Complex Networks built its own audience insights panel, called Complex Collective, to not only bypass the guessing games but to boost its offerings to advertisers by giving them more information on key demographics.

Launched at the beginning of 2020, the Collective has since amassed over 30,000 participants who have signed up to provide their perspective for research projects. Some of those thoughts have been turned into insights that help marketers inform their ad campaigns, of which has totaled seven-figures in revenue, according to Complex Collective general manager Aaron Baxter. He would not say how much that actually represented or what percentage of total company revenue it accounted for.

This was Complex Network’s first business-to-business operation to inform brand partners on audience habits across everything Complex Network is doing from understanding consumer e-commerce habits to mobile usage to interests in e-gaming.

The group of 30,000 is meant to be reflective of Complex Network’s collective audience across its four brands — culture title Complex, music brand Pigeons & Planes, food brand First We Feast and sneaker title Sole Collector — Baxter said.

In its first year, the Collective generated three large-scale trend reports that had more than 1,000 audience responses in each. These reports were put together by the edit team tracking industry trends and painted a broad picture of the media company’s audience. They included topics such as the pandemic’s stress impact on younger generations and how to mobilize undecided and disenfranchised young voters. The data was used by both Complex and was shared with interested marketers.

The Collective also boasts being able to produce granular reports on specific demographics as it also created 26 smaller “spot insight” research initiatives and 3,000 other reports that were, on occasion, solicited by brands, Baxter said.

The goal for 2021 is to more than double the output of research it did this year and have just under 10 trend reports that cover topics ranging from the future of influence to the future of gaming.

Currently, there are three ways that Collective is able to sell these reports.

The first is by sharing the custom research, like the trend reports, that were created apart from brands’ involvement, but with the hope that brands will buy the insights for their lead generation.

The second is through brand solicitation, in which brands work with the Collective team to craft their own research reports based on a specific problem they are having. And the third is using the research as a source of first-party data to learn more about Complex’s audience segments. Baxter declined to share the pricing for the different models.

Banana Republic, for example, commissioned the Collective to inform how it could get younger men to shop inside its …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron