Startups are coming out of the woodwork to capitalize on the AI craze among marketers. But not every AI player is new to the scene.
Inuvo, a software company that uses a web crawler combined with machine learning to analyze online interactions and predict consumer intent, has been around the block – and it’s got an unlikely origin story.
It was founded in 1987, went public the following year and originally operated in a completely different sector – providing services for the oil and gas industry. But after that business proved unprofitable, Inuvo ceased most of its operations until 1997, when it went through a massive restructuring and pivoted into the online advertising industry over the course of the decade that followed.
Today, its main focus is on artificial-intelligence-powered tools for audience intelligence and media buying. Inuvo makes its data available to advertisers through a strategic partnership and integration with Xandr’s DSP.
In May, Inuvo hired Barry Lowenthal as president to oversee sales and product marketing. Lowenthal joined the company after 16 years as CEO of Media Kitchen, a media planning and buying agency owned by Stagwell.
Lowenthal’s long agency experience comes in handy in the new role, he said.
“Our sweet spot is working with midsize agencies that want a programmatic managed service,” he said, “but are also looking to start experimenting with AI products.”
Lowenthal spoke with AdExchanger.
AdExchanger: Why move from Madison Avenue to ad tech?
BARRY LOWENTHAL: When Media Kitchen was merged into MMI (another of Stagwell’s agencies) last year, they didn’t need two CEOs. I took a pause to think about what I wanted to do next.
I started attending networking events, meeting founders and seeing what they were building. I did a bunch of angel investing and became an advisor for a VC.
And then ChatGPT happened, and my first thought was, “This is freaking amazing.” We’ve always used machine learning and AI in the digital media buying business because it’s the only way you can manage all that data. But I realized that a big change was happening, and I wanted to get closer to it.
Inuvo refers to itself as a provider of “privacy-conscious digital marketing technology.” Can you rephrase that minus the jargon?
We talk about being privacy conscious or compliant because we don’t rely on identity-based data, such as cookies, to uncover what we call “audience concepts,” which are trends that customers are interested in. We’re targeting the “why” not the “who.”
The reason we don’t talk about ourselves as being contextual is because that’s only one data point. We’re not going to place an ad on an auto site just because it’s an auto brand. We look at how multiple concepts interact to inform the kinds of media we buy.
What’s an example of using multiple concepts to support a media plan?
A noise-canceling headphone brand’s agency wanted to test us for programmatic media buying. As we built out our model looking for concepts, the one that kept coming up was “dog ownership” – specifically, small dogs.
It was kind of weird because the connection between small dogs and headphones isn’t obvious. You’d expect things like “music” or “airplane travel.” But then, as we dug into it, we started to make more specific connections. Because many small-snouted dogs, like pugs, have breathing problems and snore, their owners have a hard time sleeping with their pet, which is why they’re interested in noise-canceling solutions.
Does your technology make these connections, or does a person have to do it?
One of our challenges was that we needed to figure these things out ourselves. We’d see concepts, but not the connections. But the newest version of our audience portal uses AI to show us different patterns and the strength of the connection between them.
As someone who spent a long time in the agency world, how do you see AI transforming how agencies do what they do?
I recently had a conversation with the founder of a creative agency who told me she’s already seeing AI change production using generative AI programs like Midjourney. In her view, clients will pay for agencies to come up with the creative idea, but production will eventually become almost purely AI-generated, and you’ll have product managers overseeing the execution process.
It feels very obvious that this is what’s going to happen. The question is how agencies then approach career pathing from a project manager who uses AI to a senior creative person who can come up with a brilliant idea. That’s a whole other conversation.
Inuvo’s offering aside, do you use AI technology in your life?
I record all my meetings so I can throw them into Claude, Anthropic’s AI, and have it summarize them for me and pull out the key points. I can’t even tell you how helpful that’s been.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.
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