Hirt & Carter Digital & EVRYTHNG – a Digimarc Company – Press Release

Hirt & Carter South Africa and EVRYTHNG (a Digimarc company) Partner in Sub-Saharan Africa
to Bridge the Gap Between Digital and Physical

Connecting Brands and Consumers through Product Digitization

SOUTH AFRICA, LONDON and NEW YORK – August, 2022 — EVRYTHNG, the Product Cloud managing digital identities for the world’s consumer products, today announced it has partnered with Hirt & Carter Group’s pioneering digital technology division, Hirt & Carter Digital Solutions to bring product digitization at scale to consumer goods brands in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Our aim is to enable more sustainable, transparent and more secure supply chains to empower consumers to verify the authenticity of their products & recyclability of its packaging. Our partnership with
EVRYTHNG – a Digimarc company, makes it possible for our manufacturer and brand clients to deliver end-to-end supply chain visibility and transparency into every product’s journey from the factory to the consumer to re-sale or recycle. Through this we gather and apply traceability data from across the product lifecycle, unlocking end-to-end visibility and authenticity through item-level, real-time intelligence and analytics.

The technology behind EVRYTHNG’s Product Cloud™ effectively turns every item bearing EVRYTHNG’s proprietary digital identity into a data-gathering, always on, digital communications platform in the unfolding, connected Internet of Things. This partnership in Sub-Saharan Africa will put the region at the cutting edge of global innovation in manufacturing and retail in an era witnessing seismic change in digitally connected consumer behavior.

“We are delighted to have partnered with Digimarc & EVRYTHNG to accelerate the digitization of products in South Africa and across the Sub-Saharan Africa region,” said Chantal Donnelly, General Manager, Hirt & Carter Digital Solutions. “The retail & consumer goods industry is embracing product digitization as a strategy to build direct consumer relationships, engagement and to address consumer demands for transparency and authenticity. A true game changer for retailers & brands who have sustainability at the top of their agenda.”

Capturing and managing data is essential to delivering precision marketing. By creating products ‘born-digital’ with a digital identity at the time of production, brands are able to gather and apply data intelligence throughout each product’s supply chain journey and when the product is in the hands of the consumer.

This regional partnership unlocks the power of Hirt & Carter’s long-standing relationships with the South Africa’s leading brands and retailers. It will allow manufacturers and marketers an unprecedented opportunity to turn their products into smart platforms which, research shows, can perform more effectively than even traditional digital marketing channels.

“To compete in today’s global market, brands are digitizing their products at scale to gather data intelligence and meet consumer expectations for transparency, authenticity and personalized experiences,” said Niall Murphy, CEO and Co-founder, EVRYTHNG. “Brands that apply dynamic data-driven intelligence to their operations are able to achieve greater resiliency, with the agility to respond to changing channels and customer needs. Our partnership with Hirt & Carter Group allows us to expand our global reach into a very important market for consumer goods brands”.

Hirt & Carter’s leading eco-system of technology, print, packaging, label, creative design and strategic solutions provide an end-to-end solution for brands, for whom the business already manufactures billions of packaging items annually, on their product digitization journey.
The Digital ‘Switch-on’ of the Consumer Products Industry.

To bring the massive impact of product digitization to the forefront, EVRYTHNG co-chaired the GS1 standards development process that yielded GS1 Digital Link and was the first platform to allow consumer product brands to digitize products at scale. GS1 Digital Link upgrades the ubiquitous barcode used by two million manufacturers on more than 4-trillion product items per annum, so that every product item can now be smartphone-interactive, transact with point-of-sale systems and connect to the web — all with one code on the product.

“Through our partnership with EVRYTHNG, we are helping clients transform products, at scale, into owned digital media channels for direct-to-consumer engagement. Brands and consumers alike now have unprecedented visibility into each product’s journey — critical to delivering on brands sustainability goals and consumer expectations for transparency. It’s a natural industry fit,” said Donnelly.