After a lot of work, we’re overjoyed to announce that our bespoke AI planning platform, DIGBIE, is finally up and running. Developed just for Canopy, DIGBIE uses a wide variety of databases to point us in the direction of the most relevant and most salient mix of cultural data points for each project. Our planning and scoping process will now be much quicker, much more efficient, and - most importantly - will use evidence-based insight to identify the most relevant topics around any given project, and the markets where fieldwork will be most useful.
DIGBIE helps us to identify evidence-based cultural insight in four ways:
· Expanding on the project theme. DIGBIE surveys billions of data points to provide real-time insight on the search terms and topics most associated with the project’s focus. This lets us easily see, for example, which concepts and cultural phenomena are most associated with ‘masculinity,’ in key markets and globally. Clients’ own databases can be added to those already built into DIGBIE, so that results from past projects become part of the cultural analysis we do.
· Planning fieldwork and digital scoping. Because DIGBIE translates and transliterates all queries, it can tell us which corners of the globe show most interest in a project theme – cutting through to state and city level. This can throw up surprises, but lets us see past market sales or growth figures toi dentify areas where interest is greatest, and where it’s growing quickest.
· A demographic dimension. DIGBIE provides demographic data to help us work towards an understanding of how factors like gender, age and ethnicity inform cultural concepts. Using this data opens up avenues of investigation to help us understand why different sub-topics might be interesting to different people.
· Showing change over time.Through DIGBIE, we can focus our preliminary investigations on a specific time period – a financial year, a political event, a new product or campaign launch– to see how cultural constructions of key concepts were affected. We can also gain a sense of which concepts and related topics are growing in popularity, and which are decreasing.
Essentially, DIGBIE is a tool to give us evidence-based rationale for decision-making. Our cultural analysis work is based on human expertise – but we’re only as good as the cultural data we’re looking at. DIGBIE ensures that the cultural data points we’re synthesising are those which are most relevant to the topics our clients want to understand.
From now on, DIGBIE will be used in all our fieldwork and scoping planning, and to help clients narrow down and define the questions and cultural spaces they need to investigate. We’re looking forward to working with our new AI friend – so if you have any questions about how DIGBIE works or would like to see the full DIGBIE creds, do get in touch! (And if you have any questions about cultural spaces, DIGBIE will be helping us answer them…)