BrightTag Rebrands To Signal, Addressing How Brands Connect

BrightTag has rebranded to Signal after acquiring the Chicago rival last month, but Joe Stanhope, senior vice president of marketing for the company, said it took more than an acquisition to pick the new name.

It required a deep examination of the company's identity and roadmap, as well as determining how brands and advertising agencies would search for the company's services on the Web.

"The name didn't come from a dream," Stanhope said. "It came from something very deliberate, and one of the reasons I was brought into the company."

In fact, Stanhope said it took about eight months to ink the name, taking into consideration company culture, customers, and vision from the top down. The new name came from a dictionary, rather than a made-up word.  He said clients should think of every consumer action as a signal from which marketers can connect their brand message.

Picking a new name meant understanding what it will sound like when spoken in Portuguese, Italian and Japanese. The company also took into consideration trademarks, IP protection worldwide, and how to pull employees and clients through the journey. 'It was easier to find a domain name and operate globally 20 years ago," Stanhope said. "It's also more difficult these days to find a name with a clean history."

While the new name -- Signal -- delivers on the original message, it also speaks to the future of an open data platform to collect, connect and activate information.

BrightTag began helping companies manage tags or bits of software code that advertisers place on Web sites to help monitor visitors, so they can serve marketing messages to them later. Today, the company's message supports much more than tags through its open data platform Fuse in real-time. Advertisers can take action on the data in real-time and direct those signals to serve advertisements.

Signals from consumer actions on Web sites can trigger follow-up emails and other types of actions. From here the company will work on developing a live segmentation engine as well as more partnerships to package services and build connections with other company's systems, and will expand globally. 

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