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Overtone Community Lens

Online we are often alone in a crowd. You scroll through the “for you” feed on a social platform or other recommendations designed to have you engage and keep scrolling.

The monetization aspect of the internet also works similarly, with systems designed to find out where you were last week, what your identity is and whether you are likely to buy an object like a toilet seat or not. If you are, you may receive an advertisement for one. Or ten.

Individuals may buy things, but it’s the communities they are part of, families, jobs, fandoms, that really are the focus of their lives. Brands, from soft drinks to software, realize this and increasingly are trying to connect to those communities as a place to do business. Overtone believes in maintaining people’s privacy and thinks that the best way to understand communities online is through the content they read, watch and listen to.

Content-based Audiences

Let’s take for example the case of an advertiser who is telling people about an upcoming show, in this case Giuseppe Verdi’s Il Trovatore, which is on at the Royal Ballet & Opera in London. As that advertiser, I want to reach people who would be interested in coming to this opera, which is dark and dramatic.

I can go looking for some sort of data that spotlights a dark and dramatic person, or search for individuals who used their credit card on a ticketing website in the last six months, but there is another way that is more privacy focused and more resonant with my ad banner (in the image below).

Now that technology can have a fine-grained, more human understanding of content, I can use a tool such as Overtone to find the places where my audience is already in the mood for potentially going to the opera.

After all, my potential customer may be a banker in the City of London or a father of three somewhere in Kent, but if they are reading about stock prices or updates to the local school schedule, they are essentially a different person at that moment from the opera lover I want them to be. The article one is looking at makes the audience.

In the example below you can see two articles from the same outlet about entertainment, which both mention keywords like “drama.” But Overtone’s tech (having analyzed the brief) can recommend that your ad appears on the article about theatre and screen icon Richard Burton, but not on one about reality TV. It can pick up the subtleties of tone, the way a human would, to make a recommendation.

What makes a community

Because the way that Overtone’s tech works involves fine-grained understanding of things like the emotional tone, level of opinion and type of journalism, this can also help people trying to reach an audience understand exactly what makes that audience tick.

In the example above, the model that was built from Overtone’s signals to reach potential opera-goers can be used to evaluate thousands of articles from around the world, and give them a score for the opera campaign. But, in a big difference from asking an LLM to do this, for example, it can also use concerete data to show us why it is making that decision and let humans tinker with decisions they don’t like.

So for the Il Trovatore campaign, we can see that model is more likely to rate in-depth articles as the sort of articles our opera goers read, or articles that mention “composers” or articles that mention the TV series Succession, which while set in contemporary New York, also has a high level of drama. Similarly, if an article is a listicle or about Sabrina Carpenter, the people we want to reach are probably not in the group reading it.

Communities in Real Time

Reaching communities through what they read is particularly powerful when you can understand that community over time, as Overtone discussed in our last newsletter. When a community around a TV show, sports team, concert or city is reading articles that speak to them as a group, they are no longer just isolated individuals, but reachable as a collective.

While the hyper-connected internet can actually be a very isolating place, understanding where readers are in their lives at that moment, from checking football scores to ordering diapers, can help brands speak more directly to their potential customers and support the content that community reads. Using AI can make things more human.

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