March 15, 2019
A deep dive into Brexit

A deep dive into Brexit

By Lisa Nanu, Head of Marketing & PR.

The divorce between London and the EU has become a long and arduous journey for all involved and understandably has been covered by the press on a global scale.

But what are the sectors that will be most affected by Brexit?

ADmantX has scanned hundreds of thousands of pages talking about Brexit from a leading programmatic platform and then used its proprietary NLP technology to understand what topics are most often covered when talking about Brexit, what the predominant sentiment and emotions are, and what are the most mentioned people, places, organizations and concepts in such articles.

The topics that showed up the most in Brexit pages were unsurprisingly related to politics, referendums, elections, parties and Parliament for more than 70%. However, interestingly, we identified many other topics/areas covered in relationship with Brexit.

While some other topics areas were quite expected, like Business Finance for 35% due to the clear debate on the impact of London financial district of Brexit, other were not immediately evident.

For example, we found Brexit covered in many pages about sports (5%) and travel (6%).

How will Brexit affect UK travelling and what problems could arise with airline administration? What will be the consequences for a British football team signing European sports players? Or British players signed for a European club? All these questions are still waiting for a clear answer.

Brexit was quite relevant also in pages about Automotive (3%); many companies in this sector that have plants in the UK are now wondering how taxation or regulation of their activity will be managed in the future, in addition to other doubts about their permanence in the UK.

What about emotions and sentiment?

Due to the widespread uncertainty surrounding Brexit, it is unsurprising that the most common emotions and sentiment in the articles were Negative (60% Negative Sentiment) but more than expected Positive Sentiment (20% positive, 20% neutral) was found on Brexit coverage.

Deep diving on Emotions in the negative Sentiment:

  • Fear, stress, anxiety and confusion were the most found emotions on Brexit articles. Due to the heated debate around it, anger was also an important emotion found.
  • We also identified particular feelings (on top of emotions) like “independence” in all articles which relates to the desire of independence of the UK towards Europe, or to articles about Scotland wanting to remain in the EU and being independent from the UK.

So, what does this mean for advertisers?

This means that Brands that want to manage their communication in regard to Brexit should do it in a precise and not simplistic way.

For example, cutting all Brexit contents (pages with the keyword Brexit on them) will filter too much as around 40% of communication was basic debate with “no negative sentiment” whilst on an emotional level, only few articles had a very negative emotional profile that should to be avoided.

Simultaneously, Brands should be aware that Brexit coverage has a presence in other topics areas like Sport, Travel, Automotive etc., so need to make sure they manage this overlap in their selection of those content areas for their advertising.

The need for an effective and personalized brand safety strategy at the level of the brand and its values and needs (Brand Care), without impacting too much delivery volumes, is therefore essential.  To be effective in this you need advanced true Semantic page reading!

For more information, get in touch!