• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, June 25, 2020

Zeta Global, a data-driven marketing company co-founded by former Apple CEO John Sculley, has launched a real-time market and consumer data analytics platform to support the changing behavior of consumers since the onset of COVID-19.

Opportunity Explorer ingests demographic, behavioral and location signals from Zeta’s data sets containing 2.4 billion characteristics, including 200 million individuals in the U.S.

It combines the global information in real-time and creates a custom and interactive display that data marketers can analyze and use to take action, using 1 trillion monthly online and offline signals such as behavior, demographics, purchase and location.

The post-COVID economy, as Neej Gore, president of the Data Cloud at Zeta, describes it, is about more than just the re-opening of brick-and-mortar stores. It's about the tectonic shift in consumer behaviors across all verticals. 

During the past month, there have been many changes in attitudes and behavior in terms of interest in the Black Lives Matter movement and related topics, especially at the height of the national protests. Zeta added new data points to address these changes.

Consumer interest in deeper political issues has risen, too, according Gore. “Millennials have been the most engaged segment around Black Lives Matter,” he said. “Within multicultural groups, both Black and Asian Americans were the first to re-engage with content.”

The highest-trending topics during the past 30 days includes National Voting Rights Act, Mass Incarceration, Coalition Against Racism, and George Floyd Memorial Fund.

Since Zeta monitors data in real-time, the company’s platform has been able to see rapidly changing consumer behaviors. The real-time numbers are available in the Opportunity Explorer MarketPulse when hovering over the chart. As of June 24, some of these important trends include:

• Economic Activity Score (key health of the U.S. economy): 2.2% week-over-week increase
• Travel Intenders: 5.5% WoW increase
• Auto Intenders: 2.3% WoW increase
• Retail Visitation: 8% WoW increase
• Retail Sales: 17.7% MoM increase

The current retail designated market ares driving the highest visitation are Denver and Phoenix, while the lowest are Miami and Philadelphia. 

“Within the past two months, we’ve added many audiences that are relevant to the current times including, but not limited to, those that have an intent toward food and grocery delivery services, home cleaning products, streaming providers, Black Lives Matter protests and more,” said Gore. 

Gore believes the platform’s ability to understand intent, combined with the understanding of consumers’ individual psychographic profiles and channel preferences, gives marketers the ability to create and deliver a new type of personalized experience.  

Zeta refers to the segments as “Intender Audiences.”

These are specific audiences its Data Cloud has identified, where consumers have high intent against a certain attribute or outcome. Currently, there are 700 Intender Audiences, with between 30 and 50 added each month. One of Zeta’s unique capabilities, Gore, says is to create a new Audience, and backfill with a year’s worth of data within hours.