AI-driven marketing automation platform Artsai came out of a two-year-long stealth period on Thursday with plans to help brands cut down on marketing vendor fragmentation hell.
Client Pandora has been using Artsai to help its ad partners with dynamic creative optimization and to gather and apply campaign performance data and insights across touch points. Pandora also taps Artsai’s tech on the marketing side run its own cross-platform user-acquisition and re-engagement campaigns.
“It really is a very fragmented space out there,” said Patrick Schmidt, executive director of performance ad sales and monetization at Pandora. “We work with a lot of different brands that have a lot of different KPIs.”
To meet those goals, which run the gamut from “generating app installs to lead gen to driving sales signups and everything in between,” Pandora needs a unified view of how a campaign is shaking out and to know which messaging is having the best results, Schmidt said.
But every advertiser has its own preferred marketing, attribution and analytics vendors, and “making sense of all that data in a single place, doing it quickly and driving the proper optimizations is a big challenge,” he said.
Artsai applies artificial intelligence to the problem, said CRO and co-founder Erik Lundberg.
“We call it ‘adaptive marketing automation,’ which means we learn from each interaction that the marketer has with users,” Lundberg said. “You get better results when you’re learning from optimizing the whole journey.”
The AI optimization tech works via plugins that communicate user actions and events back to an AI engine that then performs specific actions, like dynamically generating content, allocating more budget to a specific audience or setting a bid price.
Rather than focusing on improving one aspect of the customer journey, Artsai tracks users “as they travel from one engagement to another,” whether that’s on Facebook, in a branded app or across the programmatic ecosystem, said CEO and co-founder Yuri Khidekel.
“It’s a user-centric approach,” Khidekel said. “We’re getting a clearer picture because we’re looking at everything – social, email, the marketer’s own app – so we can serve the right message for specific users.”
The time is ripe to come out of stealth because all the pieces are in place, Khidekel said.
“We finally have all the plugins and stack solutions to cover the entirety of a user’s digital journey,” he said. “We can present a bigger story – adaptive marketing automation – rather than just ad tech.”
Beyond helping orchestrate the customer journey, which is the sort of thing a company like Integrate or Captora would do, Artsai’s aim is to help advertisers eventually cut down on the number of mar tech vendors they have to work with.
“As there is only one user but many marketing features, Artsai consolidates the marketing stack based on the entire user digital journey as opposed to a specific part of the journey and generates optimized content for all user engagements along the way,” Khidekel said.
Artsai’s platform, which is targeted at larger marketers, is available as a hybrid service. After the team helps with the initial setup, marketers can manage their own campaigns and run their own reports. The company is flirting with the idea of offering a fully self-service option or white labeling its technology down the line for small businesses.
Artsai, whose clients also include Lyft, Wish, King, Match and TurboTax, started life in 2012 under a different name, Adxcel, as a DCO solution, but focused on developing artificial intelligence during its stealth period. Pandora has been a customer since 2013.
The San Francisco-based company, which has 23 employees, primarily engineers, intends to boost headcount to around 40 people over the coming year. Artsai claims to be profitable, generating eight figures in annual revenue despite never having raised outside capital.
