Rather than tell the industry what we believed they would spend, we asked them what spend they would be investing in marketing in and what channels they would be making their investments in.  Analysing the feedback of 209 key marketing decision makers we created The Marketing Sentiment Survey, and published this in early January 2017 in partnership with The Irish Times. This research went on to attract local and international attention, and became the barometer for marketing investment in Ireland for 2017.

Understanding

The Marketing Sentiment Survey underscored MediaCom’s focus on outcomes as a driver of business success. We understood the importance of listening to the views and challenges that marketers were expecting to face in 2017 and the years ahead.

It has to be remembered that the beginning of 2017 was a difficult time for many businesses in Ireland to make marketing decisions as the environment had been disrupted by the uncertainties of Brexit, GDPR, increasing costs and the misalignment between general business confidence and consumer sentiment.

Solution and Execution

The Marketing Sentiment Survey analysed and reported the feedback of 209 people in Irish businesses that decide on the level of marketing investment. This comprehensively ranged from CEOs, CMOs, Marketing Directors and Heads of Sales across a mix of small, medium and large sized companies.

We partnered with The Irish Times to present the findings to the Irish marketing industry in early January 2017. This event also featured a panel of some of Ireland’s most experienced marketing professionals, Brian Keating from AIB, Orlaith Blaney from Ervia and Aedamar Howlett from Coca-Cola, who added their thoughts and predictions on the year ahead.

Collaborating with The Irish Times we published the survey as a booklet for the event itself, and as further content that was shared through Marketing.ie and social media.

Results

The Marketing Sentiment Survey was a game changer as it came from the opinions of the marketing industry itself and was set in the realities that these decision makers were dealing with when deciding how to invest their communications spend in 2017.

• The event generated much talkability on social media and our #marketing 2017 hashtag was trending in both Dublin and Ireland as a whole.
• MediaCom Ireland’s twitter followers grew 20% in January 2017.
• Over 100 people attended the Irish Marketing Sentiment Survey event
• The event was covered in The Irish Times, on irishtimes.com, on Newstalk.com, in trade publications Marketing, The Irish Marketing Journal and on RTE Radio 1.
• The survey achieved international recognition with coverage from WARC.com; a first for MediaCom Ireland and a rarity for Irish media agencies.
• The event was the first media-owner research partnership for MediaCom and has paved the way for two further partnerships of this type in 2017 alone.