The challenge

Our client wanted more rapid, agile insights to fuel their marketing briefs that traditional processes and tools couldn't provide. Clients typically struggle with three key issues:

Slow Response to Changing Trends: The fast-paced nature of trends meant that client's manual processes are not fast enough to keep up.
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Labor-Intensive Efforts: The process of social listening and trend mining was time-consuming and required specialized skills.
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High Costs: The financial implications of employing agencies and allocating resources for trend analysis are significant and often led to duplicated efforts.

The solution

To address these challenges, the Insight Assistant (IA) was developed. IA is a scalable tool designed to unlock trends and insights at the speed of culture, enhancing idea generation and impact across Marketing, Product, and Sales departments. Key benefits include:

Cost Efficiency: IA reduces costs dramatically, from hundreds of thousands to mere hundreds of dollars.

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Accessibility: It makes the trend analysis process accessible to a broader team, from a handful of data specialists to thousands of marketers.

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Time Saving: The tool reduces the time taken for trend analysis from 10 days to just 10 minutes.

IA covers various user journeys, focusing on surfacing and interrogating trends for different teams with specific exploration requirements. It’s designed for integration with other tools and workflows, streamlining the trend analysis process. Beta testing was opened to the most relevant teams, allowing for the definition of specific use cases and requirements.

The Innovation

IA leverages English language social data sources, ensuring security, ethics, and legality. Users can choose between data sets for targeted exploration. Enabling users to set trend parameters, explore evidence, and save relevant searches. While supporting the exploration of both broad and niche trends, with the capability to benchmark trends over time.

Insight generation is a key feature of IA, with human oversight required to moderate insights. The tool includes features to guide users and assess the quality of output. It integrates expected advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) into insight generation and employs an AI-driven multi-stage approach for validating insights. Additionally, it explores insight success metrics modeling through AI to continuously enhance quality.

The results

The implementation of IA in Beta is being evaluated for wider rollout, the tool improves the speed of understanding of the ever-changing world of consumer trends. This tool not only saves time and reduces costs but also empowers a broader range of team members to engage in meaningful trend analysis, making the process more inclusive and comprehensive.