Polling company YouGov continued its push into the advertising sphere today with the launch of ‘Global Profiles’, a new offering aimed at brands and agencies.
YouGov described Global Profiles as “the world’s largest globally consistent audience dataset”. It’s essentially an evolution of YouGov’s existing Profiles product, which aims to help brands and advertisers better understand their audiences, using YouGov’s first-party polling data. But Profiles uses different data points in different markets, making it hard to use for media planning and measurement in global campaigns.
Global Profiles seeks to address this. YouGov says panellists’ answers to over 1,000 questions inform the dataset, which is available in 43 markets including the UK, USA, China, Japan, France, Germany, South Africa, India, and Brazil.
The dataset includes 700 attitudinal questions, 150 questions on media consumption, social media intelligence across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and demographics and lifestyle data.
Stephen Shakespeare, YouGov’s CEO and co-founder, says the new product “lets brands and agencies discover and understand their global audiences across all the markets that matter to them. It will be central to their global strategies, campaigns and partnerships.”
While the vast majority of ad campaigns are still tailored to local markets, the new product could be useful for brands wanting to navigate global issues. Brands wishing to understand if and how they should react to a major news story which is relevant in lots of markets could use the data to understand their audiences’ attitudes. Similarly, brands which run sponsorships or product placement deals in globally consumed media could use YouGov’s data to understand which shows and films they’re interested in, and then measure the impact of those campaigns.
A golden opportunity
Today’s announcement represents another step by YouGov to widen its appeal to agencies and advertisers.
Marketing has always been a major use case for YouGov’s data. But recently the company has been pushing out new products specifically for these groups, as it sees an opportunity to capitalise on the industry’s focus on privacy compliant data.
In financial results last year, YouGov said it expects first-party data providers and third-party market researchers to benefit from marketers reassessing their targeting and measurement strategies. The company said its YouGov Direct and YouGov safe products were specifically designed with these changes in mind. The latter of these two acts as a marketplace where users can give marketers access to their data, in exchange for monetary rewards.
