What if appropriating this rising discipline of « Search Intelligence » was now an opportunity and even a major appointment for corporate Insights experts? This is the conviction of Arnaud de Baynast, co-author of the famous Mercator and founder of Digital Value, who has just announced the launch by his team of a platform dedicated to the detection of insights from the extraordinarily abundant data represented by consumer search engine queries. He answers MRNews’ questions in this exclusive interview.
MRNews: You’ve just announced the launch of your search intelligence solution, Digital Value Insight. How would you define it in a few words? And why this initiative?
Arnaud de Baynast (Digital Value): Our core business is strategy consulting. One of our core activities is to help investors make the best possible choices in their strategy to acquire companies or brands. To meet our clients’ needs, we turned our attention to very specific data, in this case, the queries made by consumers on the Internet, via Google, Bing, Yahoo… By analyzing this data with our marketers’ eyes, we became aware of its tremendous interest, and therefore of that of Search Intelligence, because that’s what it’s all about. And the feedback from our customers has been extremely positive. So we set about optimizing and facilitating this analysis work as much as possible, by developing a solution to harness the power of this data. This was a project that took several years to complete, and required a major financial and human investment. Initially, this platform was used to meet our needs, so that we could do our job properly in private equity. Today, however, we believe that it can be a formidable tool in the hands of Insights teams, and more broadly, corporate marketing teams. Hence the launch of Digital Value Insight.
This platform was initially used to meet our own needs, so that we could do our job properly in the private equity sector. Today, however, we believe it can be a formidable tool in the hands of Insights teams, and more broadly, corporate marketing teams. Hence the launch of Digital Value Insight.
You’re a marketing expert, co-author of the famous Mercator… Why is Search Intelligence so interesting for specialists in this discipline, if we compare it to Social Intelligence?
Search engine queries are an extraordinarily powerful, precise and representative reflection of consumers’ intentions, of what’s going on in their heads. You, me, all of us, when we formulate a query, it always makes sense. The advantages of exploiting this data are manifold. Firstly, the volume, with over 12 billion queries made every day. But also the fact that they are global – with Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Naver… – which opens up incredible prospects in terms of granularity and comparability, especially as it is possible to reconstruct historical data over several years. Unlike survey data, this research is spontaneous, sincere and unsolicited. They are therefore truly representative, unlike what is shared on social networks, and unbiased, as are the opinions expressed by consumers. And it’s relevant to all sectors of activity: FMCG, healthcare, energy, telecoms, luxury goods, capital goods, mobility… Finally, I’d like to add that it’s immediately available, although we still need to be able to exploit it and derive insights from it, which is what we’re all about.
Search engine queries are an extraordinarily powerful, precise and representative reflection of consumers’ intentions, of what’s going on in their heads. You, me, all of us, when we formulate a query, it always makes sense.
Find out more about the Mercator
What are the issues for which the platform can provide high added value?
The range of use cases is very broad. The tool is extremely powerful for understanding how demand is structured in a given consumer sector, and for detecting trends.
We can take an example from the Luxury-Beauty world, where we monitor over 200 brands, far more than traditional panels. One of these is Sol de Janeiro, a Brazilian body care brand that was still relatively confidential before winter 2022. Via our platform, we observed a spectacular rise in the number of queries on this player; we counted 2.7 million in a single month, December 2023. This gave us an early indication of this brand’s success, with a very precise vision of the geography and temporality of this phenomenon. But we were also able to pinpoint the reasons behind this craze by analyzing the intentions associated with queries, in this case consumers’ growing interest in vegan-friendly and cruelty-free « recipes ».
In the case we’ve just described, we quickly identified the appeal of a brand. But the tool is also extremely powerful for objectively and accurately detecting the importance of new consumer trends…
An example to illustrate the point?
Also in the beauty world, we were able to detect early on the public’s growing interest in « lip oils », which was the major beauty trend in the USA in 2022. Sales took off at the end of the year, but by April we had already noticed an explosion in the number of queries on this theme, which had quadrupled compared to the previous year.
These are just examples, of course, but they illustrate the enormous advantages of this technique over traditional research. Users can constantly analyze millions of requests from all over the world, with a very precise picture of the nature of requests, where they are expressed geographically and over time. In particular, we can reconstruct historical data, which is often difficult or even impossible with traditional systems. And we have an extremely fine-tuned view of seasonality, which is essential data for marketers.
The tool is in fact powerful for working on 4 major use cases, summarized in this illustration.
Can you share a final example of the insights the platform can deliver on retail or digital performance issues?
Here again, the tool can be used in a number of ways. For example, it is possible to identify the structure of demand for a brand or product category: which distribution channels or sites capture this demand, in absolute terms or in comparison with competitors? And how this structure evolves over time. How much of this demand is directed to the brand’s own site, or to another specific site?
But the platform also offers extremely operational insights. Let’s say I manage the fresh cheese brand Philadelphia, and I’m interested in how my product is used by consumers in their « homemade » recipes, such as « Philadelphia cheesecake ». The tool tells me which sites and pages people land on when they make this type of query, and so allows me to see how my product is promoted. I may even be surprised – and this is real! – to discover that a competitor’s product is there instead of mine!
In practice, through what prism are requests apprehended and analyzed, given that they express themselves in so many different forms?
Ah, now there’s a tricky question! We collect these billions of daily queries via API, with the search engines supplying them to all advertisers who buy keywords. We categorize them according to 3 axes: brands, products and intentions. For example, I’m interested in the world of wines and spirits in some forty markets/countries. Of course, there are many brands (and competitors), including Glenfiddich, Dom Perignon, Absolut… But there are also private labels. We have different products, such as whisky, champagne, vodka… And finally, we have intentions, for example « for a cocktail » or « for my wedding » or any other consumption circumstance. For a market like this and for a single country, our database includes over 26,000 different keywords. In the luxury goods sector, we track over 800,000 …
We collect these billions of daily queries via API, with the search engines providing them to all advertisers who buy keywords. We categorize them along 3 axes: brands, products and intentions.
Keyword lists are generated using search engines that offer suggestions. We also use AI engines to enrich these lists. These are then sorted using Natural Language Processing tools, which measure the distance between keywords, so as to establish relevant groupings.
Of course, these sets of keywords are not fixed in time…
And no, that would be too simple! One of the great strengths of the system is that, for each keyword included, the API enables us to retrieve 48 months of query history.
As I mentioned earlier, at the very start of our adventure over 7 years ago, we began our analyses almost manually. And given the interest they have had for us and our interlocutors, we have automated these analyses and developed an interface to make them accessible, our vision being that they can be useful to many people. But this was only possible by solving some major technical challenges, thanks to the work of an extremely solid team. As a result, we are probably the only company today to be able to offer such an advanced solution, our originality being that we are data specialists with a strong marketing culture.
What sets us apart is that we are data specialists with a strong marketing culture.
One final question. Are your customers necessarily the Insights managers in your companies? And how can they use the platform?
Our offer includes access to the platform, in Saas mode, with the consulting dimension also being key. The first thing we do with our customers is organize two or three workshops to understand their vision of the market. Following this, we can deploy the platform to which they have access in an adapted configuration, with the appropriate thesaurus, which we enrich every month. And, of course, we’re there to provide the advice they need, on a case-by-case basis, including regular reviews.
In fact, we consider corporate Insights teams to be the first to be interested, even if certain uses more specifically concern operational managers, for retail or digital in particular. In companies, these managers are the guardians of the temple of marketing information for decision-making. Our vision is that this appropriation of search intelligence is fully in line with the ongoing transformation of insights departments, now in the age of AI.
FOR ACTION
- Interact with the interviewee : @ Arnaud de Baynast
- Find out more about the Digital Value Insight platform
