We caught up with long-time IIBN Dublin member Ellen Gunning whose new business, Mettacomms, is about to go out to the market seeking €1million in investment for a platform which, she believes, will completely disrupt the marketing and communications industries.
Ellen has been 30+ years in public relations and is utterly passionate about this new product.
“Ask anyone under the age of 25 to tell you about the brand they are wearing/carrying/thinking of buying” she says. “They will tell you about the quality of the goods, and why they want them, and – crucially – what the brand stands for. People no longer buy for functional benefits alone. They buy brands which reflect their culture, ethos, vision of the world. They buy brands that reflect the issues they care about. And they drop brands that don’t”.
The challenge for producers is that there are millions of issues, across a wide range of subjects, that people care about – the environment, girl power, gender equality, LGBTQ+, black lives matter, animal cruelty, child labour, modern slavery, pesticides in food – where does a brand start when it wants to identify the issue that is relevant to its consumers?
The survival of brands, in the future, depends on the positions they take now. And they want to dominate in their chosen area. Mettacomms gives them the data, the insights, the knowledge, the ranking, the predictions, the thought leaders, the issues (by location, interest, age, background etc) that empowers them to take decisions based on relevant, timely information accessed from millions of data sources. That knowledge has never been possible until now.
“It costs a lot of money to position your brand in relation to any issue and that positioning, that thought leadership, is very expensive and time consuming” says Ellen. “Mettacomms takes millions of datapoints, literally, and processes them through a communications lens to deliver insights that allow brands to position themselves with absolute confidence” she added.
But it does more than that. Mettacomms will identify who the influencers are in that space. What are the academics saying about the topic? And who are the important social media commentators? What media are writing with knowledge and insight? Who is speaking about this issue in parliament and what are they saying? Who is lobbying for change in this area? What positions are your competitors taking? Where are they on a thought leader ranking board? Are the influencers – and/or issues – different in different parts of the world? For different age groups? For different ethnic or economic backgrounds? How do you know you’re getting it right?
At the moment – you don’t. You hope. You conduct as much research as possible. You monitor media and sentiment and reputation. But – until now – there has been no one single platform that you could use that tells you what issues are relevant, how they are growing (or declining) in importance, which issues are percolating under that you should watch out for, and who are the thought leaders in that space. There has been no data that you could rely on when taking a decision to take a position for your brand. There has been no way of knowing if you are ahead of your competitors, or behind them, when it comes to ‘owning’ that space around an issue that is so important to your brand.
Further information about Mettacomms can be found here: https://mettacomms.com/
Mettacomms was also featured recently in the Business Post: https://www.businesspost.ie/making-it-work/making-it-work-the-datas-the-thing-for-new-brands-insight-consultancy-6568ae11
Please contact us if you would like an introduction to Ellen.
