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Amasa Speaker Series kicks off with Nic Ray from BrandsEye

By Juanita Pienaar

28 Apr 2017

The Cape Town Amasa (Advertising Media Association of South Africa) Speaker Series offers members the opportunity to hear from some of the industry's top decision makers. From business founders, to global experts and advertising gurus, Amasa hosts a variety of interesting and educational speakers at their monthly episodes. The first episode in the series on 20 April 2017 kicked off with speaker, Nic Ray, chief marketing officer at BrandsEye.

Nic Ray, chief marketing officer at BrandsEye

Ray began his talk by explaining that his company “mines content from online conversations for sentiment and the topics driven by this sentiment, by using a proprietary mix of search algorithms, crowd-sourcing and machine learning.” He says, “We believe how people feel about something today influences what they do tomorrow. For example, if someone complains about a certain bank on social media, we say it is quite likely that, that person would eventually leave that bank.” Quite impressively BrandsEye used this technology to accurately predict both Brexit and Donald Trump's victory in 2016 and by doing so proved that meaningful, predictive insights can be gained from online conversation.

BrandsEye evaluates social media analytics trends in 2017

19 Dec 2016

Ray also gave the audience an insight into how BrandsEye could predict the outcome of the recent French elections. Their results showed that Marine Le Pen, François Fillon and Emmanuel Macron faced significant criticism from French social media users but that François Fillon was definitely being undervalued by the polling data whereas Macron was being overvalued. According to BrandsEye, Jean-Luc Mélenchon was the only candidate that maintained a positive sentiment throughout. As we now know, things look a little different now that Fillon and Mélenchon are out of the race and Le Pen and Macron through to the second round. Could this possibly be another battle of the least liked? According to Ray, most likely but only time will tell.

It was a thought-provoking afternoon that left me contemplating what more BrandsEye could foresee, especially regarding South Africa’s immediate political future. It would also be interesting to see what my own social media commentary might say about my future prospects. What a way to start the series, definitely looking forward to next month’s event.

Read more about the Amasa CT Speaker Series’ dates and speakers coming up by clicking here