We highlight a media project that involved creating an NLP-based ESG tracking system to measure the impact of the Colin Kaepernick ad campaign on Nike's ESG performance.
Amenity Analytics, an industry leader in natural language processing (NLP) using artificial intelligence and machine learning, recently leveraged its expertise in collaboration with one of its clients, a global leader in media services to produce a targeted environmental, social, and governance (ESG) tracking system. The NLP model for this system was trained on news articles written specifically about companies whose ESG performance our client was interested in tracking. Called the Insight Engine, the NLP model systematically does the job of an ESG domain expert with unmatched accuracy, providing previously unavailable ESG investing analysis. By providing a custom tool, Amenity Analytics allowed our client to measure the impact of ad campaigns on ESG coverage in the news. One can see the power of this tool by looking at the recent ad campaign that Nike built around Colin Kaepernick.
"Nike's recent collaboration with Colin Kaepernick stands out as an example of how a brand can seize on a key cultural issue and make a statement about its purpose that resonates strongly with consumers." – Forbes.com 11/15/2018
Coming off a six-month downturn caused by workplace harassment and sexual discrimination claims, Nike successfully rebranded its ESG profile in early September 2018 with the release of a campaign that featured Colin Kaepernick. With the athlete-turned-activist providing the face of its new marketing campaign, Nike publicly supported his platform of protesting racial inequality, police brutality, and other discriminatory injustices. Amenity Analytics' NLP platform was able to reveal the transformation of Nike’s public image by identifying and analyzing insights in news coverage of the company,providing a valuable lens into how a company performs on environmental, social,and governance indicators.
Amenity Analytics’ NLP platform uses complex entity targeting to reduce a universe of news articles to only the pertinent insights for a given company.These insights fuel the calculation of an ESG score. As illustrated by our ESG Dashboard, Nike's ESG score experienced a positive turnaround between August and September 2018 (See: Figure 1).
The change reflects the wave of positive news coverage for Nike’s social justice campaign, which counteracted the previous trend of negative insights concerning workplace harassment. Despite initial criticism of the campaign, Amenity Analytics’ ESG analysis shows that overall, the campaign was ESG positive for Nike.
Further validating Amenity’s ESG score is the steady increase in Nike's stock price throughout September, a quantifiable indication that the campaign was positively received by both the general public and industry alike. Amenity’s sophisticated ESG score can provide invaluable wisdom about a company’s current and future standing with consumers that traditional data sources miss.
Amenity Analytics employs many novel techniques and breakthrough technologies to push the envelope of NLP, Machine Learning, and AI in the field of text mining and information extraction. Amenity’s proprietary software, VIP, enables users to not only parse with high accuracy, but also add context and metadata to each extraction, increasing the model’s recall and precision to unparalleled levels.These techniques allow Amenity Analytics to create an ESG investing dataset that encompasses the spectrum of consequential ESG factors
Obtain a copy of this white paper which includes technical details about Amenity Analytics’ ESG model, and a sampling of the related media extractions from Nike’s ESG Dashboard. E-mail: steve@amenityanalytics.com
This communication does not represent investment advice. Transcript text provided by S&P Global Market Intelligence.
Copyright ©2019 Amenity Analytics.
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