For years, walled gardens made it practically impossible to build alternative advertising analytics or launch creative testing startups.
What analytics startup could out-engineer Google or charge less than Google Analytics, which is free for most users? And why rent a dynamic creative engine when testing is an option in Facebook ad manager?
But the times they are a-changin’. Walled gardens have been knocked down a peg or two, at least for now, and startups have room to pitch new ways for brands to return to pre-ATT standards of testing and attribution.
The latest entrant is Memorable AI, a creative testing startup that raised $2.75 million earlier this month, including stakes from MediaLink CEO Michael Kassan and from programmatic vet Brian O’Kelley, who recently launched a new start of his own called Scope3 that scores online advertising for carbon consumption.
Bertlesmann, a German media conglomerate, also invested in Memorable’s fundraising.
The two founders of Memorable AI met while getting their masters degrees in computer science from Harvard. But the startup was actually born out of Memorable CTO Camilo Fosco’s thesis work for a PhD program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the purpose of which was to study how well people do or don’t remember different forms of video over time.
It became clear that Fosco’s idea could be applied to create vendor software for marketers, said Memorable CEO Sebastien Acevedo. And so the two decided to launch their company in 2021.
Memorable’s early client list includes some heavy-hitter brands: L’Oréal Spain, Unilever, the plant-based food maker Upfield and Coca-Cola’s Wabi unit, which is a data-driven group within Coke. Wabi is the app that store owners and ecommerce sellers use to restock products.
Getting creative
Google and Meta optimize effectively within their channels, but only within their channels.
They don’t incorporate historical sales and advertising data from across all of the other channels where a brand distributes its product or ads, Acevedo said. That’s why the attributed sales from Google, Meta and Amazon together can sometimes total more than the number of purchases generated during a campaign.
The cost of A/B testing and mid-flight dynamic creative is also an issue, because it can consume between one-fifth to as much as half of a campaign’s budget, Acevedo said.
But brands want ways to test without having to spend so much on media as a precursor, he said.
Memorable’s approach is to analyze historical data from ad platforms, DSPs and ad servers, using roughly 80% to train a creative model and the other 20% for testing the model. Its software analyzes the data to see which media and creative are responsible for driving the brand’s desired metrics.
The platform metric push
Clickthrough rate, brand recall, lead generation or video viewability each might correlate to different creative strategies or formats.
“We are agnostic when it comes to metrics,” Acevedo said. “If someone comes to us and says video view rate is what they care about and what they report to their boss, then we focus on video view rate.”
At some point, though, it might make sense for Memorable to more actively suggest KPIs to its clients, he said.
But for the moment, Memorable is still building out the main channels where its tech can be used, including Meta’s apps and TikTok. It’s in the process of implementing Amazon, with plans to add Google within the next few months.
“We’re trying to focus on the biggest requests of our clients,” Acevedo said, “and, lately, everyone wants to crack the TikTok code.”
But some new business is actually coming courtesy of the big platforms themselves.
Several recent account wins came from Google sales leads, Acevedo said. Although the platforms have “brute force” dynamic creative tools, including templates and basic A/B tests, he said, if advertisers can level up on the creative front, the platform ROI will improve and advertisers end up spending more.
Creative is a powerful and yet still underappreciated performance lever. That’s also why long-time programmatic practitioners like O’Kelley and Kassan invested in the startup, according to Acevedo.
Ad tech is often narrowly focused on targeting, reach and auction-based decisioning about each placement. Creative can help drive conversions but typically isn’t factored in to most programmatic systems.
“Anyone working on creative has been really under-empowered,” Acevedo said. “We’re trying to give them data-driven solutions, because they’re judged based on data.”
