With more and more brand and marketing managers and insight managers telling us that brand tracking is too expensive and doesn’t provide the value it ought to, it’s more important than ever to understand what brand tracking providers are doing to change this perception. 

Imran Choudhary, our Chief Commercial Officer, is at the forefront of helping brands unlock the full potential of brand tracking. By working closely with clients, to help them ensure seamless integration of brand insights into strategic decision-making, Imran is shaping the future of data-driven brand growth by ensuring Latana’s tracking solutions are fit for the insight professionals of today.

Now, he’s tackling brands' most pressing questions about industry trends and what needs to be done to improve brand tracking to keep up. Read on for his insights, or send us your question at news@latana.com—we’ll make sure to get you an answer.

Q. What are some of the industry trends in brand tracking?

A. Over the last two decades, most forms of market research solutions have benefited from tech-enabled innovations to help improve insight generation and delivery. However, this hasn’t been the case for brand tracking - left behind to the traditional methods which haven’t changed in decades in regards to data collection, data processing or data analysis. This is a real shame!

With this stagnation, its inevitable issues arise and we’re seeing this with a rise in panel fraud impacting data quality from traditional incentivised surveys. In some cases up to 40% of responses either come from ‘professional survey takers’ who answer tactically as opposed to truthfully, or via bots designed to answer surveys solely to capture the reward at the end of the survey.  Insight leaders are now being increasingly tasked with understanding how to reduce the impact of fraud to ensure more reliable, representative insights.  

Another trend is the need for brands to justify their investment in brand marketing by being able to better link brand performance to wider business effects. This is why brands want to measure their brand health and the impact of their brand marketing with ever-great reliability and precision, with a growing desire for more granular audience segmentation.   

Finally, there has been an increased focus on wanting brand tracking data to work with other research and business KPIs like social listening and sales so brands can build a richer understanding of brand perception. This is why having frequent, granular data that can be piped into other BI tools is vitally important.

To top it all off, there is a growing trend for brands to do more with less budget, especially where brand trackers are concerned.  Those spending 7-8 figures annually are looking for genuine savings given wider budgetary constraints now becoming commonplace.  This is why end-to-end automation is important to cut costs where possible.

Q: What is Latana doing in the wake of these trends?

A. Latana has developed a new approach to data collection, placing surveys in interstitial mobile ad space rather than relying on traditional panels. This method reduces fraudulent responses by reaching everyday mobile users who aren’t incentivized to complete surveys, leading to more natural and honest answers at a much larger scale.

By leveraging ad networks, we benefit from a sampling framework that traditional panels cannot match. For example, in the US, we can reach two-thirds of the adult population—unheard of in the sampling space. This allows us to achieve sample sizes 10 times larger than traditional trackers, positively impacting data quality.

We typically capture over 50,000 responses per year per brand, providing large monthly sample sizes. These are dynamically adjusted to ensure robust numbers of people aware of each brand, generating reliable and precise lower-funnel KPIs with narrow margins of error—even for brands with only 1%-2% awareness. In effect, we set quotas at the KPI level to ensure even small or niche brands receive the most reliable data.

To further enhance data quality, we apply Bayesian statistics to brand tracking, enabling more precise weighting and processing. This ensures stable, accurate data, even for smaller audience segments or hard-to-reach groups like the very young or elderly. Ultimately, our margins of error are up to 90% narrower than industry standards.

We also focus on making brand tracking insights more compatible with other business intelligence tools, helping brands connect brand perception data with broader performance metrics. Lastly, automation plays a key role in increasing efficiency and reducing costs, ensuring high-quality insights remain accessible and scalable for brands of all sizes.

I’m genuinely excited about what we’re doing at Latana—especially as we take a first-principles approach to overcoming historic challenges.

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Q. What role will AI and synthetic data play in the future?

A. The role of AI, like any other tool, depends on how it gets used. AI used to be about analyzing open-text responses but now it can analyze the data and provide insights and conclusions through machine learning and AI agents

When it comes to synthetic data, - AI-generated datasets that mimic real-world responses will play a growing role in enhancing traditional brand tracking. However, AI-generated datasets are only as reliable as the data they are trained on, meaning synthetic data shouldn't, in my opinion, replace real consumer insights from real people. Instead, it should complement them by enhancing modelling accuracy, filling data gaps, and enabling simulations to predict brand performance across different market conditions. This is a perfect example of where a Multilevel Regression and Postratrification (MRP) model can help. Our MRP model utilises machine learning and Bayesian statistics to leverage millions of data points collected to improve point estimates within niche groups, ensuring better reliability.

Q. What emerging methodologies are shaping the future of brand tracking?

A. Brand tracking largely still relies on the use of consumer panels to capture brand KPIs in lengthy 20-minute surveys.  The problem with this is that many consumer groups are not going to sign up to a panel to do survey after survey, especially if they’re 20 minutes long!  Even with an incentive some groups are hard to recruit, for example, young people or older people or those on high incomes.

With the above in mind, here lies the existential problem with using consumer panels for brand tracking research - if not enough of your target audience exists on the consumer panels, you’re always going to see poor quality data with high weights applied to niche groups.

As a result, technologies that expand reach beyond traditional panels are becoming increasingly important. Leveraging the ad ecosystem for survey distribution, for example, offers a scalable way to access even traditionally hard-to-reach markets like the Nordics, Nepal, or North African states, where panel sizes are small or nonexistent. 

Even in larger markets like the U.S., this approach significantly increases potential reach, ensuring better representation across demographic groups that panels often struggle to include, such as teenagers, those from certain ethnic groups, older individuals, and high-income earners.