How a global luxury automotive brand protects decades of brand equity across social video with dig

About the customer

With decades of heritage in its category, the customer is one of the most recognized luxury automotive brands in the world. The company serves a global customer base across Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Asia that includes some of the most loyal collectors in any consumer category.

Background: Two reveals that put the brand on the line

The customer sits in a category most brands would envy and few could survive, with decades of heritage, a global press corps that treats every reveal like a major event, and a customer base that pays close attention to every signal coming out of the company. Each launch generates millions of posts across platforms, the majority of them now video, and the comments, reaction edits, dashcam spottings, prototype leaks, and counterfeit listings that follow each reveal move faster than any single team can read.

In 2025 and into 2026, the brand was preparing for two of its most anticipated vehicle launches in years. Both reveals would draw two audiences with very different priorities, the long-time owners who want the brand's heritage protected and a younger global audience the company wants to bring in without alienating the people who got it here.

The team brought in dig to give its brand, comms, and legal teams a single live view of what was actually happening on social, not only what was being said about the brand but also what was being shown.

The challenge: Legacy social listening went blind to video

Legacy social listening was built for a text-first internet that no longer exists. By 2025, more than half of social posts are video, and the most engaged content about the brand was almost entirely visual, including prototype spottings, leaked footage, factory walk-arounds, counterfeit product hauls, and unauthorized game streams. Keyword and boolean queries miss all of it, and even when volume does get pulled, there is no narrative attached, just a count.

That left the brand's teams trying to defend it with several gaps open at once. Counterfeit fashion sellers were operating across short-form video, building audiences on the back of the brand's iconic visual identity without ever putting the brand name in the post text, while unauthorized uses of its vehicles in games and modded streams were spreading without any IP review, and impersonation accounts were quietly collecting followers and posting on behalf of the brand. On the launch side, the team had no early-warning system for leaks, and one of the major reveals was almost compromised by a Reddit post that surfaced roughly four hours before the official drop.

The deeper challenge sat across the org chart, where brand, comms, and legal each needed different cuts of the same data, fast enough to act together.

The solution: Replacing keyword tracking with video-first narrative intelligence

dig delivers real-time visibility across 90%+ of the social and non-social conversation that matters, analyzing more than 750 million posts a month and auto-tagging every video against 100+ default categories spanning narrative, sentiment, creator signal, content type, and brand-specific KPIs. The platform also lets the team layer custom natural-language tags on anything inside a post, whether that is the video itself, the audio, the on-screen text, or the comments underneath.

For this customer, that turned into four working streams.

1. Brand protection at scale

dig identified and supported takedown of 100+ impersonation accounts posing as the brand or its executives, flagged 15+ unauthorized uses of the brand's IP in games and game-streaming content, and surfaced 50+ counterfeit-fashion sellers operating across short-form video. Most of these would not have been caught by keyword tools, because the brand name was rarely written anywhere in the post.

2. Launch monitoring with early-warning detection

For the first major reveal, dig caught a pre-launch Reddit leak inside its narrative window and tracked the spread across the brand's dedicated subreddit, an independent enthusiast forum, and a small set of high-follower accounts before the official drop. For the second, the platform tracked the original announcement and a follow-up reveal a few months later, separating long-time-owner reaction from new-audience enthusiasm so the comms team could see, in real time, exactly who was responding to what.

3. Reputational risk and creator-level visibility

dig isolated the 41 highest-engagement commenters across the brand's owned content and then surfaced the 17 most active creators inside that group, the small set of accounts whose posts shape sentiment for everyone else. From there, dig pulled the actual themes those creators were posting about. One creator, for example, showed a clear pattern of celebrating the brand's heritage while pushing back on the company's newer direction, and that level of specificity is what lets the team engage on the substance rather than on an aggregate sentiment score.

4. A 3.5x coverage lift over legacy tooling

Across the same period on X alone, dig surfaced 32,604 mentions against the 9,264 picked up by the brand's previous social listening tool, a 3.5x lift in raw coverage before any of the narrative work runs on top of it.

The results: Threats pulled before they scale

The impact was structural rather than incremental. Brand, comms, and legal now work from the same live view of social, which means impersonation accounts get pulled before they grow, counterfeit sellers get flagged before they scale, and leaks get caught before they have a chance to reset the launch narrative.

• 100+ impersonation accounts identified and removed
• 50+ counterfeit-fashion sellers detected across short-form video
• 15+ unauthorized uses of brand IP flagged in games and streams
• 3.5x coverage lift on X versus the prior social listening tool (32,604 mentions vs 9,264)
• 41 highest-engagement commenters and 17 most active creators surfaced for direct engagement
• Pre-reveal detection of a major launch leak across Reddit and enthusiast networks

Conclusion: From monitoring the feed to understanding the narratives shaping it

The hard part of brand protection at this scale was never volume, it was visibility into the parts of social that legacy tools were built to ignore, including video content, comment threads, creator behavior, and the small set of accounts that actually move sentiment for everyone else.

With dig in place, the customer has moved from monitoring to narrative intelligence, and the same engine that defends the brand today is the platform the team now uses to plan the next launch.

How the customer uses dig

• Identify and remove impersonation accounts across social platforms
• Detect counterfeit goods sold through short-form video
• Flag unauthorized IP use in games, mods, and streams
• Catch launch leaks before they reset the comms narrative
• Track narrative shifts during major reveals in real time
• Identify the small set of creators that actually move sentiment

About dig

dig is the leader in video-first social intelligence. By analyzing billions of posts across social platforms, dig captures the authentic human reactions that traditional text-based tools miss. Built for today's video-driven internet, dig reads the human layer of social, from tone and reactions to cultural context, so organizations can understand what people actually think, feel, and do.

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