The rapid advancement of text-to-video (T2V) models has revolutionized content creation, yet their commercial potential remains largely untapped. We introduce, for the first time, the task of seamless brand integration in T2V: automatically embedding advertiser brands into prompt-generated videos while preserving semantic fidelity to user intent. This task confronts three core challenges: maintaining prompt fidelity, ensuring brand recognizability, and achieving contextually natural integration. To address them, we propose BrandFusion, a novel multi-agent framework comprising two synergistic phases. In the offline phase (advertiser-facing), we construct a Brand Knowledge Base by probing model priors and adapting to novel brands via lightweight fine-tuning. In the online phase (user-facing), five agents jointly refine user prompts through iterative refinement, leveraging the shared knowledge base and real-time contextual tracking to ensure brand visibility and semantic alignment. Experiments on 18 established and 2 custom brands across multiple state-of-the-art T2V models demonstrate that BrandFusion significantly outperforms baselines in semantic preservation, brand recognizability
When a new domain resembling a popular brand appears, defenders face a fundamental ambiguity: it may be an attacker-created squatting site for phishing, or it may be a domain the brand itself registered, either defensively, to block attackers, or legitimately, for a new product or service launch. Incorrectly flagging a brand-owned domain as malicious produces a false positive that harms end users and damages the brand's reputation. Resolving this ambiguity requires brand intelligence: the ability to determine, at scale, whether a given domain belongs to a brand. Large language models (LLMs), with their broad knowledge of brand domain relationships, offer a promising zero configuration approach to this problem, but their reliability for brand intelligence tasks remains unknown. We present the first systematic empirical evaluation of LLM brand intelligence across three tasks: domain enumeration (Q1), open ended brand attribution (Q2), and binary ownership classification (Q3). We evaluate four models, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Gemini 3.5 Flash, Claude Sonnet 4.5, and Claude Sonnet 4.6, across four retrieval settings (in context, web search, WHOIS lookup, and combined) on 36 of the most phishe
People increasingly get answers straight from AI search engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini rather than scrolling search results. Brands that once focused on search engine optimization (SEO) must now optimize for how these engines represent, cite, and recommend them -- a shift variously called Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), and AI Search Visibility. We treat AEO and AI Visibility as part of GEO, and study how to measure brand visibility across AI engines: what they value when they cite a brand, which sources they rely on, and what content large language models surface. The hard case is everyone outside the already-authoritative top brands -- SMEs, D2C brands, creators, and early-stage startups. We analyze 100K+ prompt responses across 100+ brands tracked on Ranqo between March and May 2026. First visibility runs form a clear three-tier brand-stature ladder: global household names (e.g., Stripe, Nike) appear in 73% of relevant AI answers on their first run; established mid-market and regional brands (e.g., Olipop, Klaviyo) in 44%; niche and small brands in just 11% -- about 30 percentage points per step. When engines cite sou
When a conversational assistant recommends a brand to a user with no recent observed engagement, that user's same-name Google search rises +4.3 percentage points (pp) [3.1, 5.5], visits to the brand's own site +2.4 pp [1.4, 3.5], and brand-specific retailer-page visits +1.0 pp [0.3, 1.7] over matched backward placebos. Recovering that estimate is the work. The mention creates a brand exposure no web log attributes to the assistant, and the naive all-mention funnel that seems to measure it is confounded: many mentions are incidental references to brands the user already uses ("your Netflix download"), whose downstream visits are that existing customer's own behavior and surface as a brand-specific pre-trend. We measure off-platform response on a panel that joins opt-in clickstream to the same users' ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini conversations, and isolate the effect with a pre-trend event study, a stance classifier, non-customer conditioning, and a within-response same-category control: incidental name-drops then move behavior far less (+1.8/+1.1/+0.3), and the named brand moves far more than unnamed same-category brands in the same response. The downstream path is mostly search-media
Large language models (LLMs) are becoming a major way for consumers to find products, but we do not yet understand how brands compete in this new channel. We study brand dynamics in LLM recommendations using skincare products -- a category where consumers cannot easily judge quality before buying and must rely on brand reputation -- across three commercial LLMs (GPT-4o-mini, Claude Sonnet, Gemini 3 Flash), with a robustness check on search goods. In three experiments, we find: (1) a Conditional Monopoly where well-known brands get recommended 100% of the time (IAI = 10.0) when all products have the same specifications, but this dominance disappears with less than a +0.1-star rating advantage for a competitor; (2) authority-style marketing language, including fabricated clinical-evidence claims, breaks this monopoly at a Bias Surplus Value equal to +0.17 rating points, with each model responding differently; and (3) a social dilemma in multi-brand GEO competition: when all brands adopt the same optimization strategy, individual payoff falls from +0.802 to +0.007 in our payoff proxy, and non-participating brands receive zero recommendations in our tests. Our results suggest that gene
Co-branding has become a vital strategy for businesses aiming to expand market reach within recommendation systems. However, identifying effective cross-industry partnerships remains challenging due to resource imbalances, uncertain brand willingness, and ever-changing market conditions. In this paper, we provide the first systematic study of this problem and propose a unified online-offline framework to enable co-branding recommendations. Our approach begins by constructing a bipartite graph linking ``initiating'' and ``target'' brands to quantify co-branding probabilities and assess market benefits. During the online learning phase, we dynamically update the graph in response to market feedback, while striking a balance between exploring new collaborations for long-term gains and exploiting established partnerships for immediate benefits. To address the high initial co-branding costs, our framework mitigates redundant exploration, thereby enhancing short-term performance while ensuring sustainable strategic growth. In the offline optimization phase, our framework consolidates the interests of multiple sub-brands under the same parent brand to maximize overall returns, avoid exces
When a large language model (LLM) answers a question about a company, it grounds the answer in retrieved web sources, and those sources decide what the model says. Most analysis of AI brand visibility looks at the answer text. This study looks one step earlier, at the citations. We merge three Rankfor.AI datasets covering 128 brands across 12 home markets and 13 languages, and analyse 167,551 URL-grounded citations (189,974 total attribution rows). We classify each citation by domain and source type and measure where AI gets its brand information, by language and by market. Four patterns hold. First, AI grounds brand answers overwhelmingly in third-party sources: 85.7% of citations point to sites the brand does not own, against 14.3% owned. Second, the source base is concentrated and long-tailed: 80% of citations come from about 18% of domains, fitting a Zipf law (alpha = 0.86, R^2 = 0.983). Third, one reference site dominates almost everywhere: Wikipedia is the most-cited domain in 11 of 12 languages, the exception being Lithuanian, where the business daily vz.lt edges it (4.38%). Fourth, the source mix is market-specific at the margin: for 46 Polish national brands the most-cited
This study examines inconsistencies in the brand safety classifications of online news articles by analyzing ratings from three leading brand safety providers, DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science, and Oracle. We focus on news content because of its central role in public discourse and the significant financial consequences of unsafe classifications in a sector that is already underserved by digital ad spending. By collecting data from 4,352 news articles on 51 domains, our analysis shows that brand safety services often produce conflicting classifications, with significant discrepancies between providers. These inconsistencies can have harmful consequences for both advertisers and publishers, leading to misplaced advertising spending and revenue losses. This research provides critical insights into the shortcomings of the current brand safety landscape. We argue for a standardized and transparent brand safety system to mitigate the harmful effects of the current system on the digital advertising ecosystem.
Visual brand language is the set of visual properties that convey brand identity for a product. What is the impact of visual brand language on a person's ability to recognize and understand the functional identity of an object? Using an empirically supported modeling framework based on the JIM model of object recognition and the LISA model of analogical inference, we simulated the impact of visual brand language on object recognition, the allocation of attention, and retrieval of functional information about objects. Our simulations predict that brand information captures attention and can slow recognition of an object's functional category, with greater degrees of branding causing larger effects. These results have potential implications for the usability and experience of designed objects.
Brand advertising plays a critical role in building long-term consumer awareness and loyalty, making it a key objective for advertisers across digital platforms. Although real-time bidding has been extensively studied, there is limited literature on algorithms specifically tailored for brand auction ads that fully leverage their unique characteristics. In this paper, we propose a lightweight Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework designed for brand advertising campaigns, exploiting the inherent attributes of brand ads -- such as stable user engagement patterns and fast feedback loops -- to simplify modeling and improve efficiency. Our approach utilizes online isotonic regression to construct monotonic bid-to-spend and bid-to-conversion models directly from streaming data, eliminating the need for complex machine learning models. The algorithm operates fully online with low computational overhead, making it highly practical for real-world deployment. Simulation results demonstrate that our approach significantly improves spend efficiency and cost control compared to baseline strategies, providing a scalable and easily implementable solution for modern brand advertising platforms.
Brand equity and vertical integration are focal, strategic elements of a franchise system that can profoundly influence franchise performance. Despite the recognized importance of these two strategic levers and the longstanding research interest in the topic, our understanding of the interplay between brand equity and vertical integration (company ownership of outlets) in a franchise system remains incomplete. In this study, we revisit the five-decade-old question of how brand equity affects vertical integration in a franchise system and present some novel, nuanced insights into the topic. Evidence from a Bayesian Panel Vector Autoregressive model on a large panel data set shows that brand equity has a powerful, lagging inverse effect on vertical integration, such that higher brand equity leads to less downstream vertical integration in a franchise system. Reverse causality analyses identify a less pronounced but present reciprocal effect. Boundary conditions analyses reveal that the negative effect of brand equity on vertical integration is weaker in franchise systems with international presence and in retail-focused (vs. service-focused) franchises, and stronger in franchise syst
Social media advertisements are key for brand marketing, aiming to attract consumers with captivating captions and pictures or logos. While previous research has focused on generating captions for general images, incorporating brand personalities into social media captioning remains unexplored. Brand personalities are shown to be affecting consumers' behaviours and social interactions and thus are proven to be a key aspect of marketing strategies. Current open-source multimodal LLMs are not directly suited for this task. Hence, we propose a pipeline solution to assist brands in creating engaging social media captions that align with the image and the brand personalities. Our architecture is based on two parts: a the first part contains an image captioning model that takes in an image that the brand wants to post online and gives a plain English caption; b the second part takes in the generated caption along with the target brand personality and outputs a catchy personality-aligned social media caption. Along with brand personality, our system also gives users the flexibility to provide hashtags, Instagram handles, URLs, and named entities they want the caption to contain, making th
Teams measuring whether large language models (LLMs) recommend a brand face a reproducibility problem: ask the same question twice and the answer moves. Practice resamples each prompt a few times (commonly five) and averages, treating within-prompt resampling as the source of the noise. But a measured brand score moves for at least four separable reasons: within-prompt resampling, prompt paraphrase, model identity, and query language. We specify a crossed random-effects (generalizability-theory) decomposition that partitions the total variance of a response-level brand outcome into these four sources, and embed the components in a decision-study allocation that returns how many repeats, paraphrases, models, and languages to buy for a target reliability. We apply it to a fully crossed corpus of 12,933 LLM responses on 20 Central and Eastern European brands, 8 languages, and 3 models (GPT-5.2 and Gemini 3 Flash in parametric mode, Perplexity in grounded retrieval), with a stability subset of 1,435 cells resampled about five times. The outcome is per-response multilingual sentiment polarity. Query language is the largest systematic facet (26.5% of the variance of one response) against
This paper examines influences of brand dynamics on insurance premium productions in Turkey using a dynamic GMM panel estimation technique sampling 31 insurance firms over 2005-2015. The results reveals that brands trust appears as a chief driving force behind premium production where its unit increase augments premium outputs by 5.32 million Turkish Liras (TL). Moreover, the brand value of firms also appears a statistically significant determinant of premium sales, but its size impact remains limited comparing to brand trust, i.e. a million TL increase in brand value generates only 0.02 million TL increase in sales. On the other hand, the study also documents a strong momentum driven from past years premium production with trade-off magnitude of 1 to 0.85. This might imply a higher loyalty-stickiness of customers in Turkey, as well as a self-feeding "bandwagon effect".
As artificial intelligence systems increasingly mediate consumer information discovery, brands face algorithmic invisibility. This study investigates Cultural Encoding in Large Language Models (LLMs) -- systematic differences in brand recommendations arising from training data composition. Analyzing 1,909 pure-English queries across 6 LLMs (GPT-4o, Claude, Gemini, Qwen3, DeepSeek, Doubao) and 30 brands, we find Chinese LLMs exhibit 30.6 percentage points higher brand mention rates than International LLMs (88.9% vs. 58.3%, p<.001). This disparity persists in identical English queries, indicating training data geography -- not language -- drives the effect. We introduce the Existence Gap: brands absent from LLM training corpora lack "existence" in AI responses regardless of quality. Through a case study of Zhizibianjie (OmniEdge), a collaboration platform with 65.6% mention rate in Chinese LLMs but 0% in International models (p<.001), we demonstrate how Linguistic Boundary Barriers create invisible market entry obstacles. Theoretically, we contribute the Data Moat Framework, conceptualizing AI-visible content as a VRIN strategic resource. We operationalize Algorithmic Omniprese
This study aims to examine the impact of electronic word-of-mouth (eWoM) marketing on branding attitudes in social networks. Specifically, we investigate the effects of eWoM activities on brand awareness, brand destruction, branding, brand image, and brand competition. To gather data, we conducted a survey among followers of the Vizland shoe page on the Instagram social network. Statistical analysis was performed using SPSS software, and hypotheses were tested using SmartPLS software. The results indicate that eWoM significantly and positively influences branding, brand image, and brand awareness, while it does not have an impact on brand destruction. Additionally, branding and brand destruction are found to play a crucial role in gaining competitive advantage. Therefore, eWoM activities contribute to enhancing the brand relationship.
In social media, marketers attempt to influence consumers by using directive language, that is, expressions designed to get consumers to take action. While the literature has shown that directive messages in advertising have mixed results for recipients, we know little about the effects of directive brand language on consumers who see brands interacting with other consumers in social media conversations. On the basis of a field study and three online experiments, this study shows that directive language in brand conversation has a detrimental downstream effect on engagement of consumers who observe such exchanges. Specifically, in line with Goffman's facework theory, because a brand that encourages consumers to react could be perceived as face-threatening, consumers who see a brand interacting with others in a directive way may feel vicarious embarrassment and engage less (compared with a conversation without directive language). In addition, we find that when the conversation is nonproduct-centered (vs. product-centered), consumers expect more freedom, as in mundane conversations, even for others; therefore, directive language has a stronger negative effect. However, in this conte
Many recent studies have investigated social biases in LLMs but brand bias has received little attention. This research examines the biases exhibited by LLMs towards different brands, a significant concern given the widespread use of LLMs in affected use cases such as product recommendation and market analysis. Biased models may perpetuate societal inequalities, unfairly favoring established global brands while marginalizing local ones. Using a curated dataset across four brand categories, we probe the behavior of LLMs in this space. We find a consistent pattern of bias in this space -- both in terms of disproportionately associating global brands with positive attributes and disproportionately recommending luxury gifts for individuals in high-income countries. We also find LLMs are subject to country-of-origin effects which may boost local brand preference in LLM outputs in specific contexts.
Intellectual property protection(IPP) have received more and more attention recently due to the development of the global e-commerce platforms. brand recognition plays a significant role in IPP. Recent studies for brand recognition and detection are based on small-scale datasets that are not comprehensive enough when exploring emerging deep learning techniques. Moreover, it is challenging to evaluate the true performance of brand detection methods in realistic and open scenes. In order to tackle these problems, we first define the special issues of brand detection and recognition compared with generic object detection. Second, a novel brands benchmark called "Open Brands" is established. The dataset contains 1,437,812 images which have brands and 50,000 images without any brand. The part with brands in Open Brands contains 3,113,828 instances annotated in 3 dimensions: 4 types, 559 brands and 1216 logos. To the best of our knowledge, it is the largest dataset for brand detection and recognition with rich annotations. We provide in-depth comprehensive statistics about the dataset, validate the quality of the annotations and study how the performance of many modern models evolves wit
With the proliferation of social activism online, brands face heightened pressure from consumers to publicly address these issues. Yet, the optimal brand response strategy (i.e., whether and how to respond) in these contexts remains unclear. This research investigates consumers' reactions to brand response strategies (e.g., engage vs. not) during social activism and offers potentially effective responses that brands can employ to engage in these issues. By analyzing real-world data collected from Twitter and conducting four randomized experiments, this research discovers that brand relationship type (exchange, communal) affects consumers' brand evaluations in the wake of social activism. Communal (vs. exchange) brands are evaluated less favorably when they do not respond or utilize a low-empathy response. This difference is attenuated when brands employ a high-empathy response. These findings are attributable to consumers' perceptions of whether the brand's response strategy complies with relationship norms during social activism. The effects persist across activism events that vary in their political polarization. This research contributes to the literatures on brand engagement in