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Monday
Feb022015

Coverage of CES: Which gadgets and technology brands made the most impact?

From driverless cars to smart watches, autonmous flying drones and wifi enabled washing machines, the avalanche of products which came out of the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show (CES) last month was bewildering. For any PR manager planning a product launch  measuring the impact of coverage can be particularly tricky given the number of brands jostling for space.

One thing PR teams traditionally do, other than gathering clippings from their media monitoring service, is collate  either tweet counts or ‘twitter reach’, a measure of the total number of times the article has been shared on a social media platform.

The new article impact measurement (AIM) tool launched by NLA media access lets you go much further, reviewing both publisher page view data and Twitter reach in the same place. For the first time, this allows brands to know whether that twitter buzz translated into deeper engagement in terms of page views on a national newspaper website.

To demonstrate, we took a look at 40 articles across five national newspaper publishers participating in AIM; the Guardian, Daily Mirror, Daily Telegraph, the Independent and the Times.

First we take a look at online article readership, in order of popularity:

 

The top 5 sampled articles were:

As you can see, the trial of self driving cars really caught people’s attention, although perhaps for the wrong reasons as people were ‘horrified’ at the idea according to a survey covered in The Independent.  The showbiz news around Beats audio was also popular, showing both the value and pitfalls of celebrity brand associations.  Many stories about individual product launches were less popular, although a few such as Intel Sony and Sharp did manage cut through.

Top tweeted articles showed some correlation with most viewed, as you would expect. Also in the top three was the brutally honest ‘people are narcissists’ headline quoting founder of virtual reality company Oculus VR.  No doubt here as to the benefits of a snappy soundbite to encourage social sharing.

From this sample at least, Intel looked to be edging it in terms of PR impact amongst brand coverage.  The company and its products featured in all of the most popular round-up articles as well as landing a popular feature piece on their drone technology in the Telegraph.

If you are interested to find out more about how your organisation could benefit from AIM, NLA media access’ new media monitoring tool, please contact bjohns@nla.co.uk.