Brandsystems vs Google Meridian

Brandsystems offers Marcom Manager, a web-based marketing resource management platform for planning, budgets, campaign workflows, brand compliance and creative assets. Marketing teams can plan channel activity, manage resources and milestones, and track time and spend. Campaigns support configurable briefs with mandatory fields and conditional logic, plus templates and media schedules for digital, social, video, photography, events and print. The digital asset management area holds work in progress and finished assets, with metadata, search, usage details, access controls, approval flows and publishing rules. Configurable workflows and a BPMN-based modeler support marketing processes. Users can share workspaces, files and comments, and annotate documents, images, video and HTML5 content online. Reports cover campaigns, budgets, tasks and staff distribution, with XLSX and other exports. Access features include SAML2 identity federation, company-defined password policies and role-based controls. BrandSystems says the service runs on AWS, supports EU, Australian or US data-processing jurisdictions, and complies with relevant EU GDPR requirements. Pricing is available on request; prospective customers can book a demo. The company says it formed as a standalone software provider in 2001 and joined Wellcom Worldwide Group in 2018.

Google Meridian is a free, open-source Bayesian marketing mix modeling library for estimating channel contribution and ROI, modeling response curves and planning budgets. It is designed to estimate causal marketing impact and incremental outcomes for treatment variables. Teams can use geo-level data for media effect estimates, incorporate business knowledge through priors, and include controls such as Google Query Volume. Meridian supports reach and frequency modeling for video and search query volume data to account for organic demand. Its budget optimization and scenario planning features help teams assess channel allocation. Meridian GeoX supports geo experiments whose results can be used to calibrate models; automated calibration and expanded model health diagnostics are also supported. The Scenario Planner notebook requires access to at least one trained model stored in Google Drive or Google Cloud Storage. Meridian Studio is a Google Cloud-powered enterprise platform for managing models, with capacity to run up to hundreds simultaneously. Google describes Meridian as intended for cross-functional measurement teams, including analysts, business users, data scientists and technical practitioners. Support includes community discussions and expert support through Discord, plus technical troubleshooting through GitHub.