Wunderman Thompson launches a Covid-19 interactive application

Wunderman Thompson interactive application leads brands in next steps for accelerating localised recovery actions and programming

Whilst many states are still on lockdown, some have opened up and overall businesses are working through planning their COVID-19 road to recovery. In an effort to provide brands and organisations insights for decision-making amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, Wunderman Thompson, a digital marketing company, has launched a powerful interactive application powered by their Identity Network of human insights and IBM’s Watson Machine Learning, to provide a comprehensive view of COVID-19 impacts on communities to help identify and activate steps to support businesses as they navigate the road to recovery.

Built at the intersection of health and economy, this Identity Network application connects the health, transactional and demographic data from Wunderman Thompson’s Identity Network with publicly available Covid-19 data to create a daily updated, county-level view of communities and populations. This initial public view provides meaningful visibility to begin to inform recovery strategy, communications, timing (by location) and activation decisions around programming to accelerate business recovery.

The three areas of the application focus on Health Conditions, Covid-19 and Census (Risk), Health Support within Communities (Readiness), and the Impact of Covid-19 on the Economy (Recovery). The human-insights fueled application was built to inform market-level actions and can be broken into further categories, as outlined below:

Risk: How much a given county population or zip code level is at risk from COVID-19 (based on CDC guidelines)
Readiness: How prepared a county is given its availability of hospital and intensive care unit (ICU) beds
Recovery: How economically impacted counties are, where they are now, how fast they are recovering, and when will they return to “normal”

“Wunderman Thompson combines the full range of the Watson capabilities and toolchain with its vast data streams to create a unique view into a critical aspect of the recovery – and in a manner that protects individual privacy and data ownership,” said Seth Dobrin, Chief Data Officer and Vice President, IBM. “This is a great example of how the Watson toolchain can be applied to accelerate insights and rapidly turn them into valuable solutions for our clients.”

“As the community landscape continues to change, we know the key to helping businesses navigate effectively comes from our ability to identify, refine and activate human insights quickly to deliver value. With our Identity Network powered Risk, Readiness and Recovery application, we’re giving our clients insights to navigate recovery and add their own business information, like store locations, customers or supplier, into their own Recovery programmes,” said Jacques van Niekerk, CEO, Wunderman Thompson Data.

“We are thrilled to have teamed up with IBM Watson as a part of our Identity Network supporting this business-critical application. We are providing guideposts for decision-making in a place none of us has ever been before, and we are encouraged by the support we are providing our clients across varying sectors. We are certain this will help our clients build and activate localised recovery plans, as we all look forward to recovery for our businesses and our communities,” Michael Murray, President Data Products and Chief Product Officer, Wunderman Thompson Data.