Recently, while investigating different research resources for procurement professionals to use in the area of marketing spend, I ran across Warc. Warc stands for World Advertising Research Center and it is an online provider of secondary research for advertising and media agencies, brands, market researchers, media owners and universities. Global in scope, Warc has offices in the UK, U.S. and Singapore. Julia Smith, Business Development Director, Americas, discussed the database with me along with providing a demo and trial.
Warc started out as a publisher thirty years ago and still publishes journals including Admap, Market Leader, the Journal of Advertising Research and the International Journal of Market Research. Warc partners with fifty different content curators including 4A’s, IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising), Deloitte, Gale Cengage, Effie Worldwide, ESOMAR, Euromonitor, and World Economics to name a few. The database has a nice elegant design and the browse, search, and narrowing features can all be used in combination to produce results that are current and relevant. Editors hand tag all pieces of content, which ensures the quality of the search results.
The main navigation sections include: Case Studies, Topics, Trends, News, Data, Events, and Your Warc. Warc covers over 8000 case studies and Case Finder helps you find case evidence by industry, objective, media and more. The Topics section links you to Warc Topic Pages, which provide short cuts to the best and latest articles, research papers and case studies on a specific marketing topic or theme. The Warc Index lets you browse all papers and case studies by subject. As all professionals know, conferences can be very expensive to attend. Warc editors write key briefings from major conferences and events in the U.S., Europe, and Asia Pacific. They also list upcoming events and Warc webinars. The Trends section covers trends affecting consumers, brands and markets and uses content mainly from Euromonitor, The Futures Company and Warc proprietary data. The news section consists of news stories that are written by the editors and cover the most important stories. The Data section provides global highlighted aggregated data. It is not industry or brand specific – but market and channel specific. It contains the latest advertising expenditure data from eighty-five global markets via takeaway tables or “build your own table,” a comparison of global media costs and adspend forecasts for twelve key countries, including Warc’s own ad forecast across seven major media and a consensus of the latest third party ad forecasts. Also in this section is access to the Global Marketing Index (Warc and World Economics), which is a monthly indicator of the state of the global marketing industry, and Warc’s Global Outlook 2014-2015.
