Pex
Brand Monitoring
Productizing Core Technology 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+ in New Monthly Revenue
Created more than $500K in new monthly recurring revenue from Brand Monitoring.
End-to-End Coverage
Enabled pre-publish checks, post-publish audits, and persistent channel monitoring in a single product.
Clear Market Fit
Established a strong niche with mid-sized brands running influencer campaigns and posting from live events.
Impact
Demand-Led Innovation
Demand from mid-sized brands revealed a new product opportunity for Pex's matching technology, expanding addressable market beyond its original use cases.
Risk Reduction
Gave marketing and compliance teams a scalable way to reduce copyright exposure across brand-owned and influencer channels.
Recurring Revenue Engine
Shifted value from one-time reporting to an ongoing monitoring service with compounding monthly revenue.
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 integrate with an API.
Role
Senior Lead Product Designer at Pex (later Principal). Led end-to-end design, including customer research, wireframing solutions, prototyping workflows, designing interactions and interfaces, and usability testing with brand and compliance teams.
Stakeholders
- Legal and compliance teams
- Marketing, social, and partnership teams
- Copyright holders and content libraries
- Internal product and engineering teams
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 a transaction based revenue model to a recurring revenue model through compliance monitoring.