1. Tell us about your role at Adverity?
As CEO of Adverity, I work on the day-to-day strategy and operational execution of this exciting journey we started in 2015. Finding better ways to use and share knowledge forms a key element of my current responsibilities. It’s also part of my job to assist our ever-expanding client list of global brands and agencies in mastering its capabilities. With twenty years of experience in computer software, combined with the extensive collective expertise of the Adverity team, we are constantly searching for new avenues of potential innovation. I love this aspect of my job, and it’s also what sets Adverity apart in a competitive market.
2. Can you tell us about your journey into this market?
Data-based efficiency has always been the driving force behind every stage of my career. I have worked in a number of different companies, from their creation and growth to successful exit strategies, and now, in my latest role at Adverity, I am able to help businesses power smarter decisions with accurate analysis – which really taps into my passion for data.
I love all of it – the constant challenge, the validation of customers successfully using our product, and also the people I am lucky to work with.
3. What are your thoughts on the upgrading of technology in the marketing sector?
There is an expectation for new technology to be able to pull data from almost any channel in any format, and to be able to link in conversion data from many different attribution tools. The upgrades that hold true value for marketers deliver more granularity of data and perform this task as a faster speed. Any upgrade should also mean less time on report generation.
4. How has a data-driven approach empowered marketing campaigns?
CMOs and marketers require data driven insights to make an impact, however becoming truly data driven is very difficult. This is what drove us to create a platform that would simplify this process and empower marketers to create campaigns based on data insights.
By making all relevant data accessible across the organisation, colleagues outside the marketing department also have access to the key information they need to make better business decisions. The result is that teams are able to spend less of their time interpreting data and more time utilising their insight and resources into other areas to improve the business and better serve customers. Now more than ever when marketing resources are so precious, it is critical that marketers can clearly measure the impact of their efforts through data, to ensure that every cent works hard, for the greatest return.
5. Can you explain how AI has played an important role in improving the performance of marketing firms?
Artificial intelligence already plays an important role in assisting marketers in a variety of ways – sometimes not even noticeable as “AI”. There are various technological aspects required to achieve certain tasks or answer certain questions, like neural networks used for prediction and so on.
We are strong believers that it should not be about the label of “AI”, rather it is about the true value add and the problem that is solved for a user of a software.
The best AI sometimes goes completely unnoticed.
6. What are your views about the eCommerce industry post COVID-19 and how can your platform help in kick-starting it?
In general, COVID-19 has accelerated a shift to eCommerce across multiple industries. Ranging from large eCommerce companies to small shops that had to spin up an eCommerce storefront within days to survive – the impact has been significant.
Adverity’s platform plays a vital part for all eCommerce companies because today, more than ever before, every marketing dollar needs to be held accountable, creating 100% transparency of costs vs performance. Uncovering the potential for improvement is key for sustainable long-term success.
8. What features of your Augmented Analytics differentiates it in the market?
Our Augmented Analytics technology is vertically specialized to provide an answer for the marketing operations before they have even thought of the question. For example, things like automatically predicting a conversion lag for accurate anomaly detection around cost per conversion, and automatic classifications of campaigns in brand vs performance are just two of the technological fundamentals to solve problems marketers are facing.
While working on integrating data with numerous advertisers, we spotted a common yet critical problem in regard to Naming Conventions and created a feature specifically for it. A strictly and consistently applied convention when defining named elements, such as those representing a campaign or specific placement, enables you to compare ‘apples with apples’ across multiple platforms, filter and pivot across shared values, and ultimately leads to faster optimization, better insights and improved ROAS. The problem arises when human error creeps in during the inescapable yet dreary task of generating, copying and pasting the naming convention into the execution platforms. Our Smart Naming Conventions overcomes this issue by bringing with it key pragmatic AI-powered advantages over existing techniques that include the ability to spot missing values and ‘unpack’ conventions.
8. What advice would you like to give to the technology Start Ups?
Deliver true value to your customers.
9. What is the digital innovation in sales technology according to you that will mark 2020?
A fundamental change when it comes to privacy of user data and an increase in products and technology that will enable engagement with your prospects in a pure digital way.
10. How do you prepare for an AI-Centric world?
AI will be ultimately everywhere, assisting as well as executing complex tasks. From our perspective, having machine learning and artificial intelligence successfully integrated in a software product should wow customers by the benefits they see, rather than worrying about whether it’s using AI or not.
11. What are the major developments you are planning, in recent time?
We use our own platform to work with business data across all of the teams. Starting from data in software engineering and customer support to marketing, sales, and more. This allows us to have a complete overview of our organisation by simplifying the data, which we can build our analysis from. This process will be simplified further with the continued rollout of our AI-powered augmented analytics capabilities which are designed to uncover and optimise opportunities in data by using machine learning, as well as using data anomaly detection to avoid any costly errors.
12. Can you tell us about your team and how it supports you?
Working with a dynamic team in such a diverse company inspires me every day. Due to the evolving nature of our business, we have a really nimble mindset and we re-invent constantly. To some it may seem chaotic, but it’s this constant evolution that keeps us one step ahead. The great culture we have created in the office environment has also helped us transition easily to working from home during Covid-19 – relationship building is a huge part of making sure the entire organisation is in sync.
13. What movie inspires you the most?
The Pursuit of Happyness.
14. We have heard that you have a very joyful work culture, so can you share with us some of the fun pictures of your workplace?
15. Can you give us a glance of the applications you use on your phone?
You’ll find the usual suspects, Google Mail, WhatsApp, Slack, LinkedIn, Facebook, Safari. Runtastic is also on there but I must confess I do not use it as often as I should.