Have you ever noticed that Apple has a Twitter account, but never tweets? However, Apple does tweet all the time. You just don’t see it.

Social media has ushered in a new era of “dark marketing.” Today, 90% of Twitter ads, 85% of Facebook ads, 60% of YouTube ads are “dark” or hidden from public view. Instead, the ads are only shown to targeted audiences. This is far from ideal for brands trying to understand competitor campaigns.

Working with some of the world’s most reputable names, BrandTotal is a high-tech and VC-backed agile marketing intelligence company that helps enterprises reverse-engineer the marketing strategies of their competitors. Their innovative SaaS-based platform is the solution to a growing and problematic phenomenon known as Dark Marketing, which characterizes professional marketers'​ lack of transparency in the ever-evolving digital marketing ecosystem. Detecting “dark” posts --- which are becoming more prevalent due to fragmentation of channels, segmentation of consumers, and personalization of content --- is what sets BrandTotal apart. They can detect brands’ public [organic] posts and expose those that are dark and targeted, which cannot be found on a company’s public social media page. Their software helps clients spot threats and opportunities in real time within their competitive landscape, so they can garner actionable insights and adjust your marketing strategies on the fly. I wanted to find out more about how businesses can leverage this kind of agile marketing, and how BrandTotal can help businesses gain a competitive edge.

BrandTotal CEO and Co-Founder, Alon Leibovich joins me on my daily tech podcast to share his story and why dark marketing is nothing to be afraid of.

After working for several years as a marketing strategist and organizational psychologist, he realized that consumer companies were lacking a crucial input in their marketing planning: competitive knowledge. Before digital, it was pretty straightforward to track the competition in printed publications and on TV, but today, so much marketing is hidden from view in “dark marketing,” or hidden posts.

So together with experts in cyber methods and artificial intelligence, he founded BrandTotal, to help companies gain a competitive edge by illuminating and analyzing their competitors’ dark marketing campaigns. They founded the company in the rockin’ city of Tel Aviv, and have since expanded to the even more rockin’ city of New York.