Been to Las Vegas lately? You should go now!

Just got back from the NAB show in Las Vegas.   Attendance was down significantly this year for obvious reasons, like the economy.  But the traffic in all of the booths I visited was pretty good.  The people I spoke to working in the booths said that while overall traffic was lower, the quality of the traffic was high.  It appeared that if someone spent the money to attend the show there was a good reason for their attendance, as in they had a real need for something.  So did some talking with potential partners and checked out what was new at the show, overall a good show.

What I found really interesting though was the atmosphere in the city of Las Vegas.  I remember the busy times in Las Vegas when cab lines were packed, shows were impossible to get tickets, hotels were full and expensive, gambling stakes were high and overall a general attitude of take it or leave it.  NOT ANYMORE.  Stayed at one of the finest hotels for a very low price, had no trouble getting good seats at any show we wanted, restaurants had tables, and the cab drivers were super friendly as were all the people working in the hotels and casinos.  It was like a completely new town.  I remember when people used to say if you want friendly service go to Reno or Tahoe, but no longer.  Vegas is putting on a terrific face, the prices are down and getting into events is a breeze.  If you book your airfare a week or two in advance it’s cheaper than driving from San Diego.

If you haven’t been to Vegas lately this is one great time to visit the town.  I’m thinking about going back before it gets too hot.

Justifying the Cost of Brand Management

It’s a commonly heard phrase in the world of brand monitoring and brand protection, “It isn’t driving revenue so why pay for a service to identify unauthorized brand usage?”. The cost of misappropriated brand use can be hard to measure, but it is real. There are the highly documented cases such as the recent Dominoes Pizza video which caused a huge backlash for company and its reputation. Probably oveall consumers realized the craziness of this episode and that this type of outlandish behavior and the memory will fade away. However it did require significant time and money spent by the company to respond to the episode that should have been spent on more pressing business issues.

It is well documented that product piracy and counterfitting are a big business on the Internet. Companies lose millions of dollars to black and gray markets. These losses don’t show up in corporate financials though, but they are lost revenue that someone else obtains through the unauthorized use of their brand. The tools exist today to fight this revenue loss and can result in shutting down these pirates and deliver the revenue to its rightful home. But to be effective companies need to employ the tools.

I was talking recently with a customer of ours who related the story of one of his customers. It seems that his customer had authorized him to perform some work and identify where their brand was being misused online. The results showed that there were black market sites up and running that were taking over $2M in revenue through the sale of pirated and counterfeit goods carrying the customer’s brand. This $2M in revneue could be redirected to the brand owner through a program that would cost them about $100K. Seems like a small investment for a sizable return. The executive could not get the program funded however due to tight budgets. How tight of a budget do you have when you can’t spend to increase company revenue with such a small investment. This is just one of many storied I hear repeatedly when talking with my customers.

Sure times are hard and business owners need to make certain their money is being spent wisely. Protecting your brand and defending your product against pirates is always a wise decision.

Protecting your brand

New Media Search was founded to provide tools to allow brand owners to identify use of their brands in online images and video.  Today the Internet is a visual expererience.  Brand owners spend a lot of money promoting and positioning their brands.  Yet one small episode of misuse of that brand can undo that spending in the blink of an eye. 

There are many media monitoring and brand monitoring companies in place that look for brand misuse.  Unfortunately most of these companies can only identify your brand if it appears in a written or text format on the Internet.  So if somebody writes about your brand in a blog or posts a comment to a message board then it is very likely that these monitoring companies could find that reference, but so could google or any good search engine.

The problem occurs when a brand shows up in a movie or a picture.  The text search techniques used by the existing monitoring companies or search engines just are up to the task of finding that brand reference inside of an image file.  It is not uncommon for appropriate uses of a brand to label a file with a descriptive term that allows a text search engine to find the usage.  But appropriate uses of a brand are not the problem.  Its inappropriate uses that cause the problem. 

In cases where the goal is to cause problems for a brand the offender will make it hard for the brand owner to find the offending image or video.  In these cases tools that look inside the images and videos to identify the brand usage are required to quickly find and respond to these inappropriate and unauthorized brand usages.  New Media Search has focused its efforts on building such tools.  Our software looks into these files and finds the brands located and can alert the brand owner of this usage.

But, and here is the catch, you have to use the tools.  We have been out working with companies to deploy these tools in parallel with the existing text monitoring tools that are in use today.  This type of brand protection is typically offered as an add on feature to existing monitoring techniques.  Most brand owners have balked at paying a small incremental fee to protect themselves against these image and video formats.  But it takes only one episode like we saw last week with a well know pizza company to show the value of this type of protection.

New Media Search’s Blog begins

My introduction to the world of blogging.  I’ll be bringing you the latest news about New Media Search as we try to convince the world about the need for our software products.