The Ad Council

Overview

Before The Ad Council could put a single public-facing message about Tourette Syndrome into the world, it needed to know what people were already saying about it, and how much of that conversation it could trust. Ten years of online discussion mixes awareness with stigma, jokes with misinformation, lived experience with requests for medical advice. Sorting one from the other, and figuring out who was actually shaping the narrative, was the job.

Black Digital analyzed ten years of Twitter conversation from January 2010 through October 2020, then narrowed the lens to study two years of activity across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Tumblr, and YouTube in more depth. The team tracked volume, impressions, engagement, sentiment, and unique authors, then went a layer deeper: mapping the influencers and communities driving the highest-engagement conversation, and pairing the quantitative picture with human review of context. Volume spikes could mean awareness or they could mean stigma going viral, so the report connected every number back to the conversation behind it, then translated the findings into concrete campaign considerations for messaging, partnerships, and channel selection.

Campaign Results

• 26.7 million potential Twitter impressions analyzed across the ten-year research window
• 59% negative sentiment identified in the ten-year Twitter conversation
• 10,014 topic mentions, 1.4 million engagements, 6.3 million potential impressions, and 4,663 unique authors analyzed across the two-year multichannel window
• Positive references increased from 29% in 2010 to 31% in the 2018–2020 comparison
• Reddit generated 4,145 of the 10,014 multichannel mentions, surfacing a major community and medical-advice conversation that platform assumptions could have missed

The research gave The Ad Council a documented view of the audience environment before a single campaign decision was made: the stigma to counter, the awareness narratives to reinforce, and the voices already earning attention. For Black Digital, it’s proof that social listening can go past a dashboard of numbers and become a working input into campaign strategy.

Related Services

• Campaign Strategy and Creative
• Audience Research and Social Listening
• Social Media Strategy and Management