The study used research firm Nielsen Online’s user-generated content measurement tool Buzzmetrics to track hundreds of millions of online conversations that contained the word advertising.
“Ads”, “false”, “marketers”, “dollars”, “revenue”, “commercials” and “misleading” were the words most commonly used in the same sentence as the term advertising.
Buzzmetrics acts as a search engine, trawling three billion online conversations before analysing posts and other internet content that contains a specific word or term. It then produces a brand association map, which shows which words users most commonly associate with the chosen word.
A similar study around the term “Nike” found that “Adidas”, “air”, “comfortable” and “shoes” were most associated with the brand.
Alex Burmaster, European internet analyst at Nielsen Online, said brands could benefit from monitoring what people associate with their brands over time and measuring the impact of marketing campaigns.
“It’s useful because you don’t know what people discuss about your brand,” he said. “For example, we found that people weren’t talking about golf when they were discussing Nike, despite its sponsorship of Tiger Woods.”
Burmaster said brands could identify threats to their reputation, through the tool. Although the word “sweatshops” was identified as one of the words most associated with Nike, it ranked outside the top 10 words most associated with the brand.
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