XN Project: Pros & Cons Paper
Sponsor: Viacom
Company name:  Viacom
Project title:  Visualization for Audience Performance
Project Description:  Some background- as a media and entertainment company Viacom creates content, and creates content on behalf of client advertisers, which we distribute to our various platforms, one being our social handles. On our social handles we target many different types of audiences. For this project we hope to understand which audiences have been most successful for us in the past, and using this knowledge can we understand which audiences will be most valuable for us in the future. Audiences on social come in all shapes and sizes, some may be very niche and specific, for example all tennis-players above 65, and some may be much more broad, for example anyone living in the US above 18. Each audience will have a unique behavioral profile that we wish to understand. We want to students to strategize, given the performance and delivery data that we have on our social audiences, what types of audiences should we focus our resources on given various objectives.  First, we want to understand the performance of our content across the various audience types. For example, how many impressions, video views, engagements have these audiences accrued, how many times have the audiences been targeted for various ad campaigns, and how much does it cost to target them. We also want to understand the size of the audiences and how that may relate to performance of given ad campaigns. The objectives we want to optimize for are total impressions, total reach (unique impressions), total video views, total engagements, engagement rate (engagements/impressions), high video retention, and low cost. We’re looking for understanding on which audiences should be used given the objective, and can we understand attributes of an audience may contribute to good performance in a given objective.

Goal:  Students will be expected to create visualizations of the performance of the audiences; these may include average number of impressions delivered per ad, average cpm per ad etc. Also, which audiences or group of audiences would be most suitable for a given objective and what are audience attributes that contribute strongly to performing well in a given objective. Students are expected to summarize their results in a powerpoint presentation.  Students will help Viacom understand if they are reaching the right audience on their social media channels by analyzing the performance of various ad campaigns that target various audiences. Students will develop an analysis using real-world data to understand what drives success in reaching the right audience for the right objective. Finally, students will gain experience in summarizing their results using visualizations and presentations.

Assignment: XN Pros & Cons Paper
Requirement: 500 words. Pros & Cons of Data as it relates to Viacom Business Performance Impact APA formatting – Title page, reference page, headers, citing references within the body, etc

Imagined Towns

Consider the list of towns below from The Accuracy Project, which has compiled the most unusual, amusing, beautiful, humorous or bizarre place names in the United States. While some of these names are historical and no longer exist, they all are or were the names for real places.

Choose ONE of the towns from below and use it to write a 300-500 word flash story. What does it feel like to live there? What are its landscapes, weathers, flora, fauna, and human residents? Who is desperate to leavebut cant? Who never wants to go away?

Goose Egg, Wyoming

Buttermilk, Arkansas

Scrabble, West Virginia

Cyclone, Texas

What Cheer, Iowa

Zigzag, Oregon

Horse Head, Virginia

Dogtown, California

Devils Backbone, Connecticut

Angel Fire, New Mexico

Frogtown, Illinois

Lost, Minnesota

Money, Mississippi

Burnt Water, Arizona

Roach, Nevada

Why, Arizona

Talking Rock, Georgia

Neversink, Pennsylvania

Star, Oklahoma