Explore the inaugural list of Brandwatch’s Change Makers here.

The report is a result of carefully segmented and analyzed data mixed with expert research, and harnesses the power of recently-announced advancements now embedded in Brandwatch’s AI Engine, Iris, to help identify and vet the most influential players of 2023. These latest revelations in GPT tech enable Brandwatch and its clients to tap into and act upon new movements and forces of change across media, culture, and consumer behavior. 

For this report Brandwatch defined Change Makers as those using their influence and following to trailblaze new frontiers – through curiosity, creativity, innovation, and action. That presence and those fanbases, in 2023, largely manifest themselves across a digital landscape of social networks, forums, blogs, and media coverage. Their influence reshapes the immediate conversation, and ultimately transforms consumer habits and public opinion on an unprecedented scale.

“The 10 Change Makers we’ve identified are influencing the cultural zeitgeist through their boldness, as well as the connection and trust they’ve built with their audiences,” said Carrie Parker, Chief Marketing Officer at Brandwatch. “Not only is Brandwatch celebrating that boldness and impact through the Change Makers Report, we’re empowering others to become agents of change in their own right – by helping them identify the moments meaningful to their brand at the right time to be able to take action.”

The 2023 Change Makers Report can be accessed here. For more information on how Brandwatch is helping our customers spark change, the cutting-edge AI at the core of our suite, or where Brandwatch looks to innovate in the future visit Brandwatch.com or email us at info@brandwatch.com.

About Brandwatch

Brandwatch is the world’s premier social suite, empowering over 5,000 of the world’s most admired companies to understand and engage with customers at the speed of social.

Combining pioneering, AI-enriched digital consumer intelligence with industry-leading social media management tools, Brandwatch offers a complementary suite of specialized, best-in-class products and services that support intelligently connected workflows. With Brandwatch, brands and agencies can adapt and thrive in today’s fast moving digital world by making smarter decisions and executing data-driven social strategies at every customer touchpoint.

Operating and serving clients the world over, Brandwatch has 15 offices across the globe and more than 1,000 employees worldwide. Brandwatch is a Cision Company.

www.brandwatch.com | @Brandwatch | press office | contact

Brandwatch has a long history of showcasing and elevating Reddit data to its customers. In 2017, Brandwatch was the first social intelligence company to legally offer Reddit data in its offering. Further, in January of this year, Brandwatch solidified its elite partnership with Reddit by entering into the Official Reddit Partner Program. With full firehose access to Reddit data composed of publicly available posts and engagement metrics, Brandwatch has also completed Reddit’s compliance certification, ensuring the ability to continue bringing Reddit data to the forefront of product innovation.

Reddit is the latest in a series of premium data sources to be brought into Brandwatch’s Social Panels for fast, in-depth audience analysis. Brandwatch helps brands meet, understand, and engage with their consumers across the online channels that matter most to them. Reddit Social Panels is a uniquely powerful tool for surfacing insights from Reddit communities to inform even better audience targeting and messaging and product strategies.

“Brandwatch’s Social Panels provide an audience-first approach to consumer research and insight discovery. Reddit adds to the power of Social Panels, providing a stellar network of communities grounded in mutual interests and passions,” said Carrie Parker, Chief Marketing Officer at Brandwatch. “These unique Social Panels, powered by Reddit data, let brands access the depth-of-knowledge and expertise of Redditors to take a new approach to uncovering insights that fuel innovation efforts.”

Brandwatch’s Reddit Social Panels take carefully segmented audiences, ranging from the niche to masses of millions, and analyze conversation through the lens of an audience’s interests or generational preference. Reddit users in communities (subreddits) are known for a high level of expertise and passion, creating great opportunities for brands to explore evolving expectations and needs.

For more information on Brandwatch’s Social Panels or the value of insights you can uncover through audience analysis, visit Brandwatch.com, or email us at info@brandwatch.com.

About Brandwatch

Brandwatch is the world’s premier social suite, empowering over 5,000 of the world’s most admired companies to understand and engage with customers at the speed of social.

Combining pioneering, AI-enriched digital consumer intelligence with industry-leading social media management tools, Brandwatch offers a complementary suite of specialized, best-in-class products and services that support intelligently connected workflows. With Brandwatch, brands and agencies can adapt and thrive in today’s fast moving digital world by making smarter decisions and executing data-driven social strategies at every customer touchpoint.

Operating and serving clients the world over, Brandwatch has 15 offices across the globe and more than 1,000 employees worldwide. Brandwatch is a Cision Company.

www.brandwatch.com | @Brandwatch | press office | contact

There are three new Iris-based features as part of this expansion:

Iris conversation insights produces concise, natural-language summaries that bring forward themes and trends within complex, raw data sets, highlighting actionable next steps with speed.

Iris writing assistant handles everything from post generation to crafting the perfect reply to spelling, grammar, and length checks on all content you post across your social channels.

Iris content insights provides AI-generated metrics and themes behind owned and competitor content that showcases the performance of posts and the subject matter that resonates most with your audience.

“Brandwatch has a proud history of not only building meaningful and capable AI into our solutions, but being the first to do so in the market,” said Michael Amsinck, Chief Product Officer at Brandwatch. “We introduced AI Search and automatic peak analysis before anyone else with one goal in mind, to aim the most advanced tech at our customers’ most critical problems. With the revelations in GPT technology, this next evolution of Iris will continue that history of leveraging tech innovation in service to our customers.”

While Iris revolutionized the industry back in 2018, Brandwatch has been steadily building onto the AI assistant with numerous statistical algorithms and AI models for years. GPT tech was even previously introduced in 2020 with Iris’s AI Search element. Now Iris works alongside marketers, analysts, and researchers to detect and explain the causation of peaks in online conversation, uncover trends and themes within quick searches and vast sets of raw data, and generate and measure content that will resonate across an entire consumer base.

For more information about Brandwatch, or how Iris is changing the dynamic of work for our customers, visit Brandwatch.com, or email us at info@brandwatch.com.

About Brandwatch

Brandwatch is the world’s premier social suite, empowering over 5,000 of the world’s most admired companies to understand and engage with customers at the speed of social.

Combining pioneering, AI-enriched digital consumer intelligence with industry-leading social media management tools, Brandwatch offers a complementary suite of specialized, best-in-class products and services that support intelligently connected workflows. With Brandwatch, brands and agencies can adapt and thrive in today’s fast moving digital world by making smarter decisions and executing data-driven social strategies at every customer touchpoint.

Operating and serving clients the world over, Brandwatch has 15 offices across the globe and more than 1,000 employees worldwide. Brandwatch is a Cision Company.

www.brandwatch.com | @Brandwatch | press office | contact

Larsen took the helm of Brandwatch in June 2021 after it was acquired by Cision. He led the merger between Brandwatch’s award-winning consumer intelligence platform with Falcon.io’s world-class social media management capabilities. In addition, Larsen oversaw Brandwatch’s acquisition of Paladin, a social influencer marketing solution, in March 2022 and Brandwatch’s admission into an inaugural elevated marketing partnership with TikTok.

Before his time as President and CEO at Brandwatch, Larsen held the same position at Falcon.io, a company he founded in 2010. Falcon.io was acquired by Cision in January 2019 and merged with Brandwatch in 2022. The position that Brandwatch now finds itself in is the vision Larsen and Brandwatch Founder Giles Palmer established in 2017. With their joint vision realized, Ulrik is now joining Palmer as a Brandwatch advisor where both will continue to contribute to Brandwatch’s success and future.

“A company’s founder is special, and that’s doubly true when we’re talking about the caliber of founders like Ulrik and Giles,” said Brandon Crawley, interim CEO of Cision and Managing Director at Platinum Equity, which acquired Cision in 2020. “They built stellar products and teams, and we are happy to keep them close so Brandwatch can continue to benefit from their expertise. I expect a seamless transition as Cali is a proven leader who has shown he knows how to transform companies and bring them to new heights. His appointment is very exciting news for our customers, employees and everyone in Brandwatch’s universe.”

Tran has a lot of experience building high performing teams and driving growth for profitable technology-enabled, global companies. Before joining Brandwatch, Tran held executive leadership positions at a number of leading marketing technology companies such Centerfield Media, Vericast, and Valassis either as President, Chief Commercial Officer or CEO.  

Earlier in his career, Tran led digital transformation initiatives for large, multinational marketing and business services companies at MacAndrews & Forbes and invested in hyper-growth marketing technology enabled start-ups North Bridge Venture Partners. Tran was also a part of the seed stage team at Ancestry and a Co-Founder of Agilix Labs.

For more information about Brandwatch, visit Brandwatch.com, or email us at info@brandwatch.com.

About Brandwatch

Brandwatch is the world’s premier social suite, empowering over 5,000 of the world’s most admired companies to understand and engage with customers at the speed of social.

Combining pioneering, AI-enriched digital consumer intelligence with industry-leading social media management tools, Brandwatch offers a complementary suite of specialized, best-in-class products and services that support intelligently connected workflows. With Brandwatch, brands and agencies can adapt and thrive in today’s fast moving digital world by making smarter decisions and executing data-driven social strategies at every customer touchpoint.

Operating and serving clients the world over, Brandwatch has 15 offices across the globe and more than 1,000 employees worldwide. Brandwatch is a Cision Company.

www.brandwatch.com | @Brandwatch | press office | contact

This officially badged partnership between Brandwatch and TikTok empowers Brandwatch clients to manage, understand, and respond to their community profiles on TikTok in a way that feels native to the world’s hottest technology platform. This means that Brandwatch customers will be able to:

• Manage – Organize, schedule, and publish content on TikTok
• Understand – Access, analyze, and benchmark profile and video metrics in real time
• Respond – Monitor, delegate, and respond to comments on profiles.

“At TikTok, we are always looking for ways to make it easier for brands to develop great content that resonates with their communities,” said Melissa Yang, Head of Ecosystem Partnerships, TikTok. “We are excited to welcome our new content marketing partners into the Tiktok Marketing Partner Program, and to be collaborating with some of the most trusted partners in the industry. These partners will provide marketers with simple, effective tools to help them to regularly publish content, gain valuable performance insight, and meaningfully engage with their communities.”

“TikTok is an incredible platform for talented, creative individuals, driving new trends and important conversations every day across the globe,” said Mikael Lemberg, Vice President of Product Global Partnerships at Brandwatch. “We are massively investing in the creator economy and we are proud and excited to partner with TikTok to build tools that help our users become active parts of that ecosystem.”

Today’s news of partnering with TikTok’s new Content Marketing specialty, clearly signals the meaningful and innovative intention Brandwatch has to be a major player within the TikTok ecosystem and the creator economy.

If you’d like more information about how Brandwatch is continuing to improve the social suite of the future which will help users navigate the creator economy, visit Brandwatch.com or contact us at info@brandwatch.com.

About Brandwatch

Brandwatch is the world’s premier social suite, empowering over 5,000 of the world’s most admired companies to understand and engage with customers at the speed of social.

Combining pioneering, AI-enriched consumer intelligence with industry-leading social media management tools, Brandwatch offers a complementary suite of specialized, best-in-class products and services that support intelligently connected workflows. With Brandwatch, brands and agencies can adapt and thrive in today’s fast moving digital world by making smarter decisions and executing data-driven social strategies at every customer touchpoint.

Operating and serving clients the world over, Brandwatch has 15 offices across the globe and more than 1,300 employees worldwide. Brandwatch is a Cision Company.

www.brandwatch.com | TikTok | Twitter | press office | contact

The influencer marketing industry has grown by more than 40% year-over-year the past five years, with 67% of brands measuring their return on investment from influencer campaigns. Creators are looking for brand partners that best reflect their values and content. Simultaneously, brands are searching for the genuine connections influencers enjoy with their audience. Brandwatch is determined to create a never-before-seen suite that gives more options for brands, creators and consumers to find each other.

“Influencer marketing and management is the next evolution of how marketers and communications professionals utilize digital and social media,” said Ulrik Bo Larsen, President of Brandwatch. “It’s the next and most important phase of the social landscape. Paladin has built an exciting company out of California that has grown into a successful global business, making influencer marketing easier for marketers. We’re excited to rapidly accelerate their reach and scale the hell out of this.”

“We are thrilled to be joining Brandwatch, bringing together their best-in-class social intelligence tools with our expertise in influencer marketing,” said James Creech, Co-Founder and CEO of Paladin. “Finally, global marketers can access a complete solution for social media management and influencer activations, backed by deep audience insights.”

Founded in 2016, Paladin offers a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform to help brands and agencies run more effective influencer marketing campaigns. The Paladin suite streamlines influencer discovery, campaign management, and reporting across the world’s leading social platforms. 

If you’re interested in learning more about Brandwatch, its diverse list of use cases or how it’s becoming more than the sum of its parts, please contact us at Brandwatch.com.

The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2022.

About Brandwatch

Brandwatch is the world’s premier social suite, empowering over 7,500 of the world’s most admired companies to understand and engage with customers at the speed of social. 

Combining pioneering, AI-enriched digital consumer intelligence with industry-leading social media management tools, Brandwatch offers a complementary suite of specialized, best-in-class products and services that support intelligently connected workflows. With Brandwatch, brands and agencies can adapt and thrive in today’s fast moving digital world by making smarter decisions and executing data-driven social strategies at every customer touchpoint.

Operating and serving clients the world over, Brandwatch has 15 offices across the globe and more than 1,000 employees worldwide. Brandwatch is a Cision Company.

www.brandwatch.com | @Brandwatch | press office | contact

As the deal closes, Cision is also combining the innovation power of Brandwatch and Falcon.io, a Cision company known for its strong social media management capabilities. The integrated social business will be a 1,000-person social media powerhouse with a mission to deliver exciting new capabilities in this fast-evolving space.

Launching today is a Brandwatch embedded application in the Falcon.io social media marketing suite. This features the full Brandwatch data platform with over 100 million data sources and will soon include Brandwatch’s patent-pending AI Search.

The Brandwatch app is also available in the Cision Communications Cloud with Brandwatch’s full social data and analytics along with the millions of news sources Cision monitors. With instant access to real-time and historical conversations online, the app makes it easy for organizations to stay on top of what is being said about their brand, products, industry and competitors and better engage their target audience with insights from data that is often difficult to track.

“Uniting our companies will bring more innovation, more comprehensive data and more real-time insights to our customers,” said Abel Clark, CEO of Cision. “Our investments in data science and AI will help marketers, communicators and researchers better understand conversations taking place on digital channels worldwide and apply those insights to deliver better outcomes for their business.”

“We have the opportunity to create an extraordinary company that is seen by our customers as critical to their overall business success,” said Giles Palmer, CEO of Brandwatch. “That is an exciting thing to be part of and I’m looking forward to joining the Cision team and making it happen over the coming months and years.”

About Brandwatch
Brandwatch is the world’s pioneering digital consumer intelligence suite. The company’s AI-powered deep social listening products help over 2,000 of the world’s most admired brands and agencies make insightful, data-driven decisions. Brandwatch includes leading content marketing platform BuzzSumo in its portfolio. Brandwatch has 10 offices around the world and is headquartered in Brighton, UK.

About Falcon.io
Falcon.io is an industry leader in social media suites and offers an integrated SaaS platform for social media listening, engaging, publishing, advertising, analytics and benchmarking. The company enables its clients to explore the full potential of digital marketing by managing multiple customer touchpoints from one platform. Its client portfolio includes Carlsberg, Toyota, William Grant & Sons, Momondo, Panasonic and Coca-Cola.

About Cision
As a global leader in PR, marketing and social media management technology and intelligence, Cision helps brands and organizations to identify, connect and engage with customers and stakeholders to drive business results. PR Newswire, a network of over 1.1 billion influencers, in-depth monitoring, analytics and its Brandwatch and Falcon.io social media platforms headline a premier suite of solutions. Cision has offices in 24 countries throughout the Americas, EMEA and APAC. For more information about Cision’s award-winning solutions, including its next-gen Cision Communications Cloud®, visit www.cision.com and follow @Cision on Twitter.

Press Contacts:
Cision                                                Brandwatch                                       Falcon.io
Maggie Lower                                  Vic Miller                                            Dan Chessa
Chief Marketing Officer                  VP, Global Communications           VP, Marketing
cisionpr@cision.com                      victoriam@brandwatch.com         Daniel.Chessa@falcon.io

The forces of digital transformation reward those organizations and boardrooms that listen to and quickly capitalize on digital insights from their consumers. Leading companies are quickly adapting and using these insights to create tailored, authentic communications and direct connections with customers at scale. This paradigm shift to real-time, customer-centric PR, marketing, and customer care strategies will continue to accelerate and differentiate those companies that take action.

Cision is a leader in news distribution and media monitoring and analysis with a media contact database of 1.4 million journalists and over 75,000 customers. Brandwatch works with thousands of the world’s most admired brands, using the latest in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to bring structure to and derive meaning from the voices of the billions of people using social media.

Cision and Brandwatch are a compelling combination. Together, they will provide brands and organizations with consumer and media intelligence to devise more effective customer engagement strategies from PR and marketing to research and product development. Whether teams are connecting with journalists and influencers, launching social campaigns, developing brand messaging, or conducting deep research into consumer behavior, they will have real-time insights and long-term trend analysis to guide them.

“The continued digital shift and widespread adoption of social media is rapidly and fundamentally changing how brands and organizations engage with their customers,” said Abel Clark, CEO of Cision. “This is driving the imperative that PR, marketing, social, and customer care teams fully incorporate the unique insights now available into consumer-led strategies. Together, Cision and Brandwatch will help our clients to more deeply understand, connect, and engage with their customers at scale across every channel.”

“We have always built Brandwatch with ambition. That was recognized by Forrester, who recently named us as a leader in our space,” said Giles Palmer, founder and CEO of Brandwatch. “Now is the time to take the next step – joining a company of significant scale to create a business and a suite of products that can have an important global impact. We are excited to join Abel and the Cision team to supercharge our work and bring even more value to our customers.”

Brandwatch was named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Social Listening Platforms, Q4 2020.

The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2021.

Macquarie Capital acted as an exclusive financial adviser to Brandwatch on this transaction. Cooley LLP acted as legal counsel to Brandwatch.

Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP acted as M&A legal counsel, Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP acted as financing legal counsel, and Latham & Watkins LLP acted as regulatory counsel to Cision.

About Brandwatch

Brandwatch is the world’s pioneering digital consumer intelligence suite. The company’s AI-powered deep social listening and content marketing analytics products help over 2,000 of the world’s most admired brands and agencies make insightful, data-driven decisions. Brandwatch includes leading content marketing platform BuzzSumo in its portfolio. Brandwatch has 10 offices around the world and is headquartered in Brighton, UK.

About Cision

As a global leader in PR, marketing, and social media management technology and intelligence, Cision helps brands and organizations to identify, connect, and engage with customers and stakeholders to drive business results. PR Newswire, a network of over 1.1 billion influencers, in-depth monitoring, analytics, and its Falcon.io social media platform headline a premier suite of solutions. Cision has offices in 24 countries throughout the Americas, EMEA and APAC. For more information about Cision’s award-winning solutions, including its next-gen Cision Communications Cloud®, visit www.cision.com and follow @Cision on Twitter.

Media contacts

Cision

Maggie Lower, Chief Marketing Officer: CisionPR@cision.com

Brandwatch

Will McInnes, Chief Marketing Officer: will@brandwatch.com

Conventional, in-person market research can be inefficient, and amid a pandemic nearly impossible to conduct. Excessive amounts of time and money are exhausted gathering consumer insights that focus groups and panels yield, but even with those investments there are limitations. A lack of accessibility and geographic restrictions give global brands a very regional view of their consumers in a time when the world is more connected and globalized. Social Panels provides enhanced consumer insights at a fraction of the cost in real time.

Social Panels is unique in its versatility. Panels are created two ways:

• By uploading a custom list of authors from a range of content sources
• By conducting a flexible panel search to combine various demographic filters to identify the right group of people.

These panels become more versatile, still, when you use them to filter social conversations within Consumer Research. Panels will reveal insights across subject matter by seeing how a defined audience discusses any given topic. Then researchers have the ability to benchmark panels against each other and then again against the general population. Lastly, there’s the ability to analyze historical conversations within a panel – a practice that simply isn’t possible with traditional market research. This flexibility isn’t an option with live studies out in the field.

“We built Social Panels not only to provide robust, representative unprompted insight from social data, but to completely challenge the notion of traditional demographics,” said Rebecca Carson, Chief Product Officer at Brandwatch. “The modern consumer demands personalization, and to provide this we need to go way beyond segmenting populations with limiting labels like age, gender, and socioeconomic status. We need to understand what motivates a group of people, what drives their passions, and to discover their real, unprompted behaviour patterns.”

Social Panels goes beyond demographics as panels can be created with the most relevant individuals providing their unprompted thoughts and opinions. This method mitigates response bias by avoiding participants who feed into the research and provide researchers with answers they think the research dictates. Panelists will now be completely unfiltered, honest, and representative vs. the offline population.

About Brandwatch

Brandwatch is the world’s pioneering digital consumer intelligence suite, helping over 2,000 of the world’s most admired brands and agencies including Unilever, Walmart and Dell to make insightful, data-driven business decisions.

The company underwent the industry-transforming merger with Crimson Hexagon in 2018, and has made three acquisitions to date: PeerIndex (2013), BuzzSumo (2017) as a standalone content marketing platform, and Qriously (2019) to add global survey capabilities.

Brandwatch has offices around the globe including Brighton, Boston, New York, London, Berlin, Stuttgart, Paris, Madrid, Sydney and Singapore.

www.brandwatch.com | @Brandwatch | press office | contact

The deal brings Kinetiq’s data from over 2,600 TV stations across more than 85 countries into the Brandwatch Consumer Research platform alongside the world’s largest social data archive and its suite of AI-powered analytics, alerting and reporting tools. This new integrated solution lets brands, agencies, media companies and other organizations create a comprehensive view of their paid, earned and owned media presence across social, online and TV.

For years, brands and marketers have sought analytics solutions that reflect their more unified and holistic approach to marketing, but continue to rely on channel-specific analytics solutions. The new offering from Brandwatch and Kinetiq will change this by providing a seamless view of digital and TV in a single platform that allows marketers and analysts to discover, organize and distribute insights.

Kinetiq’s platform is capable of instantly revealing the level of TV exposure a brand is receiving, differentiating between paid spots or earned mentions, which market it appeared in (local, national or global), and if it was a seen or heard brand instance. With Brandwatch Consumer Research, users can then segment and chart data using industry-leading machine learning technology, sentiment and emotion analysis and fully customizable dashboards.

These insights can be blended with social and marketing intelligence to build a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between media spend and organic TV coverage and online conversations that informs vital marketing and PR decisions.

“The partnership between Kinetiq and Brandwatch brings together two best-in-class platforms to provide marketers with access to the most comprehensive listening across social and linear TV,” said Kevin Kohn, CEO of Kinetiq. “Now that our joint customers have the ability to view Kinetiq’s real-time TV feed natively within the Brandwatch Consumer Research platform, we’re arming them with a common lens to better understand the convergence of TV, digital and social.”

“We help brands increase their understanding of consumers,” said Giles Palmer, CEO of Brandwatch. “We’re delighted to announce this new integration with Kinetiq which brings the world of earned and paid TV data into our platform. Adding what consumers are hearing and seeing on TV will help Brands create a deeper understanding of the impact and value of their media spending.”

# # #

About Kinetiq

Kinetiq, headquartered in Philadelphia, PA, pushes the boundaries of TV intelligence with the first and only unified, global platform to measure the complete spectrum of paid, earned and owned TV media with the speed and precision of digital.

The Kinetiq platform empowers marketers, technology partners and content owners with TV audience metrics and analytics in real-time, providing the critical data and transparency needed to make informed decisions.

Formed in 2019 with the merger of iQ Media and 4C’s Teletrax, Kinetiq is trusted by leading brands, agencies, broadcasters and ISVs, including Mercedes-Benz, Uber, Fox Broadcasting Company and Google. Visit www.kinetiq.tv to learn more.

About Brandwatch

Brandwatch is the world’s pioneering digital consumer intelligence suite, helping over 2,000 of the world’s most admired brands and agencies including Unilever, Walmart and Dell to make insightful, data-driven business decisions.

The company underwent the industry-transforming merger with Crimson Hexagon in 2018, and has made three acquisitions to date: PeerIndex (2013), BuzzSumo (2017) as a standalone content marketing platform, and Qriously (2019) to add global survey capabilities.

Brandwatch has offices around the globe including Brighton, Boston, New York, London, Berlin, Stuttgart, Paris, Madrid, Sydney and Singapore.

www.brandwatch.com | @Brandwatch | press office | contact