AI-STARTUP HELPS 14 NEW CUSTOMERS UNDERSTAND AUDIENCES WHEN PLANNING MARKETING CONTENT
London – Content marketing platform Codec announces that business grew by 53 per cent from August-Dec 2016 and the signing of 14 new customers including Unilever (Cornetto, Cif, Comfort), Universal Music, L’Oreal (Giorgio Armani, Shu Uemura, Vichy).
Content marketing is now a five billion pound industry in the UK alone. Codec’s platform enables marketers to create better content by giving them an accurate prediction of what audiences care about before they plan and, rather than a static snapshot, it shows an understanding of people’s interactions with rich media over time.
Martin Adams, Codec cofounder and CEO says: “Deep knowledge of audiences is key for all areas of marketing. When planning content, marketers tend to use traditional audience insight methods including ‘social listening’ software and market research, combined with creative brainstorms. Although these methods can be effective to a point, they rely on guesswork and pose big risks financially and to a brand’s image because they rely on analysis of keywords, not of people’s interactions. Codec’s intelligence adds an additional layer of insight to marketers’ existing knowledge to accurately predict what audiences want to see.”
Tom Graham, Codec cofounder and Product Lead says: “Codec uses sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning to understand its audiences. It works by analysing thousands of online ‘tribes’ and the content they consume – from people interested in fishing, to those interested in fine wines – by dissecting the meaning of billions of bits of text, images and video content online. The end result is an understanding of how a brand’s target audience interacts with that content and recommendations of the content that will activate them. In addition, Codec explains what else audiences want to read about and helps to identify potential new audiences.”
Codec enables marketers to:
- Have visual insights at their fingertips: deep image analysis identifies the visual imagery that engages a target audience, allowing creative teams to rapidly understand what works, leading to a faster, more accurate creative process.
- Have a hyper-detailed view: of a target audience’s marketing-specific interests and affinities through a comparison against 1000s of tribes it already tracks.
- Understand target audiences data on a local market level and a global level
- Track audience interests and preferences over time: establish which interests are trending up, down or plateauing so they can be reacted to and caught.
- Identify core personality types within a target audience: through psychographic mapping of their written text and content preferences. This allows brands to connect with audiences on their terms by providing a detailed insight into the people that make them up.
- Pick the most relevant influencers: YouTubers, bloggers, celebrities and brands – that have an impact on a target audience, along with the key moments in an audience’s calendar and cultural life which can be leveraged through creative partnerships.
Codec’s reach is broad: it is currently serving customers in five different markets (US, UK, Japan, Sweden, France) across eight diverse verticals – from betting (Sky Bet & Vegas) to appliances (Electrolux EU) and cosmetics (Shu Uemura and L’Oreal).
Customers receive monthly reports as part of either six or 12 month subscription packages.
Saalim Chowdhury, EIR at 500 Startups comments: “The rapid growth of Codec’s business business is testament to the urgent need for marketers and creatives to have empirical evidence to make better decisions. Securing such high profile customers is a great endorsement of the platform and marketers’ need to truly understand their audiences.”
Kuba Wieczorek, co-founder and co-CEO Eve mattresses says: “Codec analysed our data in a way we could have never done ourselves. Its surprising insights led to us doing a long copy poster campaign which massively resonated with our target audiences and completely transformed our business. Our revenue literally doubled overnight; we had a 148 per cent increase in sales and the needle completely shifted in terms of brand awareness, going from 13 per cent pre campaign to 41 per cent after.”
About Codec
Founded in London in 2016, Codec is the only content marketing platform that uses artificial intelligence to understand people’s interactions with rich media over time to offer creatives and strategists an accurate prediction of what audiences care about before they plan content. By translating social and cultural data into meaningful insights, Codec provides brand and agency marketers with evidence to make creative content decisions with real impact to win customers and clients. Codec has raised £1.5 million from investors including 500 Startups. For more information, visit: www.codec.ai.
