TechBytes with Nir Feldman, SVP of Engineering at Kenshoo

Tell us about your role and the team/technology you handle at Kenshoo

I am leading a super talented group of Engineers building all Kenshoo products. Our Engineering organization is organized in independent full-stack development teams that continuously deliver business value to our clients. Women make up nearly 50% of our R&D team leaders—which I am told is unusual—and this inclusive-by-design approach delivers continuous innovation in the form of unique, intuitive products and capabilities.

My personal role is to maintain an engineering culture to define, change and adapt our processes and to look for the right technology to build or buy so that we can be both efficient and innovative in meeting the growing business needs of our clients.

What is the current technology roadmap to build Data Management platforms?

At Kenshoo we have been handling data for more than a decade. Our mission is to empower people to make informed decisions and engage audiences with digital media.

Our technology roadmap around data focuses on three major areas:

– Scale to easily ingest more data. As the world of the marketer is growing and data sources are multiplying we are expanding our integration framework and platform to allow the ingestion of events (streams of events) and batched data (aggregated data coming from first-party, third-party or publisher sources).

– Continue and enhance Kenshoo’s Big Data infrastructure to generate actionable insights for decision-makers on all levels of Digital Marketing. We have been investing in our Hadoop-based Data Lake and Cassandra-based event repositories and are now looking into leveraging new Cloud and Data technologies as we continue to support more and more data ingestions.

– Enabling the clients to explore data in the fastest available way with the best database technology for the mission. We are currently rolling out a solution that queries billions of records (Ads, Keywords and Other Campaign Targeting) using a web interface with response times that are almost immediate.

How is Kenshoo’s technology transforming the way modern brands do their Marketing and Sales?

Digital Marketing is becoming more and more complex. Consumers engage with brands across a wide range of platforms.

With our Data Intelligence layer, we help brands make decisions on how to target audiences based on insights generated from the technology, the data platform and the years of data analysis and AI models we have built.

Tell us more about your AI and Machine Learning initiatives

Kenshoo has been leveraging AI and Machine Learning for more than a decade. In the last year, we have been investing more in using Deep Learning technologies to improve our bid and budget optimization solutions and to surface a wider range of insights that are not accessible using traditional analysis tools.

For example, we built a forecast capability to predict the phenomena of ad fatigue. This helps marketers learn when an audience may start getting tired of seeing an ad and take action to address the problem proactively (automatically if they choose to) by doing things like refreshing the creative.

How would Marketing Teams benefit from your recent Google Cloud integration?

As we are seeing more and more organizations choosing Cloud Providers and specifically GCP as their Infrastructure for Data consolidation and BI solutions, we expect to see internal IT teams building customized visualizations and applications that are based on the data and insights we are providing. This has long been a difficult and time-consuming process, but we have made this turnkey and easy for marketers.

What are the biggest challenges in measuring the ROI of Data-driven Marketing Technology solutions?

Our Chief Product Officer released a full article around one of the biggest emerging threats to measuring ROI. Generally, the multi-touch attribution models many marketers have come to rely on are becoming less effective day by day and also less able to account for cross-device experiences due to privacy restrictions and increased blocking of third-party trackers/cookies.

Currently, most marketers use third-party measurement (every interaction needs to be tracked and attributed by a measurement platform). I expect brands to increasingly take ownership of their own data (first-party measurement) using tools provided by tech companies like Kenshoo. The value of registered users is going to be rising and brands will invest more in pushing the consumers to be identified.

What is your prediction on the disruptive application of Data Visualization in B2B and B2C Marketing initiatives?

As advertising has evolved from text to more visual formats, so has the way nimble organizations assemble, interpret and apply data. Once organizations unify and visualize their data, this becomes a communication norm. Data Visualization now sets the standard for how we interpret and share data within and across teams, but while some struggle to unify siloed data to make this happen, others are finding success in the cloud.

Data visualization has democratized data for organizations that have embraced it. It is no longer just reviewed and leveraged by analysts; it has become the basis for decision-making across all departments. My team engineered Kenshoo’s integrations with Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services that make it much easier than ever to migrate and unify all of an organization’s business and marketing data to the cloud. This removes the time-consuming barriers that often prevent teams within an organization from understanding their data.

Once migrated to the Cloud, Data Studio visualizes the data so that people throughout the organization can get the actionable insights they need to make business decisions with confidence. Marketers can glean insights and optimize their investments with ease and often at a glance, and the decision making of teams throughout the organization improves in-step.