• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, October 28, 2024

Funded in part by DreamWorks founder Jeffrey Katzenberg, the AI-powered intelligence platform Alembic announced what its CEO calls a brand health sentiment tool that lets companies measure daily customer feelings about its brands and respond quickly to changes in the market.

Alembic, an applied science and marketing attribution company, in February secured $14 million in series A funding led by WndrCo, a venture capital firm founded by Katzenberg.

If a company puts a dollar into a campaign, Alembic determines if it can get $1.50 out of it, explained Tomas Puig, the company’s co-founder and CEO. “The benefit to CMOs is the ability to stop arguing with the CFO and a longed attribution window,” he said.

Puig refers to himself as a nerd, and still considers Alembic a startup despite it being around since 2018.

“It took OpenAI 11 years to build their tech before it released ChatGPT,” he said. “You’re a startup for awhile when you’re in tech. We just recently went into the market.”

While growing up, Puig had a punk rock band, “and was convinced they would become the next Green Day.” When that dream ended, he went to work for NASA as a teenage intern, where he did coding. Then got a job at some traditional agencies before moving into a CMO role.

“One reason I ended up in film and advertising is I just loved telling stories,” Puig said. “The number one reason Alembic exists as a business is because all I want to do is turn marketers into storytellers. They shouldn’t have to worry about this stuff.”

He said the Brand Health Daily Sentiment tool that launched today analyzes the causal effects of things through monstrous amounts of technical knowhow, supercomputers and AI.

The idea is to eliminate a blind spot by providing daily insights that help CMOs make informed decisions through data -- not just first-party data but by connecting to large numbers of data sources such as Salesforce and Google Analytics.

By tracking daily sentiment, brands can monitor shifts in customer behavior to understand the direct impact on businesses using the technology.

“In the world of AI, the thinking must change a bit,” he said. “Previously, we said too much information is a bad thing. But with AI, the models have a deep hunger for more information. As you feed them more information, they get smarter.”

This is unlike strategies of the early 2000s, when companies like Target and Walmart complained about having too much data related to radio frequency identification strategies to track products through their supply chain. Puig said mathematics couldn’t keep up.

“That was the world at the time. Today’s AI models can’t have enough data,” Puig said. “If they have too little information they fail. Logic has turned on its head like horses have become motor cars.”

Alembic's tool collects daily sentiment scores at a statistically significant scale, allowing brands to monitor and respond to real-time changes in brand health. Unlike traditional products that rely on quarterly or periodic surveys, Alembic tracks and processes daily data sources across brand surveys, social media, and web traffic.

It can analyze demographic data, competitive benchmarking, and AI-driven insights, giving brands a complete view of their market position to enable faster, more informed decision-making.

Puig said every marketer and media person wants measurement where the bookie is not the scorekeeper. Google, Facebook and others price the media, as well as run the performance of the media, and the systems are intertwined. These companies shouldn’t be doing both, he said.

"I want the company to become the central nervous system for enterprise companies," he said. Attempting to determine whether success was achieved by the campaign or the macro environment is really difficult, he said, adding: "All those questions that occur when you have highly complex systems -- you need be able to feel and see every component of the company. That's what we are doing now."