/ Japanese"Marketing should not be guesswork"
So says the President of PTP Inc., Masayasu Ariyoshi, referring to TV exposure of an enterprise or organization, which traditionally lacks an equivalent to the "column-inch" metric applied to print media. Seeking to remove the guesswork, and turn marketing via television into an exact quantifiable science, he has developed the SPIDER PRO, a device that does for TV publicity what clipping agencies do for print.
After first seeing a hard disk recorder in the U.S. nine years ago, he knew developing technology would soon allow him to record the relatively small number of Japanese TV channels on a continuous basis. Today, his SPIDER PRO units can continuously record up to eight TV channels, retaining a week's worth of material on internal hard disks.
But simply having the raw video data is not enough. Who has time to sit through a week's worth of TV and search for the parts dealing with a particular subject? The answer is a small army of video taggers (over 100 of them), who watch all this material, classifying and tagging it, transcribing it, and entering it into a database. The Internet is then used to push this tabulated and cross-referenced data to all Spiders. Are you running a promotional campaign, and want to know how many television shows and news programs covered it last week, and for how long? Simply search by the name of the company or product, and SPIDER PRO will take you immediately to the relevant part of each broadcast. The search brings up all references in the last week in all shows on all channels, and you can jump to any such clip within a second, store wanted clips to a "shopping cart"-like list, and archive them to a DVD disc. This provides comprehensive and cost-effective data on television coverage of the product launch.
For a company in the news as the result of a product launch or promotional campaign, it is important to know both the extent and the amount to which the media covers the company and how the marketing efforts are being received right from the opening day of the campaign, allowing the promotion team to fine-tune the pitch and tone of the message, and focus on specific channels which may not be publicizing the campaign as expected. It's equally easy to check your competitors’ efforts in the same market to see their publicity is working, and learn from the plusses and minuses of the competition's marketing and PR efforts, as gauged by the TV exposure.
SPIDER PRO helps companies and organizations to cope with not only the positive aspects of publicity, but also helps when publicity goes sour. Ariyoshi sees SPIDER PRO as a device to help companies deal with risk. For a company facing exposure as the result of product failure (or for any other reason), SPIDER PRO provides those managing reputational and other business risks, such as those in the pharmaceutical and service industries (early adopters of the SPIDER technology) with the ability to search, to view, and analyze the effects of their risk mitigation strategies, as perceived by the broadcast media.
One Spider fits all
SPIDER users can connect to the Spider Web site using a PC, and enter a search term, which is then bookmarked on your SPIDER PRO as a search term, allowing one-touch recall of all TV mentions of the subject (including commercials) over the past week.
Five individual users can set up different search templates, allowing market analysts in five different categories, or five different product or account managers, to track their individual specialties. In a political organization, five different policy specialists can set up their respective fields of interest, and browse though only those parts of the TV coverage that concern them.
Not all spiders are ugly
If your idea of a spider is a hairy eight-legged monster, think again. SPIDER PRO is a sleek, aluminum and translucent plastic case in Scandinavian style, with no front panel controls, harmonizing with almost any modern decor, and fitting stylishly and unobtrusively into a boardroom. The remote control, with single press-button switching between users, matches the look of the main unit, with simple ergonomic gestures used to navigate through the different functions available on SPIDER PRO.
The on-screen displays provide simple uncluttered navigation through the functions through an attractive interface, enabling users to navigate the wealth of information provided with minimal training, and no technical experience needed. Arioyoshi points out that early testers who successfully tested the interface were aged from four to eighty-nine, vindicating his claim that SPIDER PRO is intuitive to use.
Spider fans
Companies such as Coca-Cola, Nestle, Shiseido or Nintendo, who constantly introduce and promote brands are obvious targets for SPIDER PRO’s search and recall capabilities. So too are organizations which do not sell physical products, but need to maintain a high level of trust, for example, investment banks like Morgan Stanley Securities, telecoms services like NTT docomo, or entertainment providers such as Disney, and companies where risk involves the lives of their customers, such as members of the JR group, JAL, Aflac, and Nissan. Politicians like to see themselves on TV as much as the next person (if not more!), and Japan's Liberal Democratic Party is one of the currently over 150 users (and growing fast) of PTP's SPIDER technology.
A modest monthly fee permits full access to the whole of the Spider database, and though the purchase price of the unit is surprisingly low, leasing plans are available, allowing SPIDER PRO to become a low-cost recurring expense, rather than a capital expenditure item.