Protagonist Announces New Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Powered Solutions to Give Marketers Empathy at Scale

New Suite of Narrative Analytics Solutions Allows Brands to Quantify and Utilize Beliefs for Higher Engagement

Protagonist, the Narrative Analytics company, announced newly expanded capabilities for understanding and engaging with audiences, leveraging deeply held beliefs and communications across all forms of media. The new marketing and communications offerings add data-driven messaging, channel strategy development and brand signature tracking to the Protagonist Platform.

Protagonist’s intellectual property, initially designed to serve the White House and National Security Council, is now available for use by corporate marketers. Protagonist identifies, measures, and provides strategies for taking control of narratives–the deeply held beliefs that drive human behavior–which are essential to customer engagement. Artificial intelligence via the Protagonist platform enables marketers to gather, analyze, and utilize millions of data points to create messages that resonate with customers, delivering empathy at scale. This was previously impossible without the power of Narrative Analytics.

“Protagonist ‘s unique technology for uncovering the deeper meaning in public conversations helped us more deeply understand the mindset of small businesses,” said LinkedIn Director of Market Research, Rogier Verhulst. “Before the analyses, we had struggled to understand their challenges and needs, and Protagonist helped us better uncover the topics discussed and the drivers behind them.”

New Service Offerings Allow Protagonist Clients to Take Control of Their Narrative

Protagonist’s full suite of solutions provides end-to-end support for understanding and influencing complex audiences. These solutions help organizations in B2B, B2C, nonprofits and government agencies crystalize competitive positioning, refine messaging, develop customer personas, ideate campaigns for maximum results, and more.

“Highly resonant, customer communication is what drives results today,” said Protagonist CEO and founder, Doug Randall. “Through AI, we can not only access and analyze valuable customer beliefs, we can deliver empathy at scale to develop content, communications, and products that connect deeply with customers. Better engagement equates to better results for marketers driving company growth.”

New offerings include:

North Star Narrative: North Star Narrative is the story that customers seek to have told about them in the marketplace. This narrative is the guidepost throughout the life of a brand, whether it is in crisis, in need of revitalization, or just trying to stay ahead of competition. Protagonist constructs the North Star Narrative by synthesizing the aspiration that resides inside the organization, balanced against the realities of where the brand currently sits — its strengths, associations, and claims. Once a North Star Narrative is established, Protagonist builds playbooks that chart the execution path and establish monitoring and optimization to track progress for clients.

Messaging Playbook: Provides tactical and strategic guidance for marketing, communications, PR, and creative teams tasked with creating effective messaging. The solution provides effective communication strategies informed by narrative analysis. This includes recommendations on how to leverage key terms, phrases, syntax, tone, claims analysis, calls-to-action, and cognitive principles to strengthen a brand, a unique approach in an industry traditionally dominated by intuition.

“The claims that people make about a given brand or issue are the building blocks of marketing and communications, whether they are true or not.” says Aaron Harms, Co-founder and EVP at Protagonist. “By extracting and measuring those claims at scale using AI, we’re able to pinpoint highly actionable and data-driven messaging recommendations that reveal which strategies will resonate best and why.”

Channel Playbook: This solution uncovers the media outlets, publications, and other sources that have the most profound impact on audience beliefs, and how to leverage them effectively. Knowing what specific channels will resonate best with an audience saves time and resources, optimizing spend and boosting customer engagement.

Influencer Playbook: This traces the narratives that clients care about the most, identifies the people driving the conversation, and builds strategies to engage those people to increase favorable dialogue. Other software tools rank ‘influencers’ by simplistic keyword associations. Protagonist goes deeper, tracking the creation, growth and engagement around full cognitive arguments across all forms of media to uncover the true stewards and opponents of brands, organizations and broad societal topics over time.

Innovations in Natural Language Processing Advance Insights Into the Public Mindspace

Protagonist announced updates to the technology behind its proprietary Narrative Analytics platform, which supports all of its offerings. The platform can now process millions of data points of structured and unstructured dialogue to uncover existing narratives, track changes in public beliefs, and highlight growing sentiments at scale. More sophisticated Natural Language Processing capabilities make it possible for Protagonist to differentiate between claims being made, evidence used to support them, and underlying concepts — providing the ability to understand which narratives are most impactful for encouraging action giving marketers insights into their customers that were previously impossible.