Commentary

BrandTech Helps Put Brands First on Digital Platforms

As platforms continue to grow in dominance and video overtakes the Internet, brands now, more than ever, need to consider their equity across all channels.

No longer relegated to the receiving end of brand messages through TV and traditional media, consumers are increasingly interacting with brands on platforms like Google, with YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat.

The majority of dollars will shift in the coming years from traditional television to these global platforms. Brands need to locate their presence within the digital media ecosystem and make certain their equity and message align with the content they sponsor.

But brands are faced with an ocean of content so vast, it’s hard to make sense of what’s out there. Marketers must rely on emerging technologies to interpret the landscape.

The more that technology improves, the deeper our capacity to comprehend brand equity wherever it intersects with consumers. To best offer visibility and insight into brand equity — and create a competitive advantage in the marketplace — a new industry will emerge: BrandTech.

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What is BrandTech?

BrandTech takes the considerations of brands into account first, empowering marketers to see and understand the context of their equity wherever it lives. Today’s global platforms access the power of the Web; they can unlock granular data and deep consumer insights.

Understanding that data — and ultimately a brand’s digital existence — requires technologies that, unlike ad tech, harness the power of these platforms to give brands an unbiased and transparent map of the media ecosystem.

With increasing importance placed on brands’ digital presence, the time has come for them to take advantage of that data to best understand their audiences and reach them with the right content.

Why now?

One word: video. Video has an emotional impact on the consumer that can’t be replicated with text, banner or radio. Since 1941 until the birth of the Internet, the only outlet with reach for video advertising was television.

The best part of television’s trajectory is that the technology supporting that industry evolved slowly, compared to today’s pace. Consequently, advertisers had time to develop standards, best practices, and uniformly accepted measurements.

But today, video moves too fast to comprehend.

On YouTube alone, hundreds of hours of content are uploaded every minute, and more than 1 billion hours of video are watched on the platform daily. Today’s marketers can’t grow and safeguard their brand equity without BrandTech to help understand and navigate video on these global platforms.

BrandTech has already begun to emerge in the marketplace

Over the last year, the industry awoke to the fact that it’s not the job of the platforms to cooperate and create uniformity and clarity, even if platforms benefit from that outcome. To paraphrase Martin Sorrell’s blunt comments around viewability last year, you can’t grade your own homework.

What is required: Tech-driven companies that have access to the platforms and the ability to provide unbiased, transparent intelligence to marketers to make platform-wide decisions. 

Companies like Moat, Integral Science, Double Verify, along with Nielsen and comScore, were all empowered to track viewability on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. In future, those firms and others will expand beyond viewability into issues like content alignment.

We’ll look back at this moment as the beginnings of BrandTech.

The cynic might question whether these “walled gardens” will cooperate with the emergence BrandTech, but it is in everyone’s best interest to cooperate. We don’t have the luxury of time to evolve.

Savvy marketers are ready to build upon their practices from television and tap into their full potential online. Welcome to the era of BrandTech.

 

 

 

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