Pex
Brand Monitoring
Productizing Core Detection into Mid-Market Recurring Revenue
Led the expansion of Pex’s matching capabilities into a monitoring product for mid-sized brands, creating a new recurring revenue stream while reducing copyright risk.
Highlights
Outcomes
$500K+
New monthly revenue created from Brand Monitoring.
Total Coverage
Enabled pre-publish checks, post-publish audits, and persistent channel monitoring in one product.
Found A Niche
Found a niche supporting with brands running influencer campaigns and posting from live events.
Impact
Demand-Led Innovation
Interest in music identification tech from mid-sized brands revealed an opportunity to build a social media monitoring service, unlocking a massive new TAM.
Risk Reduction
Gave marketing and compliance teams a powerful tool to reduce copyright infringement exposure on social media across brand and influencer channels.
Durable Revenue Stream
Shifted value from one-time reports to recurring revenue from monitoring services that grew month over month.
Press
Background
Context
Brand teams were publishing content on social media with unlicensed music constantly, eventually resulting in multi-million dollar lawsuits between major record labels like Sony and major brands like Marriott. Customer asking for a way to identify music in their social media posts revealed a broader need for an audting and monitoring service tailored to mid-sized brands who don't want to intergrate with an API.
Stakeholders
- Brand teams and compliance stakeholders
- Social, influencer, and employee advocacy teams
- Product and engineering partners
- Rights and legal operations
Challenges
- Brands needed visibility across owned channels plus partnership content from creators and employees.
- Teams had to check both pre-publish campaigns and already-live social libraries.
- Music usage often included modified tracks, such as remixes, mashups, sped-up versions, and noisy background audio.
- Rising copyright risk increased urgency for a repeatable monitoring and response workflow.
Objectives
Pre-publish Screening
Let teams check campaign assets before launch to reduce infringement risk.
Post-publish Auditing
Support channel-based historical auditing across published social posts at scale.
Continuous Monitoring
Create ongoing detection and reporting to take down infringing content quickly.
Research and Discovery
Key Findings
- Teams needed both immediate checks and always-on monitoring, not one-time queries.
- Channel coverage had to include owned, influencer, and employee-created brand content.
- Detection quality had to hold up on modified tracks and noisy social-video audio.
Implication
The opportunity was larger than search. A dedicated monitoring product could convert episodic rights checks into recurring operational workflows and recurring revenue.
Methods
- Customer workflow interviews with brand, legal, and rights stakeholders
- Analysis of Search usage patterns and high-frequency customer requests
- Competitive and market review of copyright enforcement trends for social teams
Design Approach
Dual Entry Points
Designed a clear split between pre-publish checks and published-post auditing workflows.
Intelligent Alerts
Alerted clients to posts using unlicensed music to focus on compliance issues.
Detection Confidence
Surfaced signals that helped teams trust results on remixes, mashups, sped-up music, and noisy clips.
Action-ready Outputs
Structured notifications for fast review and quick action by social operations teams.
Solution
Pre-publish Compliance Check
Brands can verify music usage before content goes live to reduce copyright exposure.
Published Content Audit
Teams can submit URLs to scan existing social content, confirm whether music is present, and identify problematic usage in real time.
Always-on Monitoring
Ongoing tracking across brand-adjacent channels supports recurring rights and risk workflows.
Reflections
This project validated a repeatable product pattern: start from a proven data capability, then repackage it into a workflow aligned to a new client's needs. Brand Monitoring moved Pex from one-time search value into sustained, recurring brand and compliance value.