Hello! My name is Adam, and I recently joined Peerset’s corporate development team. I’ve just moved back to sunny California after a three-year sojourn on the frigid east coast and a three month hike across the Iberian Peninsula. My bones have finally thawed, my blisters have healed, and my mind is ready to tackle the science of human interest.
One of the many interesting applications of Peerset’s science beyond ad targeting is its ability to provide beneath-the-surface insights about brands beyond what the brands themselves may know or suspect. With our new San Francisco-based team in place, we’ve been digging around in Peerset’s engine to see how our data might be able to start conversations about the attitudes, values, and lifestyles implicit in big brand campaigns. We will be sharing interesting cases as they arise, and we begin today with American Express (by the way, you can sample a taste of our Insights directly on the Peerset homepage).
What is American Express selling?
Exclusivity. Membership. Privilege. American Express’ marketers would have you believe that their card constitutes not just a source of credit, but rather an all-access, bespoke, VIP-only pass to the world’s corridors of wealth and luxury. You are not just a cardholder, a client, or a customer—you are a cardmember
gt;. Are You a Cardmember is the title of a recent ad campaign, and who can forget the proudly Victorian tone the company struck with its Membership Has Its Privileges slogan? This sell is based on an in-group/out-group sort of mentality, where the in-group is a carefully targeted audience segment over whom recent celebrity endorsers such as Martin Scorsese, Andy Roddick, and Larry David are likely to hold sway. This is not a bad strategy. Fans of Roddick, according to our Peerset engine, are likely to be Harvard-educated and own golden retrievers; these people probably earn decent incomes; they may spend their summers on Cape Cod, or pass a weekend navigating the fairways at Pebble Beach. The company even has a virtual “Members Clubhouse”, asking users pointedly, “Are you stuck in the rough, or are you a cardmember?”—just in case you are not completely convinced that having an American Express card is no different than belonging to an exclusive club.
OK. Now what? Well, instead of plugging obvious keywords like “shopping” or “travel” into our engine, we can enter keywords that are conceptually related to the American Express brand experience. For example, the keyword anchor “VIP” correlates very strongly at the interest level with Las Vegas and Miami—two destinations both geographically and conceptually far from Cape Cod sailboats. Other interests correlating on this level are house music, hip hop, the ‘scene’, and BMWs. This may partly explain the reference to the brand in Italian DJ Cristian Marchi’s hit “Love Sex American Express”, which hit #1 in Italy and Spain in late 2008.
American Express may be starting to understand this aspect to their pitch—recent spots featuring Beyoncé and Alicia Keys are apt to appeal more strongly to those who prefer a dance club on Saturday night to a country club on Sunday afternoon. It is possible that American Express is just on the cusp of an opportunity to market to a huge swath of the country that is ready and willing to listen to its message of exclusivity and privilege. And I don’t just mean this on a theoretical, I-wish-I-was-still-an-undergraduate-and-pontificating-were-my-actual-job sort of way. Check this out: Peerset’s top-rated interest match for VIP is Entrepreneurship. This is certainly actionable intelligence in regards, say, to an upselling initiative aimed at bringing personal cardmembers into American Express’ small business line of products. Going even deeper, we find that the VIP keyword anchor correlates highly with keywords “spontaneity” and “unpredictability”. It may be coincidence that five years back we were treated to a spontaneous and unpredictably jiggy Ellen DeGeneres in this fun American Express TV ad, but at the level of interest correlation, its jovial tone supports quite smoothly the selling of exclusivity. Further, interests like recycling and zen link strongly to “unpredictability”. It may be reaching to expect a TV spot showcasing a blinged out Paul van Dyk beneath a bodhi tree, curating a spontaneous party for jet-setting Europeans, the flashiest of which stops to prevent a co-reveler from tossing an aluminum can into the trash, on a dark and sexy dance floor to which the jet-setters’ cardmember status has granted them exclusive access. But, hey, we can still hope.
