The team behind leading social data and insights business, BrandsEye, has completed an extensive rebranding in response to accelerated company growth, having successfully evolved from a MarTech tool to an enterprise data provider.
Founded in 2007, BrandsEye was born out of digital agency, Quirk, which was later sold to Nasdaq- and LSE-listed marketing communications company WPP. A tool developed for agency clients – brands – to keep an eye on their online mentions, BrandsEye utilised a proprietary mix of search algorithms, crowdsourcing and AI to mine data from online conversations.
Over time, however, BrandsEye evolved from being an agency’s online reputation monitoring (ORM) tool to its own standalone business, specialising in sentiment analysis and opinion mining. Honing the unique blend of AI and human intelligence, the company is able to produce high-quality actionable data from unstructured customer and public feedback.
“Whilst we still do a lot of work for CMOs and their teams, the nature of this work has fundamentally evolved,” says DataEQ CEO, Nic Ray. “Today, we support enterprise clients across four continents with tailored data solutions that range from customer service optimisation to risk management and reporting.”
DataEQ’s core USP remains the use of humans – “Crowds” – to improve the quality of the data. “Our Crowds are large, distributed workforces of local language speakers who we curate, train and then pay (mostly in bitcoin these days) to log into our gamified platform. They then apply their human intelligence to mark-up unstructured feedback, enriching it for analysis.
“This, in turn, unlocks enterprise data use cases in the customer experience, customer service and compliance management space that cannot be supported by ‘AI-only’ social listening competitors.”
Ray points to the example of DataEQ’s popular market conduct solution as a prime example. “Many of our financial services clients use our Crowds to accurately identify and map out customer complaints against the Treating Customers Fairly (TCF) framework – a task that is impossible for AI to achieve, but one that is now a legal requirement in many markets.”
But the value of human involvement is twofold, adds Ray. “The Crowds also train our AI via a machine learning loop, ensuring best-in-class accuracy levels. It’s helpful to think of our Crowds and AI working together in a symbiotic relationship, each doing the data sorting and enrichment that their capability is best suited for.
“Furthermore, by adding this annotative layer to online feedback, we are also effectively creating unique first-party data that will prove vital in a post-cookie world,” adds Ray.
This “post-cookie world” that Ray mentions, will be a result of the inevitable cookie apocalypse – the gradual phasing out of third-party cookies by major browsers. As enterprises across the globe continue to shift to a first- and second-party data strategy, enterprise data providers will play an increasingly vital role in business success.