AiThority Interview with Alon Leibovich, Co-Founder and CEO at BrandTotal

Hi Alon, please tell us about your role and the team/technology you handle at BrandTotal.

Sure! I am the CEO and co-founder at BrandTotal. After working for several years as a marketing strategist and organizational psychologist, I realized that consumer companies were lacking a crucial input in their marketing planning: competitive knowledge. Before digital, it was pretty straightforward to track the competition in printed publications and on TV, but today, so much of the digital marketing is hidden from view in “dark marketing,” or targeted posts. I partnered up with experts in artificial intelligence and cyber security to develop software that will analyze social media campaigns and we founded BrandTotal. Our mission is to help companies gain a competitive edge by illuminating and analyzing their competitors’ dark marketing campaigns on social media platforms and provide them with social competitive intelligence and brand analytics.

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Tell us more about your Ideal Customer Profile and how you help these customers leverage your technology.

BrandTotal offers social competitive intelligence and brand analytics to brands and agencies, these insights enable them to better understand their place in the digital competitive landscape, faster, and more accurately than other platforms in the marketplace. We leverage AI to analyze campaigns for sentiment, key words, messages, topics and more. AI then crystalizes the findings into actionable insights so brand marketers and agencies can inform their ad creative, media buys, and more.

BrandTotal empowers brand marketers to measure key KPIs like digital share of voice, share of topic, ad creative performance and consumer sentiment to those ads  on social, and benchmark against competitors, in real time. Marketing leaders can understand what ad, campaign, content or creative resonates with their consumer audience, measure how consumers respond and interact with their digital ads as compared to their competitors ads  and quantify their brand marketing results.

You recently released a survey on how competitive intel for brands’ social media advertising can affect their strategy and execution for media spend. Could you tell us how CMOs should manage digital marketing spend across social media channels?

Our survey found that CMOs and brand marketers agree competitive social advertising analytics are important to manage digital marketing spend across social media channels. CMOs don’t need more data for data’s sake. CMOs need data with context in order to make the most informed decisions that will have the biggest impact on how they spend their marketing budgets. What each brand should do will vary, but our high level recommendation to CMOs is to take a step back from just looking at their own brand’s performance to see the full view. By taking into account the entire digital advertising competitive landscape of their category or industry, CMOs can optimize their own campaigns more effectively.

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How do you see AI, ML and adtech automation platforms scaling from here? How would these computing trends in Martech and Adtech evolve with the increased adoption of AI ML applications?

Stemming from our survey, when asking the respondents to rank their current tools CMOs ranked all the tools in the space as average and below satisfactory. The data showed that the current tools aren’t addressing the brand needs and concerns for today’s modern marketers as consumers shift to social commerce and are willing to try new D2C brands. Moving forward, as platforms evolve within the industry, we will see more marketers adopt Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning capabilities, enabling contextual recognition, contextual intelligence and AI read copy to allow for more effective creative that can be measured. Advertisers and marketers will have access to consumer sentiment analysis on the ads themselves, and provide a more robust understanding of consumers engagement and attitudes and become a more insightful source for CMOs. This will improve creative performance, messaging insights and message market fit.

Your prediction on the “future of DSPs and programmatic advertising platforms” – how are you planning for the future at BrandTotal?

With third-party cookies phasing out next year and more and more privacy regulations coming into play, the reliance on first-party data has become necessary again, in order to gain back control of this data and better engage and understand their target consumers. There’s no doubt the landscape is shifting with Apple’s change to mobile privacy access affecting how advertisers can personalize ads, and Google eliminating the third-party cookie, many of the current metrics that marketers rely on to leverage for targeting will no longer be available. It’s on advertisers to make the industry relevant again, and put hyper-targeting in the past. DSPs and the programmatic landscape at large need to reassess their current datasets and data partnerships to ensure they are compliant with new privacy laws, as well as form new ones that will provide them with direct access to approved first-party data. Marketing is both becoming more data-driven and privacy conscious, marketers must look to work with other platforms that will increase their access to first-party data, ultimately enabling them to meet campaign goals.

Planning for the future, we’re always looking at emerging trends on social and how we can provide more transparency and performance insights to brands and agencies on their campaigns. We have aspirations like continuing to grow the number of quality brands we work with, especially in the QSR, automotive, CPG, and other industries, providing them with unmatched insights into the social marketing landscape.

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Thank you, Alon! That was fun and we hope to see you back on AiThority.com soon.