tomato score for this movie before I select it?
A snap judgment-oriented audience means there’s even more risk in content creation, and it affirms how important it is for business stakeholders to execute careful, thoughtful, and slow (yes, slow) decision-making in this environment. There’s a misguided belief among some broadcasters, distributors, and content creators that the more content that is put out for consumers, at an accelerated rate, will in turn raise the perceived equity behind a brand, influencer, or streaming service. This will also create further audience engagement and interest.
“ We’re living in a swipe culture. Audiences today want content that speaks to them and is honest. They want experiences that have preemptively strived to first get to know them. ”
To some extent, there is truth behind this, but I suspect that some of these actions surrounding content creation, distribution, and acquisition are meant to galvanize investors rather than consumers. A consumer can’t possibly realize just how much content he has available to him on Netflix, YouTube, Tik Tok, or Xbox Pass. It’s tantamount to trying to realize the full benefits of being a New York City citizen by eating out at every restaurant in one of the boroughs. It’s damn near impossible to execute.
I think we’ll see more careful content curation moving forward, particularly with well-versed and dynamic generations like Generations Z and Alpha. These generations are hungry for honest, authentic, transparent, and humbled content.
Advertisers will seek to further create addressable advertisements that are accurately targeted toward audiences, and anticipate when audiences should hear from them versus the quantity of targeted messages. More advertisements will not be created in a vacuum, and instead will be created in anticipation of what type of content they will be featured with, as creating synergies with content will aid advertisements in standing out to audiences.
I also believe we will see more adver-games and opportunities for consumers to not just view, but build their own advertisements to view and share with others. Advertisements need to be reimagined to be less intrusive and perceived as nuance and more in line with the overall content experience.
Q: Accurately predicting consumer behavior can be challenging especially as consumer behavior and preferences evolve. What are the keys to effective audience measurement for brands?
To precisely measure audiences, understanding behaviors, lifestyles, personalities, and emotions of consumers are all critical components. Audience behaviors include how people engage with a brand, speak about a brand, but also how they engage at each point along their consumer journey. For instance, you need to know where audience pain points are located for consumers. Some consumers may push through those pain points, and this is an opportunity to understand their behaviors.
Moreover, audiences like to be part of the product/service creation process. How are you testing products and services in the marketplace? How are you giving your customers ownership? Nike allows consumers to make their own shoes, and Starbucks allows for highly customized coffee experiences. Past research studies tell us that consumers value what they create more, even if someone else has created something similar and it is available for purchase. There’s a natural endowment effect in place here that can be capitalized on by brands if they’re interested in going beyond likes, follows and retweets.
It’s also important to understand consumers’ lifestyles and personalities. During the day, when do consumers visit you? What were they doing beforehand? What did they do next? Who are they as people? Are they ego-expressive with brands? Increasingly, consumers seek to engage with authentic brands to further express and exemplify who they are, pursuing their own self-ideals. For them, authentic brands have unique and compelling stories, strive to exist as citizens in the world, give back to communities, and demonstrate interest in making their consumers’ lives easier and more fulfilled through products and services. If a brand doesn’t take time to get to know its consumers, it’ll be patently obvious (especially among younger generations), and consumers will swiftly abandon the brand.
Finally, can you figure out how your consumers are feeling? When are they in the mood to talk to you? To hear from you? You might take into consideration external variables like weather, amount of daylight, Twitter posts, vacation posts, seasons and holidays, world news events, and other measurables to get a sense of emotional status.
Through computer vision, we’re able to measure and identify people as well as body language. This can aid us in providing further customization for consumers, perhaps anticipating what mood they are in as they browse through a store. Individual social media handles and accounts can give us emotion-based story arcs of how our customers are doing. When is your audience in the mood for your product or service? Can you predict this? Can you anticipate this?
“I've always been fascinated by cross-category learning. when you engage in an activity, you make an appraisal. this places you in an emotional state that can impact subsequent decision-making.”
Q: You recently completed some research that looked at consumer behavior and cross-category learning - such as how consumption of NFL sports clips and Madden NFL gameplay can influence consumption decisions in other categories. Can you tell us more about that work?
Absolutely. I've always been fascinated by decision-making and cross-category learning. There is a theory called the appraisal tendency theory that states when you engage in an activity, you make an appraisal, and this places you into an emotional state. Unbeknownst to most consumers, this emotional state can impact subsequent decision-making.
Now, some of us reading this may be saying to ourselves “this wouldn’t happen to me.” Naturally, we’re all inclined to believe others are more capable of being influenced by something than we are, which is known as the third-person effect. For example, you might say your neighbor is the one who's going to be influenced by smoking advertisements, not you. But often that’s not true. We are all susceptible to stimuli. And so this particular study looks at appraisal tendency theory as it relates to the way we people consume media and make decisions as they switch between television and video games, and secondly, how shifts in a person’s mood might influence their behavior.
In our study, participants were invited to view one of four video sports highlight clips of the New York Giants vs. The Dallas Cowboys - one of the most heated rivalries in sports. Each participant watched a clip showing one of the following outcomes: the New York Giants winning by a lot, the Giants winning by a narrow margin, the Cowboys winning by a lot, or winning by a little. They were also asked to play an NFL video game matchup between the NY Giants and Dallas Cowboys. To control for the order of effects, half of the participants were exposed to the video game stimulus first followed by the video clip stimulus. They could select which team to play as well as which arena.
As we are still running analyses on results, preliminary analyses suggest that extreme emotions (e.g., really feeling irritated or joyous) can stimulate consumers to be interested in sports memorabilia from either team. Moreover, the video game play experience clearly lifted positive emotions across all participants. This is critical to isolate, as there are implications here for strategic management with consumers. If you manage strategic communication for the, say, Jacksonville Jaguars or LA Rams, who just lost a live NFL game, and you have gaming data on your audience that suggests some of them are extremely competent at Madden NFL, is it possible to beam a suggestion to them through a smart TV to go play the live matchup they just viewed on their Xbox or PlayStation console?
This can aid sports teams across all leagues in mitigating temporary brand equity damage among fans by empowering them to rewrite their own consumption experiences. Differently, the amount of Madden NFL matchups that may be played in anticipation of an upcoming matchup on Sunday may alert broadcasters of the emotional state and anticipation of some audience members.
Q: What roles do machine learning and artificial intelligence tools play in better understanding consumer behavior?
Wow! This is a deep question. Artificial intelligence requires computer cognition at a human intelligence level or higher. To execute this, machine learning is necessary, which seeks to train computers to learn and adapt without explicit instructions. Therefore, established machine learning supports a major proportion of artificial intelligence. Drilling down a bit further, there is deep learning, which sifts through unstructured data (e.g., texts, videos, photos) and attempts to decompose them, relying on neural networks that are wired similarly to how the human brain is wired for cognition.
What are some consumer applications of this? Well, in deep learning, you can use computer vision and facial recognition to recognize consumers when they come back to a bank or store, and map where they walk. Are they returning to the same products or services? Is it possible to nudge them in one direction or another? You can use association rules such that you can predict based on past television and video shows watched, what consumers may like, which is a service we’ve become familiar with on Amazon as well as across streaming services (e.g., Netflix, Hulu).
“we already see the use of AI and machine learning to optimize searches and experiences to model and predict consumer decisions. In the future, there will be many other uses…”
Today we already see the use of AI and machine learning to optimize searches and experiences to model and predict consumer decisions. For example, you can train a machine to learn when a consumer is likely to stop a subscription to a service based on the amount of times logged into a service, gaps in between logging into a service, time spent in a service and other parameters. Finally, based on the previous premise I offered surrounding NFL fans, you could create a logistic regression model that predicts whether someone will win at an NFL Madden game.
In the future, there will be many other uses of AI. The great thing about these models is if deployed successfully, they can constantly ingest new data to optimize. Machine learning models naturally decay over time, as other external variables are introduced in an environment, and other variables become more or less important to the prediction algorithm. And so there is a need to constantly reassess and reaffirm, but these machines also allow us and endow us capability of really incorporating a vast multitude of different variables, scaling them together and creating something that, you know, hopefully creates joy and positivity in consumers lives as they move along.
Q: In your MBA classes at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, one of the focuses areas is teaching business leaders to present data results and actionable insights to key stakeholders through storytelling. What are the keys to effectively telling a story with data?
It’s critical to understand what your client’s fears, worries, desires, and daydreams are. I really try to hammer this home to students. I’ve told students to look at client’s stock prices, financial health, recent acquisitions, media articles that are written about them, and what is communicated and exhibited on their own corporate social media channels and home website. Who is the client as an aggregate person? What are they feeling?
What do they like to talk about? How do they perceive themselves? Who do they hope to become? How do you feel as a hired consultant after examining all the information you found on the client? How well can you get to know them? If you can execute this well, then you will likely gain their trust, as your knowledge and awareness will manifest in client conversations and through the rest of the project timeline. The subsequent presentation, analyses, and deliverable all stand on the preliminary work you’ve done to get to know the client and own their problems and opportunities.
The presentation, analyses, and related tasks have nothing to do with my students or hired consultants becoming the hero in the grand scheme of things. The client is the hero, and the presenter is the mentor. I educate my students to see themselves as mentors who are asking their audience to shift their behavior and take on a new risk. They need to think about what their client is getting out of the presentation, and to state it at the beginning.
Students need to present a bottom-line up front that states the status quo, notes what the client is going through, and clearly implicates the listening audience with a clear key performance indicator. They need to acknowledge what the client is currently facing, and then proceed to introduce a potential solution to a problem, or path to an opportunity. The rest of the presentation should anticipate assumptions and push back from the audience. In this way, the client can follow along lucid and unabashedly honest analysis conducted by the hired team, and feel ownership over the presentation itself.
“I’ve always been intrigued by consumer behavior and how audience measurement can be enhanced to predict consumption patterns. Joining GBK Collective as an advisor is a natural fit.”
Q: What are you most looking forward to in your role as advisor for GBK?
I’ve always been intrigued by consumer behavior and how audience measurement can be enhanced to predict consumption patterns. Joining GBK Collective as an advisor is a natural fit given the firm’s expertise and ongoing work with leading brands on predictive models.
I'm excited to partner with the GBK team to help clients solve some of their toughest business and marketing challenges,and make some bold moves based on new insights and predictive models. It can be difficult to shift lenses, perspectives, and opinions. However, part of the joy of working with clients is being imaginative, creative, and figuring out solutions from unorthodox or unanticipated research designs.
Moreover, academic theories aid us in figuring out explanations for why problems or opportunities may exist for clients. They allow us to capture “why is this happening” or “how is this happening” for clients. We’re able to ask and state better research questions and hypotheses, and truly design a unique and compelling research study in earnest for clients.
The ability to describe and name these seemingly hidden processes with academic theories further facilitates us in diving extraordinarily deep into business problems or opportunities, truly sitting with and meditating on them at the bottom, and coming back up to the surface with surefire solutions.