Adgorithms’ visualization of Albert
Ad and marketing platforms are becoming so intelligent, one imagines a near future where marketers can sit back and relax as they run their campaigns.
That day may be getting closer, with today’s announcement by New York City-based Adgorithms of its newest version of Albert, “the world’s first and only self-driven marketing and advertising platform.”
Albert 2.0 expands on its predecessor’s artificial intelligence decision-making and range of channels, CEO and founder Or Shani told me. The earlier version, launched in 2014, allowed a marketer to automatically place display ads on desktop computers and in mobile web/apps. The company says it has about 300 customers, including Harley Davidson NYC, furniture retailer Made.com, and online jeans shop Evisu.
2.0 ups the ante, adding video ads, search ads on Google and Bing, social ads on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, push notifications, SMS, and email marketing.
Shani noted that the level of complexity in marketing is pushing human capabilities, so his company, founded in 2010, has built this “game changer” from the ground up.
Programmatic and marketing automation technologies handle much of the heavy lifting, he said in a statement accompanying the launch, “but they rely on continual marketer or technologist input along the way.” They do not automatically test campaigns first, he said, and then scale up.
Albert, he added, is designed to learn, test, and calibrate campaigns until he meets the established KPIs, with autonomous media buying, campaign execution (timing, channels), testing, optimization, and reports.
The marketer starts the campaign by preparing the creative — that is, the ad or email messaging — and then setting up the channels, devices, targets, KPIs, budget, user type (e.g., contacts, visitors, lookalikes), schedule, and geo-parameters.
Adgorithms dashboard
Albert is designed to do the rest by learning from the results of earlier campaigns, then testing and optimizing thousands of variables (like combinations of ad creatives with ad headlines) in mini-campaigns and, finally, executing full ad and email campaigns.
A brand can target lookalike audiences or segments from CRM or third-party customer data. Albert integrates with a variety of other marketing systems, contains a demand-side platform (DSP) that is set up for various exchanges, and includes built-in proprietary ad fraud protection.
A brand might create the ads and emails for a 50 percent-off coupon for the coming weekend, Shani suggested. Albert will synchronize messaging, see what the open and response rates look like for the emails as they go out, and then target and test ads for various channels to meet the goals.
Throughout the campaigns, he added, Albert is transparent about what he is doing, and the marketer can jump in at any point.
The platform also automatically issues reports with insights (see below) and makes recommendations, like advertising in a channel not currently used. Shani said that brands using Albert see an average of 30 percent improvement in conversions or return-on-ad-spend, compared to other platforms. The company says it is trying out different pricing models, including a percentage of media spend or a fixed fee with a lower percentage.
Shani describes Albert’s competition as “nobody and everybody.” Nobody, because he sees his platform as requiring the least setup to run autonomous campaigns, and everybody, because of the widespread use of machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Self-learning systems have become commonplace in marketing platforms these days, from email marketing to B2B account-based marketing to major marketing clouds. Each vendor has a somewhat different take on the degree of autonomy they offer, but Adgorithms says its platform is the closest yet to a Google self-driving car.
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