MarTech Interview with Andrew Feigenson, CEO at Vivvix

How can enhanced ad intelligence be used to transform the digital advertising journey? Andrew Feigenson, CEO at Vivvix weighs in:

 

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Andrew, tell us about yourself…we’d also love to hear more about Vivvix and how it enables digital advertisers. 

Thank you for having me. I am Andrew Feigenson, CEO of Vivvix. I’m a serial transformation executive who loves awakening the full potential in existing companies. This often means finding an exciting new direction, creating technology-forward products that delight clients and developing high performing teams who accomplish things that they didn’t even think were possible beforehand.

Much of my time has been spent at the intersection of marketing, data and technology. I spent eight years at Nielsen where I was responsible for launching their programmatic unit, reinventing their digital business and leading all client-facing aspects of Nielsen Catalina Solutions. After Nielsen, I was CEO at Simmons Insights (now MRI-Simmons) and then Personica.

In recent years, I became intrigued by the broad topic of competitive intelligence. In a world where new competitors can emerge quickly, it seemed that this area had received relatively little technology investment; that there was an opportunity to apply technology to the problems of collecting data and making it easy for users to understand their environment.

When it came to advertising, the industry leaders included business units at Kantar and Numerator.  When Bain Capital acquired these companies, they had a similar vision as mine and invited me to lead the creation of something special – uniting the best of these businesses and expanding their ability to help the industry.

Fast forward, here I am as CEO of Vivvix, a new, independent brand within the Kantar Group portfolio that represents the union of advertising intelligence units that were originally housed of Kantar and Numerator.

We bring a deep specialism in syndicated competitive advertising intelligence. In fact, Vivvix has set a new industry standard for the most comprehensive advertising intelligence footprint available — with coverage of more than $250 billion in media spend and detailed descriptors for more than 35 million creative assets. This crosses traditional and digital media, including connected TV, mobile apps, streaming, search and display.

We now also have the ability to focus exclusively on delivering advertising intelligence that advertisers and media owners need to better understand today’s competitive media landscape. Recognizing the rapid pace of change in today’s advertising market, this means increased investment in speed of data collection and processing, as well as providing user-intuitive tools with a universal brand taxonomy and a personalized user experience.

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How can advertisers today use ad intelligence to improve their outcomes; we’d love to dive into some key takeaways on how brands are doing this?

Advertisers typically engage with us for two use cases – brand strategy and media planning.

From a brand strategy perspective, advertising intelligence users are primarily interested in building vivid clarity around their own products, markets, competitors and clients. This requires a high degree of detail into the way that ads are described and indexed. For example, in the telecom sector, a true understanding of the industry requires understanding elements such as co-op advertising, messaging elements and promotional offers.

We talk about winning outcomes lying in the balance between known facts and unknown factors. With these details in place, advertisers get a robust view of their landscape, which allows them to drive more effective, informed decisions. Without them, advertising intelligence would be simple lists of ads.

Vivvix has a heritage of diving deeply into creative ad elements to bring relevance. We work across all sectors of the market. Vivvix’s coverage and creative details are, in many ways, the closest thing to an industry standard language, or taxonomy. The fact remains that advertising is constantly evolving and there will always be new blind spots. With our unique and dedicated focus, we’ll be able to adapt along with them.

When it comes to media planning, the world is constantly changing. There are always new venues for placing ads, new mechanisms, new formats and new competitors. Some of the regular questions that media planners face is, “How much should I spend?” and “Where should I spend?”

While there are increasingly sophisticated ways of tracking outcomes today – ranging from broad market mix analysis to real-time optimization of campaigns on specific DSPs – part of the equation always comes back to knowing the competitive view and having a common way of defining ad occurrences.

With our unique and dedicated focus, we’ll be better able to help the industry understand the emerging channels and competitive moves. And, our industry standard language, or taxonomy, is a tool to help advertisers tie together their measurement across different measurement methodologies and tactics.

What are some of the advertising trends for the digital marketplace that you feel will dominate online channels in 2023?

Advertisers will continue to be concerned about finding the right channels for their advertising, in ways that perform but that are solid. Linear mechanisms were predictable but are in decline. Meanwhile, digital has proven to be effective for lower funnel metrics, but sometimes suspect in its quality and is increasingly competitive as companies bid for that valuable customer. This will lead to an environment where advertisers need to invest in digital partners to create healthy advertising venues.

CTV is going to be a huge component of this. With Netflix going live and subscription services becoming ad supported, we think this is an important area to watch. If done well, it will give advertisers a safer set of high-quality inventory. If done poorly, it could lead us into the morass of quality issues and fraud that happened in the early days of digital media. CTV is the area where I’m most excited about the combination of the best of digital and the best of traditional media.

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In what ways do you see AI impacting and reshaping the modern advertising industry; some thoughts as to the future of AI in adtech?

It’s hard not to be excited by things like ChatGPT – probably one of the most impactful new things that we’ve seen, which as lit-up the imagination of almost everybody who has used it. The reality is that Adtech has been running a similar playbook for a long time now. Mostly, it involves optimization of ads against some kind of outcome. It is singularly focused on that one KPI for a campaign. And it is myopic in its ability to only see ads tagged by the advertiser and not to see the context around those ads.

We believe that AI will have a few impacts. First, it will allow advertising to make sense of data in ways that surpass simply metrics, in ways that humans can understand – since humans are still going to be involved in advertising. Second, we believe that AI will allow us to increase our ability to understand and address the creative elements of advertising, which have been too complex to understand in systems.

We know that the majority of advertising’s impact is based on creative, yet that is an area in which the industry has been relatively nascent in its programmatic approach. We are planning to invest in both areas – applying classical advertising intelligence to a world that is programmatic and tied to identify graphics, and delving more deeply into creative attributes.

Take us through some few best practices you’d share with advertisers to help enable better contextual journeys?   

Marketers and advertisers should partner with their media agencies to ask, “How do I respond to an increasingly competitive landscape with agility?” This involves understanding your competitors of today, the competitors you may miss and those pockets of media that offer the best share of voice for the budget. Ultimately, the right agency partnership will yield an always-on view of the competition that allows you to build clarity into those competitive moves and market dynamics, so you can react to them.