MarTech Interview with Hikari Senju, CEO and Founder at Omneky

Personalized ad copy that helps advertisers scale faster can help brands tap into a larger audience niche more quickly, Hikari Senju, CEO and Founder at Omneky shares a few thoughts on the evolution of digital ads in this chat:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat Hikari, tell us about the story behind the Omneky platform?

My dad is an artist so I grew up in an environment that had an obsession with communicating via design. I remember as a kid often going to museums and learning why artists like DaVinci or Michelangelo made the color and symbolic decisions they made in their artwork. Additionally, my grandfather worked at IBM so I also grew up learning about the tech space. I often went along with him to research labs to see the latest product demos, which really embedded a fascination for technology in me. I would deconstruct and reconstruct all the hardware we had at home, and was really into robotics competitions. I studied computer science at Harvard with a focus on AI where I started several companies, one of which was an edtech platform called Quickhelp. Quickhelp was acquired by another edtech company called Yup where I became their Head of Growth. It was at Yup that I learned how much data there was in advertising, but also inefficient spending. Combined with my background in AI and design, I saw the opportunity to start an AI generative company in the space called Omneky.

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How are you seeing AI impact different facets of advertising and adtech today, a few key thoughts based on your observations from the global marketplace?

Online campaigns require frequent and faster creative iterations. In 1953 when 72% of American households were tuning in to watch “I Love Lucy,” they had a shared experience and therefore the advertisements could be the same. Now we live in a world where everyone is living in their own Truman Show. This means the creatives need to be personalized for each individual as well.  According to Nielsen in 2017, 47% of advertising performance is based on ad creative – and is probably a lot higher today given the fact that a lot of the targeting previously available, no longer is. The only way to consistently drive results today is through brute force performance from these platforms with AI, which is what Omneky does. The great result about this is that this data driven process to ad creative is globally scalable. Utilizing GPT-3, Omneky’s AI generates hundreds of thousands of ads per week and analyzes performance to learn what features are driving results (and which features aren’t). 

As ad platforms (like Omneky) make it easier for creative teams to scale their efforts, there still has to be improvement and alignment between internal teams to optimize output from this: what best practices would you share?

Omneky makes advertising as easy as clicking approve. Design teams submit their brand book and creative assets, and marketers connect their advertising data, which our platform uses to generate the creative iterations. All design and marketing teams have to do is click “reject” or “approve” on each creative. If they don’t like something about the creative, they utilize our image and video annotation tool to provide specific feedback about changes for each creative or provide general feedback on the batch of creatives. Customers can also submit requests for future creatives or submit creative themselves that our AI can iterate against. This way creative teams can utilize the full power of AI while maintaining control of their brands. Omneky’s platform combines data with design to align these disparate internal teams to drive better Return on Ad Spend. 

How in your view can marketers and advertisers make better use of AI powered features to drive relevance and personalization in their campaigns?

Data driven ads perform better. Using AI to tap into audience demographics and consumer insights to improve your creative increases advertising performance. We have an analytics dashboard for customers to get up to date creative insights per target audience. These insights can be utilized to create not only better personalized ads, but also landing pages, emails and other marketing material. Omneky generates hundreds of thousands of ad iterations based on these insights which customers can approve or annotate the images and videos, to make sure every personalized creative is on brand. As a result of this, our average customer sees a 2.7x Return on Ad Spend. 

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A few thoughts on the future of Adtech?

Advertising is going to get more immersive and get into richer media. Ads are going to be dynamically deepfaked into videos, VR and AR. Ads are going to become so dynamically integrated into media that people won’t realize they’re being personally advertised to. There are going to be virtual beings that assist customers in their buying decisions. At Omneky, we’re expanding to programmatic television, using GPT-3 to generate personalized scripts for advertising video content and bringing personalized generative ad creative to TV.  

Some last thoughts and marketing / martech takeaways and predictions for 2022 before we wrap up?

2022 will see a rapid advancement in AI applications. OpenAI will release a public version of their image generation tool, Dall-E along with a more powerful GPT-3. Nvidia, Microsoft, Google and others will launch more powerful AI products aimed at consumers and businesses. Database platforms like Snowflake will have more partnerships with advertising players like TradeDesk. Alternative advertising platforms like Unity’s will gain additional traction. There will be big acquisitions in the space and consolidation amongst smaller advertising players. Big tech will continue to grow but will face increased regulatory pressure and anti-trust action.

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