The international growth of Talkwalker is the result of a success story that began with one visionary idea: the monitoring of online content. With the inception of Talkwalker, founders Thibaut Britz and Christophe Folschette have created a powerful social analytics tool that serves companies all over the world. It provides marketing insights and helps customers to protect and promote their brand.
Headquartered in Luxembourg, Talkwalker is the fastest growing company of its industry with offices in Europe, Asia and North America. Its powerful algorithms allow it to search over 150 million websites for keywords such as brand or product names. Similarly, its AI driven visual recognition services analyze over 2,000 images per second to create consumer insights and react to the growing amount of video content on Facebook and Instagram. LACC has met with CEO Americas Todd Grossman and US Marketing Officer Georges Krombach in Talkwalker’s US offices in New York to discuss the company’s success, identity, and the future of social listening.
LACC: Talkwalker has grown to become a global player in social listening and analytics. What are the key steps in the history of the company’s success? How did it all start?
Talkwalker: The social media vibe was roaring when two young entrepreneurs from the south of Luxembourg founded Talkwalker in 2009. Facebook and Twitter were gaining momentum and brands quickly discovered the potential of the new platforms as customers were talking about their products online. In a remarkably short period of time, a whole new world of advertising and marketing possibilities had opened up – and it needed monitoring tools to optimize the impact of companies’ communication efforts. Thibaut Britz and Christophe Folschette recognized this potential when they launched their company called Talkwalker and allowed marketing executives to monitor and understand the social stream around their products and brands in an innovative and hitherto unheard-of way.
LACC: Talkwalker is a Luxembourgish success story.
Talkwalker: It definitely is! And so is the personal story of its founders which I would describe as a typically Luxembourgish one: Christophe Folschette and Thibaut Britz have known each other for about 20 years. They met playing table tennis in Luxembourg and regularly played against each other at tournaments. However, it is only after finishing their studies that they founded Talkwalker. Thibaut had returned from Switzerland and started programming when Christophe quit his job to work together on the emerging project. Today, Talkwalker is an international company with over 200 employees and 2,000 clients, including brands with a global reach.
LACC: With AI driven programs such as its video recognition services, Talkwalker has continuously increased the range of its products. How does Talkwalker innovate and what are the company’s outstanding features in the world of social media analytics?
Talkwalker: At Talkwalker, we keep track with the evolution of social media by implementing the newest social media listening technology and applying it to our wide variety of products. We are able to deliver the most powerful metrics and efficient marketing insights to companies that want to understand how social media users perceive their brand. How does that work? We have a state-of-the-art social media analytics platform that uses the most advanced AI-powered technology to monitor and analyze online conversations in real-time across social networks, news websites, blogs, and forums in 187 languages.
Talkwalker has developed proprietary tools that can evaluate the sentiment of social media data - an important asset when dealing with influencers, the so-called social media gurus: We can track them and monitor their activities to help companies and brands optimize their interaction with these key online players. After all, we aspire to be a cutting-edge company that constantly innovates in one of the most dynamic sectors of marketing, delivering the highest technological standards and recognizing user trends.
LACC: What do you mean by user trends?
Talkwalker: Let’s take a look at the statistics to give a better understanding of how we identify and - in a second phase - react to user trends: Our research suggests that 80% of all social media posts will consist of videos by 2021. To process this increased amount of video content we have developed monitoring tools that are based on the video recognition technology you previously mentioned. Research and innovation are within our DNA – they go hand in hand with user preferences.
LACC: How does Talkwalker’s video recognition tool help companies to improve their marketing efforts?
Talkwalker: We are living in a society of images and this trend becomes increasingly clear with the social media behavior of Millenials and the so-called Gen Z. We post videos of moments that are special to us and smartphone cameras are already an omnipresent part of our lives, documenting our interaction with brands. A user-generated video is hence an invaluable source for a company to understand their customers’ preferences in a multitude of situations. To illustrate this: Talkwalker-led research found that up to 98% of videos with detected brand logos did not mention the brand name and it was impossible for companies to monitor them – until now. Talkwalker’s revolutionary technology finds consumer video insights and is able to measure the true ROI of sponsorship campaigns.
LACC: Online media have an ever-growing impact on our lives, presenting unique marketing and social listening opportunities. What are your perspectives on social media, audience changes, and the future of data?
Talkwalker: Over the past five years, the predominance of images and videos was confirmed as the easiest way to express yourself on social media. The selfie-boom changed pre-existing paradigms only marginally. The emergence of influencers, on the other hand, added an important actor to the social media industry whose power cannot be underestimated.
However, the real changes pertain to our technological means and the ability to decipher and understand brand messages hidden in personal videos and emoji pictograms. The impact of Artificial Intelligence, for instance, can now be felt on a daily basis – AI is reshaping the whole marketing and communications sector by getting rid of routine tasks and improving data accuracy, thus allowing professionals to shift their focus towards more creative tasks.
As for the future, our biggest vision is data democratization. We want people to engage and reflect on the potential of data. Herein lies the challenge and future of data: Its integration into the functional processes of organizations.
LACC: Thank you for this conversation!
Bob Dieschburg, LACC