MarTech Interview with Christina Park, VP of North America Enterprise Sales at LoopMe

Christina Park, VP of North America Enterprise Sales at LoopMe discusses a few ways for marketers and advertisers to track and target high quality audiences with better adtech optimization in order to drive business output and ad ROI:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat Christina, we’d love to hear more about you and your marketing-sales journey through the years…

I have had the pleasure of working in digital advertising for the past 18 years, starting off on the agency and client side and then moving into ad tech sales. I have held positions at companies like Turn, one of the first programmatic solutions in market, Drawbridge, which was a leading identity solution in the market, and most recently DoubleVerify. For the past two years I have been at LoopMe, heading up our strategy sales efforts across North America. I consider myself an early advocate of programmatic and data-driven advertising. Having come from a marketing background, I truly believe in the solutions that LoopMe offers, as we focus on aligning advertising technology towards the tangible business outcomes that marketers really care about.

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Tell us more about your role at LoopMe and how LoopMe has evolved over the years…

I currently focus on a few different sectors of the LoopMe business, managing both the West Coast and New England sales regions, along with managing a team that focuses on both brand direct and B2B data integrations. We work with agencies, brands and technology companies selling LoopMe’s wide set of products, ranging from full-service campaigns, to programmatic media, to our self-service platform, and most recently our standalone data offering called PurchaseLoop Audiences, which can be accessed through the LiveRamp data marketplace.

LoopMe has been in the market for the past nine years. The company is based out of the UK and originally got its start as a mobile-first offering that combined AI and high-quality inventory with measurement. There was a real gap in the space — the ad tech that buyers were using was being optimized towards online proxy metrics while the true campaign KPI’s were tied to components such as offline sales, brand survey lift, or in-store visitation. We wanted to solve for that challenge and create a solution that allowed advertisers to align their online campaign goals to the true overarching goals of a specific campaign. 

We’d love some of the key highlights on the new LiveRamp Data Marketplace, what inspired this, how will it benefit end users?

We observed that more and more advertisers wanted the ability to leverage our audience data that we can access via our proprietary survey solution and apply it across other portions of their media buy, including CTV, premium sponsorships, and addressable audio. As a result, we recently decoupled our media and data offering via LiveRamp to allow customers to leverage LoopMe-created segments across their entire media buy outside of LoopMe. Our data solution allows marketers to hone in on the most valuable audiences from the get-go in order to drive the best end results against their campaigns. 

There are many pitfalls with the data that is available to marketers today. First, most online data is still sourced from website environments and tied to online cookies. Second, the data can quickly become stale and out of date. Lastly, there is usually no transparency around how the data is sourced and/or modeled. This is something that we want to solve with our proprietary survey technology. LoopMe can create custom tailored audiences that truly represent the most up-to-date, in market, competitive and behavior-driven audiences. 

Our data is sourced from our non-incentivized surveys, which are served on mobile devices and always on to ensure the most updated data sets. We also provide transparency around the modeling process – we collect at least 1,000 positive responses before modeling out each segment to include the top 10% of users in our pool that look the most like the original seed audience. For more sophisticated data buyers we can also customize this process to exact precision, recall points that they are looking for, and provide transparency within a process that is usually a black box for other data solutions. By using AI to model out audiences based on real in-market respondents, our clients are finding incremental consumers for their campaigns, outside of the other audience data sets available in the market today, making LoopMe a ‘must-have’ for more portions of their media investments.

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What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve been observing in the marketplace when it comes to audience intelligence and targeting in today’s marketplace?

One of the biggest challenges today is finding high quality audiences via third-party data that accurately identifies the user that the marketer is trying to reach. Sometimes, advertisers are seeking to target consumers that have a specific attitudinal mindset, yet that data just doesn’t exist. Other times, advertisers are looking to target in-market consumers but have challenges finding up-to-date segments that accurately represent a user’s current mindset. Most traditional third-party data sources do not provide transparency around how exactly data is sourced or modeled to create a targetable segment. Additionally, some marketers just don’t have access to enough of their own first party data and need to find solutions that can help fill in those gaps. 

What are some of the top optimization tips you’d share with today’s adtech users/advertisers?

Our recommendation is to leverage advertising solutions that optimize and drive performance against the outcome you really care about. If your primary campaign KPI is to drive brand lift, use a solution that can optimize in real-time towards brand lift. If you are trying to drive offline sales, work with a partner that can measure and optimize towards driving more offline sales in-flight. 

What we are seeing across the board is that the end campaign goal is tied to real world business outcomes but the ad tech that marketers are using is still optimizing towards media proxy metrics like CTR, VCR, etc. In fact, in a recent study with IRI, we found that by leveraging their actual sales data feed (called CCF) within our in-flight campaign optimization model, we increased dollars per household by 40%. That’s a huge benefit to CPG marketers that are really trying to grow their brands.

It’s time for marketers to move away from solely focusing on these media metrics and make digital media dollars more accountable towards the goals that really matter. 

How do you feel the future of adtech is set to change and influence the online ad marketplace?

We are still in the early phases when it comes to advertising technology — as media becomes more addressable, more marketers will demand that their dollars be held accountable towards the goals that really matter. We will also see advertisers demand more transparency around how the data they are using is sourced and modeled. 

Some last thoughts and takeaways?

I am really excited about the launch of PurchaseLoop Audiences, our unique data offering via LiveRamp – it’s positioned well within the space. Marketers should continue to be objective-orientated, and instead of focusing on the complexity of the solutions they are using, stay true to the overall goals they are seeking to drive with their media dollars. With the monopolization of the ad tech space, it is more and more important for marketers to question their current solution and not be afraid to change course if it is not driving the end results they are looking for.

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