Fragmentation has plagued the ad tech industry for years – and it’s only getting worse, according to Tom Burke, CRO of media consultancy AI Digital.
A lot of the “big players” restrict their data and inventory so buyers can only access it within particular platforms, said Burke, pointing to Amazon walling off inventory and retail data across Prime and Twitch.
As a result, advertisers face “a lot of friction,” said Nick Schroeder, director of brand marketing at non-dairy creamer brand nutpods. Without real-time feedback across channels, it’s challenging to determine what media is performing best.
On Tuesday, AI Digital announced the launch of its AI-powered marketing intelligence platform, called Elevate, which is designed to address fragmentation by unifying data and inventory across the digital ecosystem.
With a clearer understanding of what inventory is available, said Schroeder, nutpods has been able to find and take advantage of “white spaces,” meaning unexploited placements with strong performance potential.
Peeling back the shell
Nutpods has been working with AI Digital for two years and got access to the reporting functionality with Elevate several months ago.
The biggest benefit of the platform so far has been the speed at which it generates insights, said Schroeder.
The brand recently ran a campaign across several platforms with multiple different ad creatives, he said, each with its own unique messaging. The reporting dashboard within Elevate broke down performance by audience and creative so nutpods could see which ads were performing best.
In the past, the process of gathering those insights was “a lot slower,” said Schroeder, and required manual spreadsheets and time-intensive back-and-forth between teams. The lag in reporting was also “a big constraint,” he said, since data was often unavailable until weeks into a campaign. Now, the data lag is only about one day.
The reporting dashboard has also “democratized” insights for nutpods, said Schroeder.
“Rather than one person being the ‘data monkey’ for the team and communicating that data up the chain,” he said, the entire team can look at the results.
Different insights jump out at different people, he added, which allows for a “richer conversation.”
Nuts for audio
One insight that was nearly impossible to miss was the extent to which audio was overperforming with one particular audience, according to Schroeder. Knowing that allowed nutpods to stop spending on underperforming audiences and instead invest more in audio to reach the audience responding well to it.
Understanding the effectiveness of audio has also allowed nutpods to generate cheaper creative without sacrificing effectiveness.
Recently, it ran a three-week promotional campaign with Kroger. Since the campaign was relatively brief and all focused on one particular promotion, the messaging required “salience” and “immediacy,” said Schroeder.
Drawing on past insights from Elevate, nutpods opted to focus on audio creative for that campaign, which was a “pretty cheap” way to take advantage of a channel that the marketing team hadn’t initially planned to prioritize.
Hungry for more
In addition to the reporting and insights piece, Elevate also has a research and intelligence pillar, which builds audience personas and offers insights on competitor strategies and spend levels based on historical data.
AI Digital is currently building an inventory discovery part of the platform, which will unify available inventory and allow users to see pricing and availability.
There’s also an agent workspace within the research module where brands can develop synthetic focus groups based on specific customer personas and run creative ideas by them or discuss what sort of emotional appeals might resonate with their human counterparts.
The third pillar of the platform is for planning, activation and optimization, and there’s an agent for that, too, which helps build media campaigns and forecast outcomes.
Elevate’s various AI agents sit on top of several third-party data providers, Burke said, so brands and agencies don’t need to access different platforms to get a holistic view of the data they need.
After years of dealing with black boxes, there’s a “huge appetite” for these tools, said Schroeder. “It’s going to enable rapid iteration on another level.”
