1. Tell us about your role in Simpli.fi?
We have a fantastic team at Simpli.fi. They are smart, motivated, and very focused on our customers. The most important thing that I can do is to ensure that they have the resources, support, and culture that they need to be great at what they do.
After that, I spend the bulk of my time trying to stay close to our customers and understand what they need from Simpli.fi to continue to help them achieve their goals. Our space is in a constant state of change, so this is critical to ensuring that we are on the right path.
2. Can you tell us about your journey into this market?
We started Simpli.fi with a vision to bring more precise, unstructured data to the world of digital advertising. We quickly found that our approach had unique advantages for local advertisers as it enabled them to customize their targeting to their local needs, and achieve performance on high volumes of localized campaigns.
Our focus on local led us to household addressable advertising, which we deliver across desktop, mobile, and OTT/CTV devices. We are now finding that brands of all sizes are coming to us for our ability to precisely target just the households that they want, whether in a few zip codes, a few states, or nationwide. This translates to less wasted impressions and a higher ROI for their digital ad spend.
3. How do you think technology is upgrading marketing Sector?
Technology is giving marketers the ability to deliver their messages to very precise audiences that will be most receptive, and to measure responses in real-time, whether that response is navigating to a web site, buying a product online, or physically visiting an advertiser’s location. Savvy marketers are using technology to drive their business in ways that haven’t been possible before.
4. How has location-based targeting empowered advertising strategies?
Location-based targeting has brought a whole new way for advertisers to reach anonymous audiences based on locations visited. Common uses of location-based marketing that we see include: targeting visitors of competitor’s locations; retargeting visitors to an advertiser’s own location to push customer loyalty strategies; targeting customers who attended specific events during specified date and time windows; and a host of other use cases like targeting travelers passing through airports, etc.
5. How do you define your Reporting and Analytics Platform?
Our reporting and analytics platform is granular, real-time, and totally transparent. We have placed a high priority on attribution and reporting because advertisers of all sizes want a better understanding of how their budgets are being applied and what sort of ROI they are seeing.
Transparency has been a key pillar of our approach since the day we were founded.
Not only do we provide cost transparency, but we also provide transparency into the targeting data and the sites, apps, and networks where ads are displayed.
6. Can you explain, how does your platform help in Audience Optimization?
With over 130K active campaigns running daily, our platform relies on automated algorithms to optimize audiences to deliver on the KPIs of each campaign. In a nutshell, our system looks for patterns in the types of impressions that are performing the best for a campaign, whether that is based on user attributes, context of the impression, device, time of day, or eighty other variables. Once patterns are detected, our system changes bids dynamically to win the most desirable impressions, while staying within the advertiser’s CPM budget.
7. What features of your digital advertising solutions differentiates it in market?
Simpli.fi has many points of differentiation that provide a competitive advantage. Most notably is our use of unstructured data, which sits as the foundation on which Simpli.fi was built on, enabling marketers to target, bid, optimize, and report at the individual data element level. This results in more granular targeting and improved performance for our advertisers as compared to platforms that utilize opaque audience segments (i.e., auto intenders, etc.). This, coupled with automated processes for campaign entry, management, optimization and reporting, enables us to deliver performance on high volumes of localized campaigns for companies of all sizes, including large multi-location national brands.
Additionally, our industry-leading addressable programmatic capabilities are very unique. With Simpli.fi, you can effectively reach consumers household by household on a national scale and take into account the various ways one household differs from another. Using our Addressable Audience Curation tool, marketers can easily curate addressable audiences in real-time based on location and demographic data for over 126 MM households across the U.S. Location data can be filtered by postal code, city/metro, congressional districts, and more. Advertisers can then filter their addressable audience with over 500 categories of household demographic, political, and economic variables all within Simpli.fi’s system and seamlessly execute digital advertising campaigns across all devices seen within a household without having to possess first party data or purchase targeting lists from data brokers.
8. What advice would you like to give to the technology Start Ups?
Focus on your customers and your people.
9. What is the Digital innovation in sales technology according to you that will mark 2019?
I think that 2019 will be remembered as the year that programmatic OTT/CTV advertising achieved scale and was more broadly accepted as a valuable media type for both large and small advertisers.
10. How do you prepare for an AI-Centric world?
At Simpli.fi, we have been heavily into machine learning since we started, as that is what we use to automatically optimize our 130+K active daily campaigns. As we move forward, we will continue to bring AI into our UI to make executing, optimizing, and drawing insights on campaigns more and more automated.
11. What are the major developments you are planning, in recent time?
Our roadmap for 2020 includes continuing to enhance our addressable capabilities, our OTT/CTV capabilities, and our reporting and attribution.
12. Can you tell us about your team and how it supports you?
We have a fantastic team that works very well together and has been together for a long time. I spend more time thinking about how I can support the team to do their jobs better, instead of asking them to support me. Of course, by doing their jobs as well as they do, that supports the company.
13. What movie inspires you the most?
Unbroken.
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?
YouTubeTV, CNBC, American Airlines, Spotify, Whoop (fitness app), Vivino (wine rating app), OpenSnow (ski reports)