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Each week, the PMW editorial team selects five top picks of the latest product releases from the adtech and martech worlds, with our verdict on why they made the cut – and why you should pay attention.
This week:
Alkimi: decentralised ad exchange
Veridooh: OOH verification with London Lights partnership
Yext: integrating GPT-3 for enterprise conversational AI
Moloco: AI tool identifies new revenue streams and ad products for content owners
Seedtag: ‘Contextual Profiles’ drive marketing performance without personal data
Alkimi ‘decentralised’ ad exchange aims to cut carbon and costs
Alkimi has completed its beta test and is now available for advertisers and publishers to buy and sell inventory through its blockchain-based programmatic platform.
How it works
The exchange is built on Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) blockchain technology and launches with ‘Prebid’ compatibility. In a typical programmatic ad exchange, publishers and advertisers are charged up to 20% in fees by the ad exchange alone. Alkimi charges a flat fee of 1.5% to both publishers and advertisers with no untraceable costs and complete auditability.
The exchange goes live alongside an Ads Explorer, enabling users to review all transactions taking place across the exchange and being stored on an immutable ledger in real time. This explorer is similar in function to Ethereum’s etherscan.io, where all transactions are listed and public. The unique combination of exchange and explorer allows Alkimi to provide publishers and advertisers with full, real-time access to their auction data, as well as complete auditability.
What the provider says
“Alkimi Exchange is built to restore trust in programmatic bidding, not just between advertisers and publishers, but also between exchange users and the consumers who view the ads,” said Ben Putley, Alkimi CEO and Co-Founder. “A blockchain-based exchange offers complete transparency without sacrificing data privacy as every transaction can be traced both real-time and historically — we don’t hide anything. Trust is also cultivated through fair pricing, which is why our fees are just 1.5%, creating a value exchange that benefits all parties.”
The PMW View
The programmatic supply chain is often singled out for inefficiencies. Alkimi is hoping to attract new clients with an ad exchange that aims to restore the value exchange between advertisers, publishers and users, by claiming to offer the sweet spot of transparency and data fidelity combined with reduced fees and the carbon emissions of each impression.
Veridooh expands OOH verification with London Lights partnership
Australian-based Veridooh is making its independent verification solution available to all London Lites clients, designed to give advertisers a new level of transparency in their out-of-home (OOH) investment.
How it works
Veridooh’s patented and proprietary solution SmartCreative collects data needed to track, measure, and verify the performance of digital-out-of-home (DOOH) campaigns. The technology provides over 400 metrics on campaign delivery in one dashboard. London Lites has already completed several trials using the solution. The media owner, which launched in 2012, focuses on offering advertisers the ability to target London’s hard-to-reach audiences with a 100% digital screen portfolio.
What the providers say
Veridooh co-founder Mo Moubayed said: “We’re excited to continue our expansion in the UK through our latest partnership with London Lites. Advertisers want the same level of transparency in OOH advertising as other platforms so it’s great to see media owners implementing third-party, independent verification for their clients. Our proprietary solution, which is the first independent OOH verification of its kind in the UK market, boosts confidence in OOH advertising which is key for the sector as it continues its post-COVID resurgence.”
London Lites managing partner David English added: “We’re thrilled to partner with Veridooh and offer our clients the ability to independently verify their OOH campaigns with us. By increasing trust and transparency in the OOH sector, we can not only prove the value of our screens but also encourage further ad spend in OOH to help it grow. We’ll continue to invest in the latest technology that helps make OOH more attractive to brands and agencies.”
The PMW View
DOOH is fast catching up to its display counterparts in terms of offering verification and measurability for advertisers. Veridooh is one of the companies leading the way in this space and this move marks a significant step towards its expansion in the UK as advertisers wake up to the potential of combining the unique high impact experience of posters with the accountability of digital.
Yext to integrate GPT-3 for enterprise conversational AI
Yext has announced the launch of Yext Chat, a conversational AI product that leverages language models - like OpenAI's GPT-3 - to provide accurate and natural language chat experiences at an enterprise level.
How it works
To function effectively within a business context, natural language chat experiences must be able to answer questions by referencing curated sets of knowledge. Yext addresses this with the Knowledge Graph, a headless content management system (CMS) that uses entity relationships to optimise an organisation’s content for voice search, chatbots, and other sophisticated AI. Yext Chat generates answers with content stored in the Knowledge Graph, which allows businesses to confirm that responses are accurate and grounded in real-world information. With Search Term Clustering and other analytics, Yext customers can identify and fill content gaps by adding new content to the Knowledge Graph, creating a flywheel where organisations can continually improve their answers based on the questions being asked.
What the provider says
Marc Ferrentino, President and Chief Operating Officer at Yext, said: “Yext Chat is a transformative product that will provide every business with world-class conversational experiences that are safe, reliable, and easy to manage. Combining large language models with our Knowledge Graph unlocks a tremendous amount of potential and opportunity for our customers. Recent innovations brought conversational AI to consumers. Yext is bringing conversational AI to the enterprise.”
The PMW View
General-purpose large language models like Chat-GPT are trained on a wide variety of public datasets, which often include little to no authoritative information about a business. Because of this, the accuracy of generated responses cannot be reliably or independently verified, a challenge for businesses, especially when models create inaccurate or misleading “hallucinations.” Yext is hoping to counter this and fulfil a business need by integrating its ‘agnostic’ layers of information about businesses, and fill in the missing gaps in AI bot data.
Moloco AI tool identifies new revenue streams and ad products for content owners
The new offering combines machine learning and first-party data to let digital content owners identify and create unique ad products and increase monetisation.
How it works
By leveraging operational machine learning, Moloco’s full-funnel solution will enable platforms to build a scalable and profitable digital ad business through a fully programmatic platform. The solution will enable publishers to create new ad products to increase monetisation and unlock new revenue streams. It will also serve a broader set of customers than in traditional linear TV businesses.
What the provider says
“Our media partners have created rich consumer offerings with content, audiences, and digital experiences that are unique to their business,” said Herman Yang, Head of Moloco Enterprise. “Our goal is to help platforms build a scalable and profitable ad business with Moloco’s machine learning technology by creating unique experiences for users and opportunities for their advertisers.”
What the clients say
By applying machine learning to help companies grow, Moloco claims it has grown revenue by more than 5.0x in the past two years and facilitates more than $1 billion of ad expenditures annually for its customers.
The PMW View
Walled gardens accounted for more than 75% of digital advertising expenditures last year. Those companies have invested heavily in machine learning over the past decade and built big businesses by fusing first-party data and ML. By leveraging similar cutting-edge operational ML as those big tech platforms, Moloco’s new full-funnel solution aims to provide these technologies through a fully programmatic platform for publishers.
Seedtag ‘Contextual Profiles’ aim to drive marketing performance without using personal data
Seedtag has launched a solution that lets advertisers deliver ‘effective performance campaigns using real-time contextual signals’ without cookies or any personal data.
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How it works
Seedtag’s Contextual Profiles combine two types of real-time signals to evaluate the likelihood of a user being receptive in that moment - web-context signals (human-like understanding of content based on AI-driven text and visual analysis) and situational context signals (eg. location, time of day, weather or screen orientation, etc.). Seedtag can comprehend what content users are viewing, and use the context of their actions to predict their habits and behaviours by using advanced situational signals such as scroll speed, the weather or even screen orientation to not just serve a highly relevant ad, but ensure it is in the perfect spot on the page.
What the provider says
Nathan Salter, UK Head of Performance at Seedtag, said: “With contextual, the game changes. We offer advertising solutions that are based on everything that is not related to who is behind the screen. We deliver ads based on all these web-context and situational signals so at the end of the day what really matters to us is what a user is reading and what this user is showing interest in in real time, not the persona behind the screen. We can therefore offer a more real time targeting segmentation in order to create this contextual profile that is more likely to drive the action that we are looking for.”
What the clients say
Seedtag gave a case study where it recently worked with ‘the world's largest furniture retailer’ to help them increase awareness and drive sales of their new outdoor furniture collection. Contextual profiling let the client know when the users were “in-context” and likely to visit the webpage. Seedtag analysed the impact weather had on the campaign and integrated the results in the activation as a key contextual variable. It was proven that web page views increased when there was bad weather and people were more likely to buy outdoor furniture when the weather forecast was going to change from bad to more favourable conditions. This resulted in a 67% reduction in the cost per session and established the client as a leading provider of outdoor furniture.
The PMW View
With the rise in awareness of privacy issues, brands have to fight for attention more than ever before. Seedtag is pitching its Contextual Profiles product as a privacy-safe solution to this, where brands can directly impact users at the right moment and in the most relevant content. This can potentially achieve a ‘holy grail’ for marketers - improved immediate feedback, and ultimately, better performance.
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