RAJAR? BARB? Have you heard of those? Well, if not, here is a brief history lesson. If you wanted to track how many viewers of a TV show you had, you had to go and ask people and calculate the viewership from there. TV aerials didn't have hit counters.
You asked a group of people across various demographics what they watched, and then you scaled that up to the size of each demographic, and you got your viewer number. This meant that if you advertised on Saturday night, you could say how many people watched your show.
If you had to make a complaint,, you wrote to a governing body in that industry or the business directly. You had no other outlet.
Then came the internet, which gave people personal home pages, forums and discussion boards. For the first time ever, you could discuss your thoughts on a product, business or topic in a big group. Brand's probably didn't care as much then as they do now, the use of the internet was limited but people gained a voice.
In the mid-2000s, Web 2.0 arrived. It gave birth to a new era of the internet. Personal home pages became blogs, and discussion groups became Facebook, Twitter, etc. The iPhone saw a mass adoption and more groups than ever.
A new opportunity came, and risk came along with it. If you complained about something big enough, millions could see it.
This content was largely in the form of text - blog posts, discussions, comments etc. YouTube for publishers was largely inaccessible, and video editing was a skill, not an app. Computing power was expensive.
This meant that Brands only had to search for their name. If a company wanted to search the internet for people who reviewed a product, they searched billions of text documents.
The previous methods still exist, and people still use traditional methods of discussion, but they also now use easier YouTube editing, Twitch streams, TikTok and Instagram posts.
It means now that somebody who is disgruntled with a product can post a picture of the product, showing the brand's logo, and say, "This is a pile of crap". Traditionally, it has been very difficult to find that content, and it still is - maybe there's a hashtag, or maybe they tagged the brand. But what if they didn't?
In 20 years, brands have gone from a single channel of complaints to 20 or 30. That's an expensive and resource-intensive task to manage those. How do you manage those? How do you get to respond to a "Pile of crap" comment before 2 million people before have?
DIGITALS aims to do the heavy lifting in finding where and who talks about your brand. Through searching text and logos, we aim just simply to tell you where your brand has been mentioned. We found your brand here. BeerLover24 used your logo in a video titled "Best beers for 2024". We want to give you a suite of tools to manage the issues around channels and outputs effectively, and we want you to do it collaboratively.
Influencer ad growth is expected to continue, other social networks are likely to come, and the ways of content will get more creative. We once had no Shorts; what comes after Shorts? Shorter shorts?
The point is that influencers will grow, and their possible channels out of output will grow. The teams working in marketing departments are going to have to spread themselves over a wider distance.
Competition for "air-time" will increase, and sourcing new influencers will take more input. But what if you could find somebody who has actively used your brand but isn't an influencer? How do you find new influencers to
We want to help you bring everything together and make it a little less noisy.