Founded in 2007, BrandsEye was born out of a digital agency, Quirk, which was later sold to Nasdaq. 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.
Quirk was purchased by WPP - a marketing comms company that is listed on both Nasdaq and the LSE. Over time, BrandsEye evolved from being an agency’s online reputation monitoring (ORM) tool to its own standalone business, specialising in sentiment analysis and opinion mining. By honing the unique blend of AI and human intelligence, the company aims 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.”
Notwithstanding this evolution, Ray notes that DataEQ’s core USP remains unchanged: the use of humans – ‘Crowds’ – to improve data quality. “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 (EQ) to mark-up unstructured feedback like social media conversation (Data), enriching it for analysis.”
By adding this annotative layer to unstructured feedback, DataEQ aims to deliver industry-leading data accuracy levels of 95%, unlocking enterprise data use cases that cannot be supported by ‘AI-only’ social listening competitors.
As an example, Ray points to DataEQ’s popular market conduct solution. “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.”
This, Ray says, is just one of the ways that DataEQ is unlocking the vast value of unstructured data. “The bulk of data generated today is unstructured, so it’s critical that organisations find ways to manage and analyse it to support strategic decision-making.”
