Episode 11 – Simon Dunlop on GTM Strategies, AI Ad Personalization & Future MarTech Trends

Harshal Wahane: Hello and welcome to another episode of the MarTech Cube podcast. I am your host, Harshal, Marketing and Communications Lead at MarTech Cube. And today, we are super excited to have Simon Dunlop, the Chief Marketing Officer at Instreamatic. Simon has tons of experience in building companies in the online media and consumer goods sector. He co-founded Instreamatic, a platform that is shaking up ad-creative optimization by offering personalized audio and video ads. Instreamatic also enhances ad performance with unlimited A/B testing and creative personalization, making it easy to deliver tailored ad concepts quickly and cost-effectively. Today, we'll chat about market entry strategies, the role of AI in marketing, and the future of contextual and personalized marketing. So, without further ado, let's get started. Hello, Simon. Thanks for joining in. How are you?

Simon Dunlop [01:01]: Hi, Harshal. I'm great. Good to join you, and I've been looking forward to this conversation.

Harshal Wahane [01:07]: That's great, Simon. We've been looking forward to this conversation as well. And it's been a great start to the week as well, and nothing better than knowing the industry veteran himself. So, can you let us know a bit about yourself and the company and how everything is going?

Simon Dunlop [01:25]: Yeah, sure. So, I've been working with startups and building companies for the last 20-odd years, both in the offline space with CPG and online, first with digital media, audio, and more recently with Instreamatic, which we co-founded five, six years ago. And we're starting to see some good results and a scale-up of our product, and we can get into that and discuss some of the challenges we face, some of the successes that we're seeing.

Harshal Wahane [02:05]: Great. Now that our listeners have an idea about you and the company, I'm sure they'd be interested in the technical questions ahead, which brings me to my first question. Simon, you've built successful companies in the MarTech, online media, and CPG sectors. What are the key components of a successful GTM strategy for new companies, and what should they focus on for a strong market entry to reach the right early users?

Simon Dunlop [02:35]: Yeah, so that's a good question, and it's something that concerns every company when they're starting out. And I'd say for a successful go-to-market strategy, you need to really focus on nailing your value prop, really understanding what your value proposition is, and understanding your target audience. And then it's all about finding the right channels to reach them effectively, and measuring how they're reacting and responding, and adjusting accordingly. So in terms of MarTech and the mix you'd need to start up, you need to cover the basics. So you need good analytics, you need a solid CRM, I mean, typically we'd be using HubSpot or something similar, and some marketing automation. So there's no need to overcomplicate things early on, but you do need to be obsessive about staying close to your customer and understanding how they react to your product. And then I think, you know, keeping content marketing and community building front and center, so you can create stuff that resonates, and you can build a tribe and community around your brand. Yeah, and for all startups, the great advantage is to be able to stay agile, you're starting small, measure everything, and be ready to adjust based on what you see and learn.

Harshal Wahane [03:57]: Absolutely. I think it's truly enlightening. And being a marketer myself, it's clear that understanding these dynamics is absolutely very crucial for businesses today. And with a strong foundation in place, determining the right tools also becomes the next crucial step. So when launching a new company, Simon, how do you determine which martech tools will deliver the most value? And what criteria should companies use to evaluate these tools?

Simon Dunlop [04:27]: Sure, Harshal. So this comes back to being very clear about the goals you're setting for your business. Because this is going to drive the martech stack and the tools that you're going to need. And I think also just for sort of breaking that down, I think it's crucial for anybody starting out with a business is that you're very hands on in the early stages, so that you really you understand the tools that you're using, how to deploy them and the effect that they're having on your business.

The, I mean, the cool thing is that. The martech tools are becoming very powerful, and you can achieve a huge amount with a very limited set of tools. And there's no point in the early days and having, you know, very complex tools if they're just slowing you down, or your business hasn't grown into them yet. And AI is obviously a game changer for early stage companies that can help with everything from content creation to customer identification, segmentation, and, you know, effectively giving a small startup team, superpowers. And then I guess, you know, depending on whether you're B2C or B2B, you're going to need different tools. So if you take a typical SaaS startup, you know, martech tools that you might, or the stack, typical stack that you might need would include a good CRM, you know, Google analytics, SEO tools, marketing automation, SMM tools, customer support, you know, maybe Zendesk, something like that, ad management. So it can really build up very fast and get very expensive very quickly. So say a key is that you don't need all those tools right away. You can get by with just the essentials, you know, CRM, good analytics, some marketing automation, and then also looking around to find the best, the best priced offers. So there are a lot of tools that, you know, offer great deals for startups to help them get traction to help them, to help them grow. And so finding, you know, good deals, onboarding a limited set of, you know, tools, looking, I think another good thing to do is you can look at other businesses that are, you know, similar to yours working in your sector and look at the tools that they're using. And then, you know, start small and grow from there.

Harshal Wahane [06:57]: Yeah. I think that's a strong point and I couldn't agree more. Since we are speaking of tools, let's dive into the innovative solutions that Instreamatic is offering. Simon, can you explain what Instreamatic's personalized audio ad spots are? And if you can, please highlight any noteworthy trends in this area.

Simon Dunlop [07:18]: Yeah, sure. I'm happy to share, share with you what we're doing. So at Instreamatic, we're leveraging AI to enhance video and audio creative. And that enables personalization of campaigns at scale which improves campaign performance and allows brands to test and optimize campaigns in real time. And we'll, we'll dive into the process a little bit later, but effectively what this means is we can take an existing improved video ad or an asset, run it through our platform and produce new treatments of the video, including multiple contextual parameters for targeting. So this enables in a matter of minutes to go from a single creative to many creatives, hundreds or thousands of creators optimized for targeting and specific audience parameters. And this process is so fast and the quality of the results is so good that it means video creatives can be updated almost in real time. And that opens whole new world of creative and campaign possibilities, which is very exciting. And I see, you know, you asked about trends. So I see a couple of major trends in the market that we're growing into and the first is that brands are crazy, are facing an ever increasing need for content to fill more and more channels and consumers have developed an appetite for more diverse and more frequent content. And that puts pressures on brands to keep up. So they need more content. The second trend is, you know, AI enabled personalization where advances in AI have made it possible to personalize content in ways that were completely impossible previously at scale.

Harshal Wahane [09:09]: Wow. It's clear that this approach not only meets the demand for more relevant ad experiences, but also aligns with the growing trend towards interactive and voice activated ad formats. And since you earlier said that AI is game changer, and I think I agree to it too. And I think today AI seems to be at the forefront of this revolution. So how can companies effectively leverage AI to streamline mass production of campaign creative, enhance marketing efficiency, and ensure responsible and ethical use of AI in their strategies?

Simon Dunlop [09:48]: Yeah. So it is, I mean, it's a cliche to say that it's a game changer, but it really is for creating content at scale and you can, you know, you can deploy AI now to create multiple ad variants. You can use it for personalization and you can create, you know, entire video scripts in a matter of minutes, AI voiceovers, voice cloning, you know, all of these areas where we're seeing AI move the field forwards quite radically. But it's obviously it's not, it's not a panacea. It's not just set it and forget it. And we see, we see AI as a, as a springboard for creativity. It's really facilitating new creative applications rather than replacing. And so it's, it augments your team's capabilities and that's certainly how we're positioning things at Instreamatic. And we see a strong demand from creative teams for the opportunities that can be unlocked using our platform and technology. And then, you know, on the ethics side, and there are a lot of questions around ethics when it comes to any new technology. And there's a clear responsibility to be stewards of technology. But I think the brands, they already have a very good understanding of the role of building trust with their audience and how quickly it can be destroyed if they, if they make a wrong step. So actually I think that they're, you know, they're perfectly positioned to understand how to use very powerful tools like AI in the right way. And the, I think keeping this idea of AI being there to enhance human creativity and decision-making without compromising integrity or privacy is the right, that's the right target. But it's definitely going to need, you know, regular check-ins and audits from the tech side, you know, and from brand side. But you know, I'll give an example of how we've been, how we've incorporated some practical sort of ethical aspects into our own product. So we worked, we've been working very closely with the Screen Actors Guild, so SAG-AFTRA and we've put guidelines in place for voice actors who want to work with our technology and with voice cloning in order to ensure appropriate monetization across, you know, multiple instances of their voice so that we can take a single voice sample, create hundreds or however many. You know, versions of that in order to address this growing market for personalization. But in order to, but, but doing that in a responsible way and ensuring that the actor gets remunerated for the use of their voice. And so that sort of moved from a position where actors might've said, hang on, this technology is going to replace us to, okay, this is a cool technology that can actually drive more monetization. And I don't need to get back into a recording studio and record a hundred different versions of an ad. I can just provide a voice print, a reference recording, and from that, we can create all of these new monetization instances across multiple channels.

Harshal Wahane [13:20]: Absolutely. I think ethical AI use is extremely crucial as it ensures transparency and fairness in every aspect of campaign deployment. And as we are speaking about AI. I think its role in personalization is undeniable, particularly in the field of ad creative advertising. How can creative personalization in audio and video ad campaigns, which is powered by AI enhance listener engagement and what role does this play in the broader marketing strategy?

Simon Dunlop [13:54]: Yeah. So, I mean, we, we understand context and when we understand context and we adjust creative and content accordingly, then I think, you know, we all know that it feels a campaign and content feels more relevant, it feels less intrusive, and the efficacy of a campaign, you know, engagement and conversion and all of the metrics that we, that we love to see, climbing, you know, deliver. And there's a lot of data to show that listeners, you know, are more likely to pay attention and respond positively when an ad is speaking directly to their current situation or needs or environment, and the deploying AI, you know, as we've mentioned allows you to take pretty much any campaign, whereas previously any camp were previously at, you know, a personalized campaign would have taken or contextual campaign would have been a special project and would have taken many weeks and significant budget to produce. Then in those situations, even when the campaign is performing very well, the ROI, on the campaign, you know, typically wouldn't pay off. So when you can take that and you can compress that into a matter of minutes and you can create a contextual campaign at scale, then the ROI is going to deliver every time, because we know that these, we know that more personalized, and, you know, customized ads perform much better. So I think that this, this moves, this moves the, this type of creative from being a specialized one-off project, especially for video and audio campaigns to being one which is ready for, you know, mass deployment and obviously that can then fit into a much broader marketing strategy. And actually an example of that can be seen, for example, you know, for example, in sports betting where you could take real-time results, you know, halftime, and you can update your campaign to reflect the changing scores in a game. So you could say, Hey, you know, we're at halftime, the score is two-one still time to support your team and so it's, it's unlocking a lot more creative opportunities for deploying personalization at scale and that's, and that can only be done by AI.

Harshal Wahane [16:36]: Yeah. Simon, I think your take on creative personalization in AI-driven audio and video ad campaigns is absolutely intriguing. It really highlights how personalized content can deeply engage listeners which helps in making stronger connections with the brands. To understand this impact, let's look at some data-driven insights from recent studies. Can you tell us what are the key findings from the study that Instreamatic was recently a part of, regarding the impact of personalized AI-generated audio ads on brand favorability, purchase intent, and brand awareness compared to generic ads and a control group?

Simon Dunlop [17:17]: Yes, sure. Harshal. So we recently published a case study with Veritonic for an Intel ad campaign that focused on analyzing how generic and contextual AI-generated audio ads performed. And it was the results were stunning and we saw that generic ads created by AI without any contextualization, so generic ads created by AI increased purchase intent by 3% and brand favorability by 9%. But what was really impressive was the personalized AI-generated ads outperformed the generic ones by up to 22%. And more specifically, we saw an 18% jump in purchase intent, 12 points on brand awareness and a 22% leap on brand favorability. So in, in all cases, so even the generic ads compared to regular ads were performing better. But then when you added personalization, you saw this very significant uplift. And generally we saw there was from results of the case study that 73% of users were more likely to pay attention to a personalized ad and 60% more likely to consider purchasing from a brand that personalizes. So all in all, some, some pretty, some pretty impressive results.

Harshal Wahane [18:49]: Simon, it's really impressive how these ads are significantly boosting brand favorability, purchase intent, and overall brand awareness compared to generic ads and group controls. Moving ahead, delivering contextualized and personalized messages is crucial for brands to engage with their audience. Can you tell us what are some innovative ways brands can achieve this without excessive production costs?

Simon Dunlop [19:18]: Yeah, sure. So we know that personalization is critical for engaging audience you know, we all know what it's like trying to have a conversation with someone in a crowded room or a train station, you need to cut through the noise in order to engage and personalization allows brands to do that. So leveraging AI, it enables you to take, you know, regular audio or video ad and dynamically insert contextual parameters that are attuned to your target audience. And it could be as simple as inserting a geolocation, you know, Good Morning New York, or Hello Singapore or it could be more complex with multiple contextual elements. For example, an airline or a travel company where you could adjust the content to mention the city where a user is located. And you could promote a flight offer or a holiday offer to a specific destination from that city. Or for example, in QSR or retail, where you could be tailoring a specific promo or specific product offers to a particular point of sale at a particular time. So you can really slice down to the very specific or have something more broad, but what we know is that in every case, the performance is going to improve when you incorporate these elements and, you know, from a cost point of view, AI enables things to be done at a fraction of the cost of this before. So if you can imagine traditionally to personalize audio video, well, audio clear video, it would be almost impossible to create hundreds of versions of a video. Yeah, but it would, it would take, it would take weeks and requires significant budget, not to mention, you know, voice actors in a recording studio, toing and froing with the client versus, versus where we are today, say with the Instreamatic platform, where all of this can be compressed into a very short period of time which frees up budgets and resources to create better campaigns.

Harshal Wahane [21:33]: That's, that's really a good take. And I think cutting through the noise is absolutely important. And also, these strategies can redefine how brands connect with the customers on a deeper level. While innovation drives results, I think it also comes with a set of challenges as well. Simon, in your opinion, what are the most significant challenges that marketers face when trying to personalize campaigns at scale? And how can AI help overcome these obstacles?

Simon Dunlop [22:05]: Yeah, I mean, as you move from one-to-many to many-to-many communication, it does bring challenges. I think we've talked about some of the challenges on the production side and content creation, which would typically be a bottleneck for this, and how AI, and specifically, we've been talking about how Instreamatic addresses some of these issues to remove the bottleneck. And enable content to flow and multiple versions of content to flow. But it can introduce new issues for marketers. So one of them, for example, is approval. So where you might have had previously a single campaign to approve with a client, now you have hundreds or thousands of instances. So it becomes challenging or might not be possible to approve all of these instances. So one of the things that we've done that we do to address that is that we will, in the case of video, we'll work with approved video assets. So we'll take an existing 30-second spot or several ads. And because these have already been approved, what we're doing is just creating new instances of an already approved video. And that can enable the approval process to be, to be much more simple. So, yeah, so as, you know, as we're going to see, as we see, you know, new instances and new use cases for deployment of AI, you know, specifically in creative customization, it raises sort of, there are new, there are new challenges and new questions that are raised, but, you know, we're working to make that as smooth as possible for, for client onboarding.

Harshal Wahane [24:05]: Right. I think that's really helpful for our listeners to deal with their set of challenges as well. Looking ahead, the future of AI in MarTech promises exciting advancements. Simon, what future trends do you foresee in the integration of AI with MarTech, particularly in the field of audio marketing?

Simon Dunlop [24:25]: Ooh, Harshal. That's, that's an interesting question, right? Things are moving so quickly that it becomes quite hard to look into, to look into the future, but, you know, definitely we're riding the hype curve at the moment of AI, and it's exciting just to see how quickly things are changing and where adoption grows fastest, you know, at the intersection of AI and MarTech, but I would say like, as the, as the promise of voice assistance finally materializes and, you know, Instreamatic has been working in the area of voice AI for a number of years. So, as we see, you know the promise of voice assistance finally sort of coming, coming to, to be, and we're, we're increasingly in a world of voice activated everything, and the very personal in-ear voice assistance, and, you know, hopefully I think we're going to see now Siri transition from peak useless, which had us all laughing. I don't know if you saw the last season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, where Larry David was, was getting very frustrated with his Siri experience. But I think hopefully we're, you know, we're going to see this now transition to a high utility helper for navigating the world around us. And we'll see a shift then towards more two-way conversational marketing, and AI is going to play a huge role in making these interactions feel natural and, you know, human-like. And the relationships that we build with our voice assistants are going to feel very personal. Just as we can already start to feel it with LLMs, that can feel like quite a personal interaction, you know, when you have, when you have an earpiece in your ear, and you're communicating with a voice assistant, there's nothing more personal. And so, of course, in this very personal audio environment, there's only enough real estate for a few ads, and these are going to need to be highly relevant and, you know, very sensitive, or we just won't want to hear them. So I think that's going to be interesting. And that's something I think that's going to play out in the very, in the very near future. And then, of course, I think, you know, we're going to just experience a whole new paradigm for personalization, where audio is not just adjusting for location or promo offer, but in generating, you know, entire scripts that are tailored to individual taste. So, and we, of course, you know, we see ourselves playing a significant role in both of those areas. There's going to be a lot of experimenting, but, you know, ultimately, what works will be determined by what consumers like, and what they're comfortable with. But the dream of a natural conversation between brands and consumer with seamless integrated commerce, all driven by AI, stitched together perfectly by AI, I think is just around the corner. And at Instreamatic, we see ourselves, you know, really at the forefront of these, of these changes. So, very exciting times.

Harshal Wahane [27:32]: That's a thought-provoking insight. And although I haven't watched the episode yet, I think I'm going to watch this today itself.

Simon Dunlop [27:40]: I recommend that. Yes.

Harshal Wahane [27:42]: Absolutely. Coming back to the topic, I think Instreamatic's voice AI approach invites us to rethink established norms and embrace new possibilities in the audio marketing. And I think just like that, here we are towards the end of the podcast. Simon, it has been a pleasure having you with us, and our listeners are definitely going to learn a lot from your experience. Before we wind up, any quotes, Simon, that you would like to add to this?

Simon Dunlop [28:10]: No, Harshal, I mean, it's been a pleasure speaking. And the pace at which things are changing, I'm sure we'll be speaking again very soon.

Harshal Wahane [28:21]: I hope that too. And as we wrap up now, it's clear that Instreamatic's innovative approach is paving the way for more effective and engaging ad experiences. We encourage all our listeners and industry professionals to follow Instreamatic and learn more about the groundbreaking work that they are doing. Also, don't forget to tune into our MarTech Cube podcast series for more discussions around interesting MarTech insights with industry leaders. Until next time, keep innovating and stay ahead in the martech dynamics. Signing off, Harshal.