Imagine you are about to go into a meeting with the big guns to ask for a 20 per cent increase in budget for the next marketing campaign. The last one went well – really well – but how can you convince them that they need to back up the success of the previous campaign with a new one? What would help win the bean counters over? What insights do you need to wow them? What kind of ROI data will knock them out? And how can you assure them that their spend won’t be in vain?

Well, just call on the super powers of passive data to give you all the insights you need.

For the last 12 months, Lewers Research have been working with Beatgrid Media, the developers of a unique new passive audio recognition app, a bit like Shazam for advertising, and have incorporated the technology into their research ecosystem. After comprehensive testing using live, real world campaigns, they now have the ability to provide a whole new line of sight on advertising efficiency and effectiveness.

“It’s kind of like the Holy Grail of brand and ad tracking,” says Lewers CEO, Lisa Lewers. “Passive audio technology can give you incredibly accurate information about genuine exposure versus stated recognition for every creative you have in flight. We can monitor spend by channel, and provide the kind of information you need to re-route your media budget mid-campaign if necessary.

“But it gets really exciting when you start combining this data with emotional analytics to look at campaign effectiveness in a totally new way, and at a very granular level. This will give the best creative and media agencies an opportunity to prove just how good they really are, to the people that really matter. Every spend can be justified, and the marketing, creative and insights teams can be working with the same focus. As I said, the Holy Grail!”

Other benefits of this ‘always on’ audio tracking is that it doesn’t require any action from the user – data is available in virtually real-time, so calls can be made to optimise campaign spend in flight, and it can also be used as a media audit tool. That’s a lot of good reasons to find out more about this technology.

Oh, and we recommend that before you spend that $3 million the finance department just signed off on, it’d be wise to run it through some good qualitative research, just to be sure it is actually pulling the same heartstrings that hold the purse strings. There’s no point wasting all that good emotional analytic information available. Let’s be honest, your all-expenses-paid trip to that international conference in Europe is on the line.