• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 29, 2015

Questioning the effectiveness of advertising, California startup Veritone created a cognitive media platform to analyze and act on information not written in advertising copy. The process required Veritone to determine how media influences viewers, listeners, and buyers, and convinces them to take an action.

It focuses on organic media as part of the content and product placements, rather than an advertising units on publisher sites.

The process requires recording, storing and analyzing all spoken words and streaming content, such as video in every media, from television to radio and online video to voicemail and telephone calls. It also means monitoring logos and products placed online and offline for brands like Tommy John men's underwear.

For Tommy John, Veritone processes live radio broadcast reads from a variety of shows. It looks for mentions of the brand, similar to searching in Google AdWords or AdSense for contextually targeted words to target against. Veritone works with about 52 ad clients, as well as media groups and broadcasters like Westwood One, owned and operated by Cumulus Media.

During a panel discussion at OMMA Attribution during Advertising Week, Kunick Kapadia, director of performance marketing at The Gate Worldwide, says not all marketers need to understand how the algorithms work, but they need to understand the concept and become more analytically focused on a variety of media.

Quantifying organic advertising continues to become an enormous struggle. "We can verify impressions served on the Web and, to a lesser degree, offline, but native is a complete black box," says Ryan Steelberg, president at Veritone Media. "We want to index all the data for search and discovery."

The real-time indexing and analysis of broadcast and digital media happens in the cloud-based Veritone Cognitive Media Platform (CMP). It provides automated verification, tracking and attribution of native or organic advertising campaigns that does not require an IAB display ad unit.

Steelberg and his brother Veritone CEO Chad Steelberg, a former Google executive, spearheaded building the platform. It produces an index from ingested data within five minutes after receiving the content, about several thousand hours daily, that lets the brand identify when a specific word or image was used during a broadcast and at what time. The user can analyze the sentiment and tone of the audio, along with specific markets.

The sophisticated technology earned Veritone Media several partnerships with many of the multichannel networks on YouTube to support image and facial recognition, Steelberg says.

The platform has preset cognitive engines supporting analysis. Brands wanting to verify live integration on radio commercial and pre-produced spots would use the cognitive engines transcribe and transcode and fingerprinting, for instance. Everything is time and data stamped to support attribution. It documents whether the campaign drives leads or sales and supports the impact of what marketers spend on organic-type campaigns. 

Veritone will keep the playback and the audit verification for years, but will link back to the source for attribution.