ethority GmbH & Co. KG was founded in Hamburg in 1998 as media time group. By launching its own web monitoring technology gridmaster, which includes a crawler/search system with semantic classification, ethority achieved a breakthrough in the field of website monitoring. This quickly led to successful appointments such as a framework agreement in brand monitoring with a global brand. Only one year later and in the course of a constant refinement of gridmaster, ethority conducted the first issue web monitoring in favour of crisis prevention for the former world’s largest internet provider.
ethority discovered the potential of social media at an early stage and began in 2005 to make use of social media channels. One example is the Corporate Blog, which was created in 2005 and is still successful today. Furthermore, ethority identified the growing importance of the opinion leadership within the web and consequently completed the range of services by adding disseminator and opinion leader marketing campaigns. This year, another highlight was the launch of a monitoring dashboard, which permits the visualization of results, graphics charts and diagrams within a monitoring and is accessible for the individual client at all times.
In 2007 ethority upgraded their product portfolio and positioned themselves in the field of studies – subsequently, the world’s first comprehensive brand study was developed, namely the brand online buzz index (bobi). Bobi includes the monitoring of 2.500 brands, whose conversation occurrence (or buzz) within web 2.0 was analyzed.
One year later, ethority published the hitherto most comprehensive social network study, which identified buzz, image and marketing models in seven languages via the 100 largest networks. Numerous studies followed, such as the FMCG-Study (Fast Moving Consumer Goods; Cooperation with Internet World Business) or the CEO-Study for the Top 500 companies (Cooperation with Manager Magazine). This gave rise to further cooperation with well-known print and online media (e.g. Wirtschaftswoche, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Financial Times Germany and Bild.de).
Ethority started the first fully integrated social media marketing and offline promotion campaign in 2008. The campaign featured a broad multi-channelling in several social networks via video platforms, blogs, twitter streams, viral clips as well as offline (amongst others per event sponsoring and street promotion).
Due to the foundation of the new unit for brand development, branding and strategy consulting, ethority present themselves as Social Media Brand Affinity Specialists since 2009. Five ethority units (branding, marketing, monitoring, research and strategy) attend to more than 100 brands within the area of B2C and B2B marketing. Moreover, ethority offers individual consultation concepts and workshops for the application and utilization of social media in major enterprises.
Because of the growing demand ethority opened a branch office in Munich in mid-2009. Another highlight will be the publication of the Online Brand Equity Index (OBEX) at the end of 2009. The OBEX is a further development of bobi, which analyzes the brand value in various branches within web 2.0.
