Protagonist mines public beliefs in order to empower brands with marketing targeted strategies by understanding their target audiences. They do this by using natural language processing, machine learning, and deep human expertise to identify, measure, and shape narratives. Today, it’s used by dozens of the world’s leading CMOs, business leaders, and foundations. Customers include LinkedIn, Charles Schwab, Wells Fargo, Warner Bros. and many more.

Essentially they are a “Narrative Analytics” company that provides brand data to enterprises for marketing purposes. After hearing about their recent announcement about their newly expanded platform features and capabilities, I invited them onto the show to find out more.

The platform that uses Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning to analyze millions of data points via all media channels (social included) is introducing new marketing and communications offerings to enhance data-driven messaging, channel strategy development and brand signature tracking through the Protagonist Platform.

These additional features include new messaging, channel and influencer playbooks that will allow Protagonist clients, such as LinkedIn, more control within the platform with added education on how to best implement data findings efficiently. Doug Randall is Founder & CEO of Protagonist and talks about how they are helping household names energize their brands, win narrative battles, and understand target audiences.

The Protagonist platform was built on ten years of narrative science that was initially developed to improve the American brand around the world for the US Government. Today, it's used by dozens of the world's leading CMOs, business leaders, and foundations.

Doug has lectured on a number of topics at the Wharton School, Stanford University, and National Defense University; his articles on future technology trends have appeared in the Financial Times, Wired, and Business 2.0.