The PRmoment Tool Review: Audience insight tool Bertie gets four stars

Tool name and maker
Bertie, from Delineate

Competitive set
YouGov Profiles, GlobalWebIndex, Kantar TGI

Bertie is a syndicated audience insight tool designed specifically for the business to business (B2B) market. The tool allows the user to build bespoke audiences to analyse by combining information held in a dataset that is updated quarterly. The dataset includes information about the influences, attitudes and media consumption habits of B2B professionals.

Price as reviewed
12-month UK subscription: £36,000 + VAT per annum. This includes concurrent user accounts to access the UK dataset.

The test
To test Bertie we used the tool to analyse the media consumption habits of c-suite professionals in working SMEs.

How it performed
We used Bertie to create a new variable to reflect our target audience. Using the variable builder, we selected metrics from the ‘firmographics’ section of Bertie to build this audience with Boolean operators (eg, and, or).

We created a group of individuals who work in organisations with less than 250 employees and are executive board members (eg, CEO, managing director), part of senior management (eg, COO, CMO, CFO) or business owners. At the time of testing there was a robust sample of 276 individuals in the Bertie dataset (Q1/Q2 2019) that met these criteria.

With our new variable created we were then able to explore the media consumption habits of this audience. We were able to get an understanding of the types of media this audience engaged with in general and for business purposes including paid advertising and editorial content. From the platform we were able to not only establish the media channels they interacted with but also their rationale for engaging with each channel (e.g. to find potential suppliers for their organisation). The Bertie database contained detailed information about the specific newspapers, magazines and trade titles read by these individuals. We also were able to assess at the specific TV channels and radio stations they watch and listen to.

We were able to output our analysis to Excel and save it in a ‘portfolio’ folder within the Bertie platform for future reference.

Likes
Overall, Bertie is a solid platform for exploring insights about B2B audiences.

• Specific B2B metrics related to business decision making.
• Ability to use Boolean operators to build audience from any metric within the dataset.
• Ability to easily export analysis to Excel and save your analysis within the platform.

Dislikes
Bertie is a very powerful tool once you get familiar with how it works. There are few areas which could be revised to improve its effectiveness and functionality.

• At the time of testing the total sample size of UK dataset was 4,000. This is limiting when looking at very niche audiences or sectors.
• It would be useful for the platform to highlight when the analysis is based on small sample sizes.
• The interface could be more user-friendly for those that aren’t familiar with using data processing tools.

Star rating (out of 5)

Written by Eze Klass, research account director at PR agency Citypress