Centro rebranded to Basis Technologies on Friday, and next week will add research and benchmarking tools to its automated software offering for enterprise marketers.

“Marketing is a battle of perception in the minds of your customers and decision makers in the industry,” said Shawn Riegsecker, CEO at Basis, quoting from a book by Al Ries and Jack Trout. “Perception is reality and everything else is just an illusion.”

Riegsecker said that the executive team needed to either spend years, energy and marketing dollars repositioning Centro as the industry changed, or rebrand the company with the name of the signature platform, Basis, which launched in early 2018.

The price to rebrand the company, excluding internal costs about $150,000, but “the biggest cost will come with the upcoming promotion of the rebrand,” he said.

The plan is to run an omnichannel campaign across social and search, among other media.

The latest move puts technology at the center of everything Basis offers. The research benchmarking feature, Market Trends, integrates with its Basis platform to support rapid reporting of digital ad performance trends for all major channels and properties.

“The new name sends a strong message that we are a software-led company,” he said. In 2020, Basis announced 300% growth projected in Q3 2020 year-over-year for software revenue. 

Market Trends integrates into Basis, which brings programmatic, site direct, advanced TV, search, and social together through one interface.

The tool surfaces metrics on ad spend and key performance indicators (KPIs) across publisher-direct, programmatic, search and social buying channels.

The goal is for advertisers to reduce time and the cost associated with collecting, researching, and organizing data for media planning.

Benchmarks help set goals, but finding the starting points in digital media is difficult. Most research tools for digital advertising data are disconnected from media workflow, and incur significant costs.

Market Trends measures the advertising spend and performance across channels, properties, verticals and KPIs. It is anonymized and analyzed from billions of dollars in ad spend managed in hundreds of thousands of line items by thousands of agencies and brands using Basis over the past five years.

Performance metrics being tracked monthly or in pre-set time frames include eCPM, eCPVC, CTR, and viewability, with more measurements in development.

Advertiser segments being tracked range from Autos/Vehicles, to Finance, Shopping, Sports, Travel and more.