Protagonist Launches a Platform to Measure the Impact of Popular Narratives
Protagonist, formerly known as Monitor 360, today introduced the Protagonist Platform, a software platform to analyze complex, cross-platform data sets to reveal the underlying beliefs and motivations of consumers.
The Protagonist Platform uses advanced natural language processing and machine learning to uncover and measure the narratives that impact a given market, while the company’s team of narrative experts apply high-level evaluation to give actionable meaning to the findings.
"For the past 10 years, Protagonist has rigorously observed and analyzed the way that beliefs function in the world, and we were never content with the inherent biases and limits of scope in traditional market research," said Aaron Harms, executive vice president of product and technology at Protagonist, in a statement. "Over the last two years, we've been building a platform that combines that expertise with the explosion of technical innovation, such as natural language processing and machine learning happening at the same time. The Protagonist Platform is the final product of that synthesis."
The Protagonist Platform combines natural language processing and machine learning to process and assign meaning to massive datasets, across mediums. Analytics delivered by the Protagonist Platform provide a representation of narrative signals, incorporating thousands of data points and specially tailored considerations. Protagonist's staff of narrative experts use these findings to create detailed Narrative Analytics reports that outline the forces at play in the market, their importance and implications, and the strategies for engaging with them.
Protagonist Platform capabilities include the following:
- Narrative Analysis and Strategy: Experts leverage the Protagonist Platform to sift through enormous volumes of unstructured data and articulate the relevant narratives. Narrative Analysis exposes both the competitive landscape and the customer base. Each narrative is then assigned an impact score to illustrate its relative level of influence. The Protagonist Platform tracks trends and maps them together to identify opportunities for growth, distinction, and customer activation.
- Narrative Subscription: Subscription applies Narrative Analytics over a period of time to map the ways that narratives change and assess the efficacy of customer and competitor actions. This enables businesses to track the way they interplay with the existing belief patterns.
- Narrative Playbook: Playbooks distill the findings of Narrative Analytics into actionable tactics, isolating the specific messaging, channels, content, and influencers that drive positive behaviors, identifying which messages will translate into leads and increase influence.
"Brands are at their most powerful and resilient when they can tap into the deep beliefs that motivate their audiences," said Doug Randall, CEO of Protagonist, in a statement. "Protagonist gives CMOs the insight to understand narratives so that they can guide rather than simply react to those deeply held beliefs."