[Iyiou’s Guide] Wisers has morphed from monitoring sentiment to now leveraging AI and Big Data to mine business intelligence.
Founded in Hong Kong in 1998, Wisers was first a service provider of media monitoring. Thanks to media data collected in the past 20 years, the company has transformed into an AI business intelligence solution provider, leveraging on the value of AI and big data.
“At present, our database has 85 billion media data records built since 1979 and is still expanding at a rate of 96 million items per day,” said Chao He, founder of the Wisers AI.
Like a three-stage rocket, Wisers is driven forward by three business segments – application software unit WisersOne; research consulting unit WisersAnalytics; and technology unit Wisers AI. Wisers AIprovides the technological foundation for the company’s development, which is powered by NLP for text analysis, and possibly the analysis of images and videos in the future. Wisers AI also provides enterprises with technological solutions to assist them in their AI transformation.
WisersOne offers clients access to the SaaS platform to empower them through their marketing communications journey. Clients retrieve insights into public sentiment, PR or marketing effect, influencer profiles, industry-specific intelligence, and more.
WisersAnalytics provides multi-faceted research and consultancy services with focuses on digital marketing insights, consumer studies, brand performance assessments, media research and assessments.
The three business segments are inter-related but play a different role in propelling the company ahead, with each riding on Wisers’ unique advantages in AI technology and Big Data.
Significance of technology: improving business flexibility
Established in 2014, Wisers AI can be regarded as the brain of Wisers. With a team of 30 researchers with doctorate and master degrees, the company aims to develop solutions with smart technology and AI-grade products. In 2016, it received HK$8.53 million from the Hong Kong government’s Innovation and Technology Fund. Wisers AI specializes in the research on Natural Language Processing (NLP) for semantic analysis. By collecting media data in real time and performing text analysis, Wisers offers business intelligence services such as public sentiment monitoring, and help companies explore potential business opportunities.
Since embarking on our journey of serving our clients, Wisers has never ceased to develop its advantages in business intelligence, while using AI technology to consolidate third-party published or authorized data. The company has built a Big Data business knowledge map covering 12 vertical industries.
Wisers has never stopped investing to consolidate its advantages in data quantity. Founder of Wisers AI Dr. He said that while their hundreds of linguists are specializing in different industries, they also continue providing annotated data for AI algorithm training and learning for the company.
Product-wise, Wisers AI mission is to improve the flexibility of Wisers’ solutions. For example, Wisers AI technology can be deployed in the form of SaaS and help provide solutions adaptive to the local environment. Wisers AI has lined up traditional and new media agencies to capture data. Besides, the company has built its own team to collect data and monitor public sentiment. Armed with omnichannel media sources, Wisers can provide clients with information right after the event and according to the delivery mode specified by the clients.
At present, Wisers AI can offer customized risk control solutions for banks, securities firms and regulators in the financial industry. Based on the risk control factors that come alongside public sentiment data, Wisers AI analyses the correlation, emotional value, topics, the upstream and downstream relationship of each factor, and explores the possible risks. It also uses knowledge map to mine from massive media data so as to shed light on the relationships between companies, executives, shareholders, and other companies or people, thus helping financial companies build a panoramic view of their customers’ map and automatically identify important and risky customers. In the words of Dr. He, the value of our products lies with allowing customers to discover previously unknown issues and learn about the potential risks.
Customized Solution for different marketing scenarios
WisersOne and WisersAnalytics are the applications that are made possible with Wisers AI as the underlying technology. WisersOne is the solution that can be customized to fit different marketing scenarios.
Jason Dang, General Manager of WisersOne, held that apart from the advantages in technological innovation, Wisers has also benefitted from the rapid development of social media and mobile Internet in recent years. As the media environment has been fast evolving, it is increasingly difficult for companies to keep their capital-output ratio low, which has presented Wisers with tremendous business opportunities.
To cover all types of marketing needs, WisersOne breaks down the scene into the following 4 categories:
- Media monitoring: includes the company’s negative monitoring, crisis warning, competitor monitoring, industry dynamic monitoring, event discovery and tracking in related fields, etc.
- Cross Media Tracking: is comprised of the analyses on corporate communication performance and peer comparison, evaluation on press release effect, evaluation on self-media selection, media research management, etc.
- Digital marketing: offers influencer discovery and recommendation, evaluation, influencer pool management, etc. In addition, WisersOne can carry out activity delivery recommendation, peer marketing case study, activity effect evaluation, word of mouth analyses, social media insight and so on from the perspective of activities.
- Business intelligence. Featuring an intelligent database that has been integrated with the knowledge maps of dozens of industries, WisersOne helps enterprises study and analyse various types of market intelligence.
Take the specific situation of public relations crisis as an example—when a public relations crisis occurs, WisersOne will launch a crisis response mechanism, upgrading the system level to 7*24 real-time all-media monitoring and negative warning, and establishing an experienced special service team. Based on AI’s event tracking system, it will monitor the crisis trend, topic evolution, spread of related subjects, and netizen sentiment around the clock, as well as continuously judge and analyse the crisis trend to help companies keep abreast of the latest situation and adjust their response strategies in a timely manner, so as to minimize business risks and losses.
Technical assistance and consulting services
If WisersOne is said to provide standardized services, then WisersAnalytics combines the analytical insights and consulting services of a professional team on a data basis. Angel Young, General Manager, WisersAnalytics, said that the business not only provides monitoring services, but also looks for clues in big data and mines insights through AI technology and rigorous analytical methodology to provide relevant suggestions for the decision-making of brands in regard to their business problems.
In terms of the analysis steps, WisersAnalytics will first understand the properties of each media platform, as multiple platforms mean there are a lot of data that are irrelevant or have not been organised. The brand needs the help of big data processing technology to classify data of different dimensions and correspond numbers to the KPI of daily marketing, in a bid to assist the companies in optimizing their decision-making.
After technical processing, WisersAnalytics uses its own set of AIDA (Aware, Interest, Desire, Action) analysis framework to carry out a subsequent evaluation. Based on information gathered on social media, WisersAnalytics can measure consumers’ buying path based on the extent of brand recognition, interest, reputation and purchase behavior, helping the client understand their performance through a series of indicators. In the meantime, it can help brands learn from the best cases of their competitors.
Take the evaluation of influencers as an example – on one hand, WisersAnalytics will collect metrics such as the number of likes and interactive messages. On the other hand, it will analyse the texts and images released by the influencers, extract points of interest from influencers, as well as determine indicators such as brand recognition, relativity and agreeableness. For an influencer who has already reached cooperation with the company, WisersAnalytics will also analyse from the comments the extent of the influencer’s contribution to consumers’ purchase intentions. Through multi-dimensional measurement, WisersAnalytics compares their influence with the client’s brand goals, in a bid to determine the proportion of investment.
“With more than 20 years of experience in media intelligence service, Wisers can provide multi-dimensional and industry-wide monitoring for our clients, providing them with precious insights in their decision-making process” said Young.
Wisers has 9 offices in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and mainland China with more than 900 employees. It is now providing services for four categories of clients – the first being governments and multinational corporations subscribing to our public sentiment monitoring service; the second being well-established businesses and brands that require marketing communication monitoring and analysis; the third being research and consultancy companies that need to track marketing data; and the fourth being financial institutions, listed companies, media and government agencies that rely on Wisers’ all-media big data and/or AI technology for business integration, connection to their internal big data platforms, and development of customized solutions.
