Turning Dialect Into Data

U.K-based company Relative Insight analyzes language and turns it into a data file. Originally developed to help law enforcement to catch cyber criminals, the technology has recently expanded into the marketing world.

Looking at Manhattan from the window of a Midtown conference room, Ben Hookway says he finds New York fascinating. There are so many reasons why that could be, but he’s talking about urban morphology.

“I’m always attracted to cities by the sea,” says Hookway, a surfer and windsurfer from Scotland, not the first place one would expect to grow a water sports enthusiast. “What I find amazing about New York is, it’s banded by water: the ocean, the rivers, the really natural lines, and this forced concentration of everything: talent and ideas and even anger sometimes. Just everything.”

Hookway is in town, taking meetings and meeting potential clients, all with the goal of expanding Relative Insight to the U.S. market. The name of both the company and the technology it utilizes, Relative Insight turns language into data.

“We’ll take any text – it could be social media, it could be forums, it could be review sites, above-the-line ad copy, anything – and put it into our black box of magic,” says Hookway, the company’s chief executive (CEO). “We look at grammar, semantic topics, medidata, any combination of things, and then it comes out of the black box, and it’s a data file. We compare data files and draw some interesting conclusions.”

“It sounds almost grandiose to say, but it’s potentially a whole sector in itself,” he continues.

relativeinsight

CEO Ben Hookway (left) and CMO Rich Wilson of Relative Insight

Relative Insight started with James Walkerdine and Phil Greenwood, two students at Lancaster University in Northern England, who spent a decade building the technology. Initially developed for law enforcement, Relative Insight was used to catch people who were up to no good on the Internet. A magician doesn’t reveal his secrets, so Hookway’s lips are sealed on how exactly the black box of magic works. But just know that it’s sophisticated enough that police could distinguish a 12-year-old girl in a chat room from a 50-year-old man doing an admirable job of imitating one.

EV Group, a venture capital group based in Manchester, got wind of the technology and brought in Hookway, a former TechHub adviser who’s also worked with mobile interface technology in San Francisco. As CEO, his first course of action was to leave the two scholars alone for a little while. “Sometimes with these clever, hardcore tech companies, you just need to give it room to breathe,” he says. “You need a business plan, but you also need to give smart people time.”

Believing that a company’s culture is defined by its first few employees, Hookway’s next step was to build a team with chemistry and rapport. The technology’s two founders currently serve as chief operating officer (COO) and chief technology officer (CTO). Rich Wilson, whose tech career started with a German engineering firm almost 20 years ago, is the chief marketing officer (CMO).

“There’s almost a societal demand for evidence everywhere: politics, marketing. Everyone wants evidence,” says Wilson, who’s from just south of Northern England. “As the research was maturing, it was like a perfect storm happening,” he continues. “You get a feel for when something is going to take off.”

Hookway accompanied a friend to an unrelated pitch deck at a Manchester creative agency. When he saw a word cloud on the board, that’s when he knew how well Relative Insight would translate to marketing. “I asked about the analysis technique and she said, ‘It’s a word cloud,'” Hookway recalls. “I said, ‘I know it’s a word cloud, but can you tell me about the analysis?’ ‘…It’s a word cloud.”

wordcloud930

Recently launched in the marketing world, Relative Insight has worked with agencies in the U.K. such as Ogilvy & Mather, Havas, Saatchi & Saatchi, and brands in the automotive, technology, and skincare industries, among others.

Marketing is based on two things – imagery and language – that are completely subjective. To that end, Relative Insight will analyze all of a brand’s marketing materials and turn that subjective into something objective.

Just as the “black box of magic” can tell the difference between a preteen and a pedophile, Relative Insight can also understand context clues and figure out if the word “navy,” for instance, refers to the color or the military. Relative Insight makes sure a brand’s voice is consistent across its billboards, direct mail, and social channels, while capturing grammar, acronyms, and colloquialisms and looking at word choice.

“The word ‘we’ is a particularly tricky one,” Hookway says. “If you’re trying to develop a persona of inclusiveness, you can say, ‘We are going to make a difference.’ They’re saying, you the consumer and me the brand. Everyone in the marketing meeting understands that, but when you read it as a consumer, it reads like we, as in only the brand. That’s the kind of significance we’re looking for.”

While working with a telecommunications company about to release its newest camera phone, Relative Insight scanned forums and review sites, and discovered a glaring error. The company lauded what “great pictures” the phone took; however, the serious photographers being targeted don’t “take pictures.” They “shoot images.”

Subtle, but key. “That’s the beauty of language: all the subtleties around it and interpretations,” Wilson says. “It’s not black and white; there are shades of gray.”

“Looking at language in isolation is seldom informative,” he continues. “Only comparing it to something and giving it some context, does it have value.”

shutterstock-110788055

Another thing Relative Insight does is look at what consumers say about a brand, whether they speak factually, emotionally, descriptively, in relation to other brands, or in relation to their own lives. For example, they found that consumers who talk about BMW are more likely to focus on aesthetics than Volvo users, who use more terms related to safety and functionality. And Microsoft Mobile’s feature-driven campaigns were heavy on words like “megahertz” and “megapixel,” rather than superlative words like “magical,” “next generation,” “experience,” and “awesome.”

“The demand for marketing to become more data-driven puts pressure on people to make decisions based on data,” Wilson says, noting that since Google changed its algorithm, the focus isn’t so much on keywords anymore. “The thing about social media is, data is quite easy to get and quite easy to analyze – there’s a danger that marketing professionals mistake easy-to-access data with valuable data.”

With this data, brands will know the right language to use, whether they’re targeting a 25-year-old female in Australia or her 72-year-old great uncle in Iceland.

“The big vision is to model the world’s language,” says Wilson, who’s happy to be in New York, one of his favorite places in the world. Ever the tech guy, he’s also partial to the Palo Alto, as well as San Francisco and the Austrian Alps, where he snowboards. He says Brits tend to go to France, but Austria is infinitely more convenient, since ski resorts surround the airport.

But more so than the villagey feel of Palo Alto or Innsbruck’s après ski vibe, Wilson loves the energy of New York and appreciates how direct its people are, especially coming from the more stereotypically reserved U.K. Relative Insight has grown so quickly that he and Hookway are stateside about a year earlier than anticipated, a fact that indicates they’ll be back in the city before long.

Graphics via Shutterstock.

Subscribe to get your daily business insights

Whitepapers

US Mobile Streaming Behavior
Whitepaper | Mobile

US Mobile Streaming Behavior

5y

US Mobile Streaming Behavior

Streaming has become a staple of US media-viewing habits. Streaming video, however, still comes with a variety of pesky frustrations that viewers are ...

View resource
Winning the Data Game: Digital Analytics Tactics for Media Groups
Whitepaper | Analyzing Customer Data

Winning the Data Game: Digital Analytics Tactics for Media Groups

5y

Winning the Data Game: Digital Analytics Tactics f...

Data is the lifeblood of so many companies today. You need more of it, all of which at higher quality, and all the meanwhile being compliant with data...

View resource
Learning to win the talent war: how digital marketing can develop its people
Whitepaper | Digital Marketing

Learning to win the talent war: how digital marketing can develop its peopl...

2y

Learning to win the talent war: how digital market...

This report documents the findings of a Fireside chat held by ClickZ in the first quarter of 2022. It provides expert insight on how companies can ret...

View resource
Engagement To Empowerment - Winning in Today's Experience Economy
Report | Digital Transformation

Engagement To Empowerment - Winning in Today's Experience Economy

1m

Engagement To Empowerment - Winning in Today's Exp...

Customers decide fast, influenced by only 2.5 touchpoints – globally! Make sure your brand shines in those critical moments. Read More...

View resource