The Audience Intelligence Glossary

Core metrics

The numbers that describe an audience: how big it is, how strongly it leans toward something, and how much of a category's attention a brand holds.

• Brand Affinity
  How disproportionately a segment engages with a brand, as a multiplier.
• Affinity Index
  The number itself: segment share divided by baseline share.
• Over- and Underindexing
  When a group is more — or less — represented than the baseline predicts.
• Audience Size
  How many people an audience actually contains — and how that is estimated.
• Audience Overlap
  How much two audiences share the same people — and what that is worth.
• Share of Search
  A brand's share of category search demand — the earliest signal of share shift.
• Share of Voice
  A brand's share of category media presence — what it buys, not what it earns.

Sponsorship

How a partnership between a brand and a rights holder is selected, priced and measured.

• Sponsorship Fit
  Whether a brand and a property actually share an audience — before the money moves.
• Sponsorship ROI
  Return on sponsorship investment — and why most reported figures are not ROI.
• Sponsorship Impact
  The measurable change in demand a partnership caused — against a control.
• Media Value and AVE
  What equivalent advertising would have cost — a reach proxy, not a value.
• Rights Holder
  The party that owns the commercial rights a sponsor buys.

Method

Where audience data comes from, and what the differences between methods mean for the answers you get.

• Audience Analysis
  Describing who a group of people are, beyond age and gender.
• Behavioral Data vs. Panel Research
  Observed behavior against stated answers — what each method can and cannot do.
• Psychographic Segmentation
  Grouping an audience by values and interests rather than by age and income.
• Persona
  A named, fictional stand-in for a segment — useful, and easily misused.
• Lookalike Audience
  A new audience selected for resembling one you already have.

Geography

Bringing an audience down to a place — region, city, catchment area, postal code.

• Regional Affinity
  Where inside a country an audience concentrates, relative to population.
• Geomarketing
  Marketing decisions taken on the basis of where people are.
• Postal Code Targeting
  Selecting audiences at postal-code resolution instead of by region.
• Catchment Area
  The area a location actually draws its visitors from.