Monday, 20 April 2020

- Launches the Italy Barometer with Hearst to understand how people are reacting at the epicenter of COVID-19 -

Pulsar, the audience intelligence and social listening platform, has launched ‘Mapping the New Normal’ revealing trends in global conversations, behaviors and response to COVID-19. Based on analysis of millions of online conversations across social media, search, forums, news web, ‘New Normal’ provides insights into how populations around the world are reacting and what is driving emerging new behaviors – from interest in new policies such as Universal Basic Income to the emergence of DIY haircuts, new shopping habits and food deliveries.

To kick start the initiative, Pulsar announced two projects: launch of a publicly available #Newnormal dashboard identifying then tracking emerging trends in consumer behaviour; and a partnership with Hearst, publisher of brands including Esquire, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, ELLE and Harper’s Bazaar, on the Italian and Spanish Barometer indexing how the populations are feeling and behaving week to week since the COVID-19 lockdown.

Italy and Spain have emerged as the new epicenter of the global pandemic and have experienced two of the largest and ‘oldest’ outbreaks of the virus, second only to China and the US. With the countries having been in quarantine for over a month, the Pulsar barometers provides second to none insight into the social impact of the pandemic based on analysis in real-time of online conversations and behaviors. It analyses more than four million posts per week to reveal how Italy and Spain are slowly becoming more optimistic about the future but are most nostalgic respectively for their families and their nightlife with food and friends as key factors giving hope for a better future to come.

Francesco D’Orazio, CEO of Pulsar, commented: “When the crisis hit us we realised that all the analysis available was focused on the medical and financial side of the crisis but no one was focussing on how our everyday lives where changing. With every day that goes by, we are adapting and changing our behavior to shape a new reality. ‘Mapping the New Normal’ is trying to shed some light on what this new reality looks like and what new behaviours are likely to stick or dissipate once this is all over. It will provide insights that we hope will build understanding of trends in behaviour as populations adapt to the COVID-19 emergency and contribute to improving our global response.”
The #NewNormal dashboard identifies emergent online behaviors globally with the most recent topics including virtual backgrounds, head shaves and recreating art masterpieces at home. Topics are updated daily with input from the Pulsar research team, partners and users around the world and discussed in the New Normal Report, a weekly Zoom chat that started on Wednesday April 15th.

-ENDS-

For more information
Contact Davide Berretta, VP Marketing, davide.berretta@pulsarplatform.com

About Pulsar
Pulsar is the leading AI-powered audience intelligence platform. Combining conversational and behavioural signals from the world’s leading digital destinations, Pulsar helps brands understand their audiences better and create messages that matter to them. It is part of the AIM-listed Access Intelligence Group which develops high quality SaaS software to address the fundamental business needs of the media, PR, marketing and communications industries used by more than 3,500 global organisations every day. Alongside Pulsar, this includes Vuelio, the platform that helps organizations make their story matter and ResponseSource, the network that connects media and influencers to the resources they need, fast.

Pulsar has three software and one consultancy offering:
TRAC: the most advanced social listening and insights tool on the market, Pulsar TRAC uses AI to help customers analyse public conversation topics from open and premium data sources, seamlessly breaking down those audiences into communities of interest to guide marketing strategy and activation.

TRENDS: the "Google Trends for social media", Pulsar TRENDS allows customers to track the momentum of conversation topics on social media in real time at both the global and local level, with historical data going back 14 years.

CORE: the one-stop-shop monitoring tool for owned-channel analytics, Pulsar CORE allows customers to monitor the growth of their audience, benchmark against competitors, and track the performance of content across channels, from social media to Google Analytics.

Research: blending some of the brightest minds in
audience intelligence with custom analytics models by industry, Pulsar works with leading brands in continuous and one-off research engagements, integrating quantitative and qualitative methodologies to turn audience data into strategic insight.