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.
