What would you do with extra time or money?

From A-Z, Action movies to Zydeco, we at Episode Four can use our “Madonna” tool to tell you how anyone in the United States might answer that question.

Why do we care? Because at Episode Four we are focused on making hits for brands. And to make hits for a specific target audience, we need to know what they like.

Hits might include a song everyone knows or a movie everyone has seen. It might be an app everyone has on their phone or a product that everyone receives for the holidays. A hit provides economic or social value for the hitmaker.

Brands, too, can create or associate themselves with hits. These are content and experiences that lead to ‘water cooler moments.’ In other words, brand hits are pieces of marketing that many people talk about and share with their friends. The economic value of a brand hit comes in the form of business results: awareness, consideration, transactions, advocacy, and so on.

Our work (along with some pop science research) has shown that there is an art and science to creating hits. To codify the science, we have created a tool called “Madonna” – named after one of the greatest multi-hyphenate hitmakers of a generation.

Engineering hits

It is our belief that the most effective way to make a hit is to provide a twist on a genre that our target is familiar, fluent, and interested in.

Genres are wide-ranging and cover all types of music, film, television, books, experiences, and more. We have identified over 330 of the most popular genres in the U.S. Genres are the centerpiece of our tool and real Americans’ preferences about them make up our data set. The science in our process.

The twist is a creative interpretation of the genre that makes people intrigued, interested, and compelled to share with their friends. It’s a new spin, a mashup or unlikely integration that catches and holds someone’s attention and makes the content memorable. Twists are our bits of creative magic and are the ‘art’ of our process.

Madonna is our tool that hopes to provide better insights (science) for our ideas (art).

Building Madonna

Our Madonna tool identifies the genres that are most interesting to any target audience by understanding the types of entertainment and cultural experiences that they most enjoy. 

To build our genre list, we dove headfirst into genre experts and understood how they categorized culture. We borrowed film and television categories from IMDB and Netflix as well as song and podcast genres from Spotify. We looked at literature types on Amazon and dissected sports (and esports) through the lenses of international leagues. We investigated dozens of lists of the top live experiences, events, art installations, food and wine festivals, vacation destinations, hobbies, and so on.

We believe we have created a list of almost everything people could do when they are not working or sleeping.

With this list in hand, we then decided to simply ask people what was interesting to them. We surveyed about 100,000 Americans to understand if they were familiar with a specific genre. And if they were familiar, how likely they would be to spend time or money on it.

We learned a lot of expected and unexpected things about people across the country. Popular genres include bargain shopping, visiting planetariums, and watching miniseries. Conversely, unpopular genres include watching infomercials, going to puppet shows, and playing hockey.

We wanted to get more specific around specific audiences. So we asked people for as much demographic information as they would give us about themselves. Each person who took our survey gave us 19 data points about themselves, their household, their hometown, and their education and job.

Then, inspired by the famous Stanford University brand research study, we asked people how someone might describe their personality. This gave us some nice psychographic texture as people said they were a mix of sincere, exciting, competent, sophisticated, and rugged.

With all of this information in hand, we created a data visualization tool in Tableau that allow us to “see” the data and provide better insights on it.

Using Madonna

Now that we have Madonna up and running, we have been able to pull some surprising insights about a variety of topics. Here are some high-level examples:

For high net worth individuals, golf is polarizing – they equally love it and hate it. The majority enjoy hiking, kayaking, or mountain biking. And they would love to do that while listening to their favorite musical genre: electronic dance music (EDM).

Far and away, the most popular genre category with young Hispanics (18-25) is comedy. Compared to the rest of the country, they index highest for a wide variety of funny things like stand-up comedy, romantic comedy, satire, sitcoms, comedy podcasts, parody, and sketch shows.

Most of the coverage around esports has been about its popularity with young male players. While that is true, our Madonna tool also shows us another audience that is equally passionate: women between the ages of 30-40 who live in cities and are employed full-time.

We use Madonna every day to inspire and brief our creative teams, validate or challenge clients’ media buys or sponsorships, and provide better insights on a specific audience or category.

If you’re interested in meeting Madonna and seeing how she might help you, we’d love to chat.