Launchmetrics adds AI layer to measure whether brand messages land, not just reach

Brand intelligence platform Launchmetrics has added AI-powered tools that let fashion, lifestyle and beauty brands analyse what their media coverage actually says, rather than only how much of it they generate. "The concept of being seen is no longer what is most important. It's being seen and being understood," chief marketing officer Alison Bringé told FashionUnited.

Bringé said two factors drove the development: AI has allowed the company to extract more value from the data it mines for customers, and brands now expect far more insight into what is working and what is not. The new capabilities are designed to show not only how visible a brand is globally, but whether the messages it puts out reach audiences as intended.

The starting point is a problem familiar to most PR teams. A brand rallies its teams around the world behind a new campaign, product or initiative, and the resulting coverage may be large in volume while carrying a different message from the one pitched. "Just because you pitch something doesn't mean that is the story that the reporter writes about," Bringé said.

Launchmetrics' Analyze Coverage feature uses AI to identify the top themes across a brand's coverage, for example everything published about it during a fashion week. Bringé said the feature has been well received by clients under pressure to report quickly, who now have access to richer insights "almost like with a click of a button".

How the measurement works

The underlying metric remains Media Impact Value (MIV), the monetary value Launchmetrics assigns to every post, interaction or article about a brand, which Bringé said the company has established as an industry standard over the past decade. What changes is the level of detail. "Now it allows you to go deeper into that media impact value and understand what is it that is driving it," she said.

Once Analyze Coverage has surfaced the main themes, a set of Advanced AI Enrichments lets brands break MIV down further: by category, such as menswear or womenswear; by product; by geography; by campaign or event; by audience; and by media tier. "Maybe you're a beauty brand and you want to know, is my mascara more talked about than perhaps the mascara of Christian Dior," Bringé said.

According to Bringé, this level of tracking was difficult before AI because it required image and visual recognition, as well as queries built on context clues rather than set up by hand. AI now helps define the monitoring parameters and competitive landscape for each customer, and supports the mining of the data.

MIV covers what Launchmetrics calls the five voices that influence the consumer's path to purchase: media, celebrities, owned media, partners and influencers. Bringé said the same calculation applies across all of them, with the algorithm adjusted over the years as the platforms behind each voice have changed. "Now, we're also measuring the AI voice," she said.

Launchmetrics has also published a guide to its new AI Visibility Score, which tracks how brands appear within AI-generated answers, the context they surface in and how they compare with competitors named alongside them. The score combines four signals into a single figure from 0 to 100 and is designed to work alongside MIV (Launchmetrics).

Ralph Lauren benchmark

To illustrate how brands can use the data, Bringé pointed to an analysis of Ralph Lauren presented in a recent Launchmetrics webinar. In the first quarter, the US brand generated 82.8 million dollars in MIV across more than 9,000 mentions, with 62 percent coming from womenswear. One competitor in its peer set, by contrast, had MIV split almost evenly between menswear and womenswear.

"So, while Ralph is much more heavier in women's wear, you could see the competitor did a much better job of balancing that," Bringé said.

She said such comparisons matter because "growth isn't coming from new demand. It's coming from taking from the share of your competitor." Brands can use the breakdown to see whether their message is not landing, whether a rival promotes a category more effectively, or whether they have neglected a category where a small additional effort could deliver a larger return.

The same applies to media tiers. A brand may perform strongly in tier-one publications but trail a competitor in tier-two titles, which Bringé said generate more value overall because there are more of them.

Bringé said the tools respond to demand from customers facing more pressure from leadership to show what is working, in an economic climate less favourable than a few years ago. "Everyone has data now, but it's about seeing where you can move and where your opportunities are," she said.

Her advice to brands is to look beyond vanity metrics and move fast. "In this day and age, you need to act quicker than anybody else before the data gets stale and before someone else steals that customer or your share of market."