For those who know me, resilience has been one of those principles I’ve always adopted, both for my company and for my customers. I remember, when I was CEO of OX2, presenting the Resilience concept to some marketers here in Brussels: what it was, why it was important and how it could be applied to their needs. I was amased to see how most of them didn’t even know what the word exactly meant…

In today’s ever faster evolving world, partially due to the digital evolution, resilience is more than ever essential if companies want to stay ahead of the game. At NextStage we try to be very resilient. Here you’ll start to wonder why I’m saying all this…

Listening to customer feedback and following very productive discussions in the past few weeks with many interesting people in the field of Analytics and Marketing, we have decided that, besides our Onsite Analytics tool, there are other products that make sense to launch.

Why? Because our technology allows to do so much more. It has been challenging for me to decide where to start. If you know Joseph, founder of NextStage and the mind behind our technology, chances are that you had noticed how prolific he can be. He has several blogs, publishing several times a week on top of doing constant research. He comes up with new ideas and applications of our technology very frequently. This was also true in the past thus, at NextStage, there are prototypes of many different tools that we’re planning on releasing in the near future.

The first tool that I want to launch is NSAI (NextStage Advertising Intelligence). NextStage’s NSAI tool allows you to optimize any marketing collateral ranging from a print ad (Yes, offline!) to a website or a banner. You won’t have to wait years: expect it to be ready sometime after the summer. Let me explain you a little bit how it is going to work.

What does NextStage Advertising Intelligence (NSAI) do?

NSAI is an online service where you can come and test your marketing collateral to see how well it’s going to work with your target audience. Not only that: it also tells you what you need to change, giving you recommendations, to better fit your audience.

Basically, you will log into our system and the first thing that you will do is define your target audience(s). This is done through a form that will allow us to understand in our terms who you are targetting to. This reminds me that I’ll have to explain our concept of NextStage Rich Personae, which is one of the most actionable persona clasification that I’ve seen so far but that’s a whole other story.

So, once your target audience is defined, you are ready to upload any marketing collateral or point a url for analysis. Our systems will go through the material and gauge how well it will perform with the audience(s) you have defined.

In more than 90% of the cases, we expect to be able to send you the results within 2 hours. An email will alert you that the analysis has been performed.

NSAI analyzes the different design elements including shapes and colors and also text as our technology understand language and can thus gauge it’s effectiveness. The first version of the tool will only be available for materials in English (US & UK) and canadian French. Well, Joseph will tell you that it also works in Gaelic, as this is the first language that our technology has learned, but honestly, who cares? I’m preparing another post that explains in more details how NSAI does this.

You will then be able to log-in - through the link provided in the email for usablities’ sake - into the system and view the different reports that will show you how well your collateral is going to work with your audience. In addition you will see a list of recommendations that you can apply in order to optimize it and make it more effective. This later is for me the most interesting and valuable feature of our tool and it will fulfill the promise of our tagline: Making Marketing Actionable!

Other future tools

The other tools, also based on existing prototypes, that I’m currently considering to launch in the coming months are the following:

A Resume analyzer

This tool will be very helpful for Human Resources departments that want to have a better understanding of the people that apply to a position. By using this tool, HR Responsibles will be able to better gauge if the candidate will fit the job description and will help to reduce the number of failures in recruiting, a costly endeavour, certainly in these times. I know that a big job site was interested in adding this tool to their offering, but well I wasn’t in charge back then and you know that Joseph is a researcher not a business man ;-)

A Political campaign analyzer

This tool will allow politicians to gauge the effectiveness of their political messages and campaign collateral and also compare themselves to other candidates. NextStage has been active in the political space and has made very accurate predictions of US elections and primary races with an astonishing level of accuracy. You might have seen Joseph on television as he’s always interviewed during US political campaings. Read how NextStage was able to predict election outcomes back in 2004 with amazing accuracy - you can also read Joseph’s prolific work about politics here).

Sentiment Analysis

Last but not least, Joseph has been doing some research in Sentiment analysis lately and he has come with a very interesting aproach, different from what I’ve seen in other products. Our approach is more qualitative than quantitative and our aim is not to replace existing products in the social media space, that crawl the Internet in order to provide buzz monitoring or pr reputation. Instead, our tool will provide a very exhaustive analysis of the materials it feads upon. Joseph has done for example Sentiment Analysis of Zappos’ CEO Twitter Account which presents following a discussion we had with Christopher Berry from Critical Mass.

As we’re not yet done with these developments, we’re open to any feedback, requirements or ideas that you would love to see implemented. Drop me a line through the comments box hereunder or contact me privately through email (rdo @ nextstageanalytics DOT com) or the contact form with your ideas and suggestions.

So what do you think? I’m looking forward hearing from you ;-)

Original Comments

Comment 1

Author: Javier Godoy Date: June 15, 2009 Text: I can’t wait for this tools :-)

Good luck !