Ed Clarke speaking at the FIBEP World Media Intelligence Congress in Washington DC, November 2016
Ed Clarke, President at Global Ad Source, outlines what makes Global Ad Source different in the industry and what technologies they use when it comes to monitoring, tracking and processing ads from different media. He shares his views on new emerging trends in video advertising and explains how social media affect the creative side of advertising.
Q: What do your clients ask for the most and how does Global Ad Source differentiate in the industry?
Ed: We offer a fresh view on competitive advertising creative tracking in more than 80 countries. We integrate traditional advertising along side of new social media communications from brands which results in complete coverage of everything our client’s competitors are saying.
Consequently, we have seen a marked increase in volume of brand communications and are evolving our services to not only deliver everything brands are doing, but distilling this flurry of activity into insightful reports that people can use in their day to day and strategic planning.
Q: What technologies do you use when it comes to monitoring, tracking and processing ads from different media?
Ed: We have knit together a close network of over 40 suppliers who bring their content onto the Global Ad Source portal. We make the data searchable, normalized, and categorized so our clients can find what they want, and need, immediately. We have built our own Social trackers allowing transparent access to brand-owned social channels such as Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, Twitter, and Instagram.
Q: Which methodologies do you find most effective when it comes to capturing digital advertising?
Ed: As we have built a lot of our own tracking services, we simply need to stay on top of all existing channels as well as emergent ones such as SnapChat.
Q: What trends do you see emerging in video advertising?
Ed: Brands are increasingly using non-traditional media to share video communications. Traditional Television campaigns are being shared on multiple media necessitating the capture of all executions. Of particular interest is how brands are sharing YouTube specific campaigns – directors’ cuts, traditional TVC and often specific campaigns you will only find on sites such as YouTube. If you cannot capture this activity of your competitor, you are not seeing the full picture.
Q: How much and in which have social media affected the main principles of creative process in advertising?
Ed: Social media’s impact has been huge and will play an increasingly important role in how brands market and communicate to their audience. Of course, tracking how an advertisement actually impacts the performance of a brand will be difficult, though with social media it is becoming easier to track the effectiveness of any particular piece of communication.
Q: In five years, what will be the most significant change in the way brands advertise?
Ed: I think we will see much of the same evolution from traditional media to newer media – social media particularly allows brands to completely personalize content for any particular user which will result in an explosion of customized, one-to-one communications between brands and their audience.
About Ed Clarke
Ed Clarke is an experienced entrepreneur with specific expertise in forming global networks and commercialization of technology.
Recognizing a nascent opportunity in the advertising monitoring sector, Clarke founded Global Ad Source and with a development team custom designed software to pursue this project.
Ed helped grow the Global Ad Source advertising monitoring database to become one of the world’s largest source of advertising creative. Global Ad Source updates clients with breaking competitor advertising every day from over 80 countries across 8 media types.
You can reach Ed via email or connect with him on LinkedIn.
About Global Ad Source
Global Ad Source updates global brands and global advertising agencies with breaking competitor advertising every day from over 80 markets. Our objective is to provide easy access to copies of advertising for brand, market and category research, without taking masses of your time and expense. Current and relevant, we cover not only TV, print and online, but also social communications on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and YouTube. As consumer touch points become more varied, add social into your monitoring brief to navigate your competitors’ brand map.
To learn more about Global Ad Source you can visit www.globaladsource.com, connect on LinkedIn or reach them via email.
