Converge Weekly

International Business Machines and a handful of other major marketers, including casino operator Harrah’s Entertainment and software giant Microsoft, are experimenting with developing ad campaigns based in part on what consumers are chatting about on the Web.

For decades, advertisers have relied heavily on sometimes-dated consumer surveys and focus groups to provide grist for their ads. Now, some are using new technologies to scan the Web for key words to find out what consumers are—and aren’t—saying about their brands.

Then, they are incorporating those findings into their more-conventional research and using them not only to choose the overall themes of their marketing campaigns, but also specific text and photos for their ads.

Once the campaigns are up and running, the companies and their ad firms are using the same Web-scanning technologies to gauge consumer reaction to their messages, and to fine-tune them to boost performance.

In creating a recent campaign for its Lotus business software, IBM and its ad agency, Ogilvy North America, tapped sources ranging from consumers’ Web searches to the comments they posted on video sites likeGoogle’s YouTube to their conversations on social-media sites like Twitter.

IBM discovered through online videos that potential customers tended to care less about its technologies themselves than what those technologies could do for them. Instead of talking about voice over Internet protocol or cloud delivery models, for example, they talked about having conversations and meetings.

That insight, says Kristen Lauria, a vice president of marketing and channels at IBM, led to a new print ad with the text “Lotus knows you’re trying to reach the person, not their phone.”

As part of its “Lotus Knows” campaign, aimed at the software’s business clientele, IBM also has rented billboards in airport departure lounges that say “Lotus knows who will miss you,” and bought newspaper ads that say “Lotus knows there’s something you should read in today’s Business section.” Lotus-branded doorknob hangers in hotels claim they know when “you can’t be disturbed.”

Marketers have longed drawn on information from the Web to help them design their Web sites and online marketing campaigns. Now, more of them have begun to use it to guide their marketing across a range of media, including print and TV, and in choosing the overall strategy for those campaigns.

Until this year, “there was no real technology to be able to do that,” says Jean-Philippe Maheu, Ogilvy’s chief digital officer.

“Ultimately, brands need to have a role in society. The best way to have a role in society is to understand how people are talking about things in real time,” says Jean-Philippe Maheu, chief digital officer at Ogilvy, which is owned by WPP. He says that until this year “there was no real technology to be able to do that.”

Ogilvy, a unit of WPP, recently set up a way for employees companywide to tap into the consumer research the ad agency collects on the Web and integrate it into their advertising work.

The agency says its goal is to use the new process to design messages ranging from paid-search ads on the Internet to public-relations pushes to TV spots and online video.

“It’s a big change for us,” Mr. Maheu says.

Last year, Harrah’s Web sites and online ads began to reflect lessons it learned from consumer reviews on travel site TripAdvisor.com. It also started scanning reviews and comments on social-media sites like Twitter and Facebook to better understand consumers’ perception of its casinos, hotels and spas.

Making such changes in its online ads boosted Harrah’s online bookings by a double-digit percentage, says Monica Sullivan, the company’s vice president of advertising.

“It is one of those ‘Aha’ moments, when you think, ‘I should have known that all along. Being relevant to consumers is the way to communicate about your brands,’ ” Ms. Sullivan says. She adds that Harrah’s is finalizing a series of TV, print, radio and Web ads that were inspired at least in part by online research.

One major challenge to doing so, ad executives say, is that advertisers often work with separate agencies for different types of marketing.

Digital marketing shops, which often play second fiddle to more conventional ad agencies used to steering overall strategy for a campaign, are often the ones that conduct these new forms of research.