Sponsor spotlight: respondology asks DigiMarCon World 2026, "what's in your comments?" November 04, 2026 Matt Gingras of Respondology on the DigiMarCon World 2026 main stage at the Luxor Las Vegas, asking the question this entire conference should sit with: "What's in your comments?" - Photo by Dennis Yu, November 4, 2026. This is why marketers fly in from around the world for DigiMarCon World: a main stage where the companies defining their categories share the actual data behind their work. Every brand here is chasing the same thing - attention that converts. One of its sponsors walked on stage and pointed at the most underpriced attention surface in marketing: the comment section underneath the content you already paid to make. Respondology - a DigiMarCon World 2026 sponsor and exhibitor, and the company FIFA trusts to protect its players and fans online - presented "The Comment-to-Conversion Engine: Turning Social Conversations Into Revenue." Their presenter, Matt Gingras, made the case with the company's own data, and a second Respondology session - Santi Clarke's "Connection at Scale" - rounded out a two-stage presence. Then Gingras did what great sponsors do: he invited every attendee to Booth #1043 for a free, personalized comment report on their own brand. The numbers that stopped the room. * 97% of comments on brand social media go unanswered - including fan praise, product questions, and purchase-intent signals. * 68% of buyers read the comments before making a purchase decision. Your comment section is a sales page whether you manage it or not. * 20% of all comments contain spam, bot activity, or abuse - and paid social is nearly twice as toxic as organic. * 4-6% of comments on direct-to-consumer brands show direct buying intent - and when brands actually reply, those comments convert at 11%. Those figures come from Respondology's Business of Comments research - an analysis of more than 168 million comments across 7.6 million posts, with the Fall 2026 edition expanding the dataset to 182 million comments across more than 4,000 accounts. This is the DigiMarCon difference in one session: not pundits talking about AI, but practitioners presenting proprietary research gathered from real platform work - the largest comment dataset in the industry, shared generously with the room. Respondology is a Boulder, Colorado company whose AI platform helps the world's most visible brands moderate, understand, and respond to social media comments at scale. The company - part of the Boulder Heavy Industries portfolio, led by CEO and co-founder Erik Swain and chief product officer and co-founder Tim Murphy - has raised $16 million to build it, and it holds the strongest trust position in its field: when the stakes are highest, the biggest names in sport choose Respondology. The platform has three parts: * Moderate - hides spam, bots, toxicity, and brand attacks in under a second, around the clock, across paid, organic, and creator content, in more than 100 languages. * Discover - turns comment sections into intelligence: sentiment, buying signals, and trends, surfaced in near-real time. * Respond - AI agents, launched this year, that reply to comments in the brand's own voice - a Community Builder for loyalty, a Promoter that catches purchase intent, and a Listener that de-escalates negativity before it spreads. Trusted where the stakes are highest. Comment sections get dangerous fastest in sports - and that is where Respondology earned its reputation. The company was inspired in 2019, when its founders watched the racist and sexist abuse hurled at Serena Williams online, and it expanded into football after England's Saka, Rashford, and Sancho were racially abused following the Euro 2020 final. It exists, in other words, because its founders decided the internet's worst moments deserved a serious answer. Today, FIFA provides Respondology free to all of its member associations as part of its social media protection program for the 2026 World Cup. Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur use the platform to filter racist, homophobic, and misogynist content. The Denver Broncos, NASCAR properties, Boots, Marks & Spencer, and Skin Laundry are among its customers - more than 3,400 social accounts, touching over 2 billion followers every month. When the world's largest sports body trusts a company to protect its players, that company has passed a due-diligence bar most marketing technology never faces. That is the caliber of company on the DigiMarCon World stage - and in the TECHSPO hall, where you can walk up and talk to them. Why this matters for every marketer here. Gingras's session landed on the insight that should follow every attendee home: as AI search systems increasingly read comment sections to decide what a brand is and whether to recommend it, a clean, well-answered comment section is becoming a ranking and trust signal - not just community hygiene. The brands that treat comments as a conversion surface are compounding an advantage the rest cannot see yet. That is the DigiMarCon spirit at its best: a sponsor with real data, a real product, and a stage session that teaches the room something true - then a booth where you can see your own numbers, in a hall full of people you can build real relationships with. Conferences like this are where categories get defined and careers get connected. Come for the sessions; stay for the people. New to running AI agents yourself? Start where its speakers start: How to Set Up Your First AI Marketing Agent - a step-by-step walkthrough published right here on DigiMarCon. Visit respondology at Booth #1043. Respondology is offering DigiMarCon World 2026 attendees a free, personalized comment report - what's actually in your comments: the spam and toxicity exposure, the unanswered questions, and the buying intent sitting untouched under your posts. Stop by Booth #1043 at the Luxor, meet Matt Gingras and the team, and get yours. You can also explore the platform at respondology.com - plans start at $999/month for brands ready to turn their comment sections into community, commerce, and competitive intelligence. Keep exploring DigiMarCon. Go deeper. DigiMarCon, LLC put Respondology through its full audit process - the same SEO and visibility audit DigiMarCon, LLC run for its own clients - and published it in the open, scorecard and all: Respondology Audit: The Comment Authority Behind FIFA and the Premier League. The short version: world-class product authority, the best proprietary dataset in its category, and a wide-open visibility opportunity ahead of it - the best kind of position for a company this strong at the hard part. DigiMarCon World 2026 runs November 4-5 at the Luxor Las Vegas Hotel & Casino - part of the world's largest digital marketing conference series, with regional events across the country and around the globe. Thank you to Respondology and all of its sponsors and exhibitors for making it possible. If you've never been, come see why the people keep coming back.

Respondology launches respond to turn comments into competitive advantage. Respondology, the provider of a social media comment moderation and intelligence platform, today announced the launch of Respond, an artificial intelligence-powered platform that engages with social media comments to capture audience attention. More than 97% of user comments go unanswered according to the company, not because brands don't care, but because replying is a manual process, and they can't keep up. A vast majority of audience sentiment exists in comments on social media, such as X, TikTok and Instagram, and within product reviews and other spaces. It might seem as if these comments are just users blowing off steam, but it's not the case. According to Respondology's own internal data, almost 68% of buyers read comments before making a purchase decision. Nearly half, almost 47%, associate toxic or unanswered questions and comments with poor attention are associated with inattention from the brand itself. A poorly attended brand section can lead to a bad reputation. Some of the best-known brands on social media are those that reply to comments on Twitter with humor and wit, such as Wendy's and Taco Bell. But a brand doesn't need to stand out as hip or streetwise to be in the trenches with its audience just to be present. To bridge this gap, Respondology built a solution that uses AI agents trained on a company's brand voice that act like interns to triage comments across every platform, categorize comments by intent - purchase questions, fan moments, feedback, support requests - and respond authentically. The company said agents avoid chatbot canned replies. Many algorithmic systems produce content that looks generated, static or out of place, which can be perceived poorly by audiences. However, brands are walking a narrower tightrope than they might expect. Many brands are facing an increasing problem where audiences have become increasingly wary of messages sent on social media. Many push back against automatic and perceived AI replies from brand sources and conspiracy theories proliferate that algorithmic bots exceed humans in social spaces. Respondology raised $5 million in mid-2025 to assist brands in curating and moderating comments and shaping their social media presence. The next stage is helping them take control of their messaging. The company said the objective of Respond as an agentic AI tool is to give brands a way to reach out to audiences at scale, understand sentiment and get ahead of the spam, without becoming yet another algorithmic output. Image: siliconangle/microsoft designer. A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE: Support its mission to keep content open and free by engaging with theCUBE community. Join theCUBE's Alumni Trust Network, where technology leaders connect, share intelligence and create opportunities. * 15M+ viewers of theCUBE videos, powering conversations across AI, cloud, cybersecurity and more * 11.4k+ theCUBE alumni - Connect with more than 11,400 tech and business leaders shaping the future through a unique trusted-based network. About SiliconANGLE Media SiliconANGLE Media is a recognized leader in digital media innovation, uniting breakthrough technology, strategic insights and real-time audience engagement. As the parent company of SiliconANGLE, theCUBE Network, theCUBE Research, CUBE365, theCUBE AI and theCUBE SuperStudios - with flagship locations in Silicon Valley and the New York Stock Exchange - SiliconANGLE Media operates at the intersection of media, technology and AI. Founded by tech visionaries John Furrier and Dave Vellante, SiliconANGLE Media has built a dynamic ecosystem of industry-leading digital media brands that reach 15+ million elite tech professionals. Its new proprietary theCUBE AI Video Cloud is breaking ground in audience interaction, leveraging theCUBEai.com neural network to help technology companies make data-driven decisions and stay at the forefront of industry conversations.