NexTide Media is using artificial intelligence to help advertisers better understand livestreamed video.
Today, June 16, NexTide launched a new live intelligence tool intended to help brands and marketers translate livestreamed content into sentiment and consumer behavior data by using AI to monitor the audio and live chat from creators’ streaming videos. The tool applies tried-and-true social listening practices and metrics to a platform tailored for the livestreaming environment, tapping into NexTide’s curated network of 783 creators, which includes names like Juan “Hungrybox” Debiedma and Jason “Pikaboo” Smith.
“Usually, when you’re working with creators or streamers, they’re just kind of like, ‘hey, they might hit your 18-to-34 demographic; oh, they’re playing that game that you know you might be interested in as a brand,’” said NexTide chief executive officer and founder Alexander Guerrero in an interview with GamesBeat. “Now, we can get down to the actual things that they’re saying.”
NexTide intends for brand clients like State Farm, Welch’s, and Scott’s Lawn Care to use Kraken in tandem with the company’s other tools, including a brand-safety-monitoring AI tool NexTide launched last year. Users on NexTide’s platform will be able to type both creators and brands into Kraken’s search bar to access automatically generated recommendations and snippets of sentiment data. Guerrero said NexTide is launching two campaigns in the coming month that already have Kraken baked in, but that the company intends to license Kraken’s data using a software-as-a-service business model moving forward.
Kraken analyzes on-demand video of livestreamed content after it publishes on platforms like Twitch, and does not yet glean sentiment data from livestreamed video in real time. At the moment, it takes between six and eight hours to receive data from a new livestream. NexTide is working on a real-time product, which NexTide chief technology officer JJ Liebig said was “coming soon,” but currently “under lock and key.”
“We’re running analysis as it comes, but we’re really only doing these roll-ups and very expensive data operations later,” Liebig said in an interview with GamesBeat.
The name of NexTide’s new tool is intended to evoke the image of the legendary Scandinavian Kraken, an octopus-like sea monster, with Liebig drawing parallels between the mythical beast’s tentacles and the way NexTide’s Kraken constantly reaches out for user data. Kraken is part of a rising tide of tools and services — AI-powered and otherwise — intended to help brands feel more confident committing their marketing budgets to the growing livestreaming space. Guerrero said that his company’s offering stands apart from the pack due to its connection with NexTide’s large roster of pre-analyzed creators, with Kraken constantly running background analysis on its creator network so it can provide quick reports to interested advertisers using a wealth of historic data.
“Kraken is really a one-stop approach. First of all, realistically, if it’s an English-speaking creator, there’s a good chance we have them in our roster anyway,” Guerrero said. “And, of course, we’re opportunistic. We can run more creators than just the guys that we have direct access to.”