MarTech Interview with Ian Liddicoat, CTO and Head of Data Science – Adludio

This Martech interview with Ian Liddicoat from Adludio – CTO and head of data sciences focuses on Adludio’s core adtech offerings and the role of AI and machine learning in the industry.

Hi, Ian. Welcome to our Interview Series. Please tell us a little bit about your journey and what inspired you to start at Adludio.

I started my journey in the world of Artificial Intelligence (AI), analytics and digital marketing almost 25 years ago, when the industry was still in its infancy. Having led the development of proprietary algorithms and the delivery of AI products for industry giants, including WPP, Towers Watson and Publicis, it is safe to say that I am driven by technology.

I joined Adludio because of the scale of ambition and the talent of its engineering teams. Indeed, the breadth and depth of the AI techniques Adludio uses and the resulting insights are unparalleled in the digital media space. At a time when digital marketers are waking up to the potential of AI-technologies, particularly in mobile advertising, the chance to propel Adludio’s unique technologies forward was an opportunity that I could not resist.

Looking ahead, Adludio is uniquely positioned at the intersection of media, stunning creative, mobile and AI. As privacy limits the use of personal data, the ability to understand and optimize ad attention will be paramount.

Tell us about the mobile adtech ecosystem that you are currently focusing on and how it changed in the last 3 years? How did the pandemic change the landscape?

The past few years have solidified mobile advertising as a stable source of revenue, with the industry having reached a market worth of $223bn in 2020; a figure expected to reach $339bn in 2023. However, the result of this fast growth has been a degree of oversaturation. It is now more difficult than ever for brands to cut through the noise. This is compounded by the global economic situation, which has put a squeeze on consumer spending, and put pressure on marketers to reach increasingly ambitious levels of return on marketing investment..

The brands that truly understand the relationship between their mobile creative, and the levels of consumer attention that this can sustain, will be the ones that prosper during a challenging period for advertising.

The rate of technological integration in the sector is nevertheless a reason for celebration. Alongside our AI platform, the current uptake of technologies and experiences that mix AI, AR, VR, IoT and robotics, for example, will be of great benefit to the industry. Together, this will generate better online ad experiences for consumers and in turn more powerful marketing solutions for brands.

What are your core offerings? How do you incorporate various advanced technologies to create your products?

Adludio’s intelligent, interactive and data-driven platform integrates highly advanced Deep Learning technologies, plus Computer Vision (CV), Neural Networks and Natural Language Processing (NLP).

These techniques are used in tandem to optimize creative features and gaming sequences to ensure that ads are highly engaging, and that the attention levels generated are also machine learned, therefore improving over time. Our platform is able to understand and manage the relationship between creative objects, facial recognition, text and a certain game structure for a given audience. This is very powerful data. This data is then used to refine and re-purpose the next iteration of the ad in real time.

In this new attention-driven era of advertising, the creative is ultimately what is going to captivate consumers. With these unique AI-led capabilities, Adludio’s platform provides our clients with the best-performing ad creative, but also the unique insight as to why this level of performance was possible.

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What is the opportunity for marketers now that brands can add AI and Machine learning to their advertising campaigns?

The opportunity for marketers is to understand how human experience and learning can be enhanced by machine learning for the benefit of their customers. Even as privacy legislation restricts how personal data is collected and stored, there are simply too many data points being generated during the lifecycle of a campaign for optimization to be left to humans alone. The wider opportunity is to understand in detail what drives attention and ultimately, repeat sales.

The availability of vast computing resources through Cloud providers coupled with open source AI technologies means the opportunity is there for brands and agencies if they embrace it.

What’s the end-value for marketing teams that wish to scale their efforts with new concepts such as gaming, metaverse and NFTs?

The use of gaming is not particularly new as we already used advanced gaming methods in our ads today. What we are now able to do is understand the relationship between game interactions and creative features and how this drives up attention rates.

In the wider technology sphere, there are opportunities for media to be traded on a blockchain, for digital assets to be created as or linked to an NFT, and for charging to be completed through a digital currency. This offers a level of transparency that is not yet the norm. Wider still there will increasingly be opportunities, like the Metaverse, to use artificial and augmented reality both for advertising and in product or service delivery. Over time the user experiences generated here will also be used to inform how individual ads are presented to a consumer and by what method. Again, machine learning will play its part in ensuring that the customer experience is constantly improving.

I would say that mobile will remain the dominant device for advertising engagement, as 5G, enhanced battery life, increased screen resolution and processing speeds continue to increase in conjunction with new and often satellite based broadband.

Which industries have been at the forefront of deploying your platform? What kind of reviews do you receive from your lading consumers?

For our clients, representing a range of sectors including automotive, luxury, FMCG and retail, their marketing has been transformed by Adludio’s solutions. For example, looking at the gaming vertical in particular, Microsoft partnered with Adludio to promote its Xbox One X games console. Wanting to drive awareness via an interactive brand experience on mobile, the result was a recreation of the Xbox’s controller on mobile, which invited the user to turn it on. The outcome of this campaign was an engagement rate of 20%, including a purchase intent increase by 5.4 points.

Nike meanwhile also sought to deliver an interactive mobile experience for its consumers to build awareness of its Joyride running shoe amongst runners and joggers. Allowing Nike’s customers to investigate the shoe on their phones, the campaign had an engagement rate of 32% as well as a click through rate of 11%.

Through Adludio’s platform, and its sophisticated combination of creative, media and AI, we offer clients only the best performing campaigns and crucially the associated insight that has made this result possible..

Do you foresee any challenges brands will deal with as a result of AI based mobile advertising?

Some marketers may find the idea of making AI a key part of marketing strategy daunting. This can arise from fears that the adoption of AI at scale can lead to a level of automation that results in job losses and that this would be difficult to manage. Others may think that AI technologies are simply “black box” in nature and that the investment required is prohibitive – but this is no longer the case.

It would be true to say that a shortage of skilled Data Scientists and Data Engineers, who can also understand the commercial implications of their projects, has  been an issue for more widespread in-housing of AI expertise. However, thanks to the growth in recent years of cloud computing capabilities, coupled with increasing availability of powerful, open source libraries like PyTorch or TensorFlow, this has brought AI within the reach of any business willing to invest in it as a part of a marketing strategy. The responsibility now rests with advertisers to engage with these technologies and do this as part of a long term commitment to improving how they interact with their customers.

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Any impact of macro trends in social media and legislation that would influence the mobile adtech markets in the next 2-3 years? Would you like to specify how Adludio is gearing up for the future?

The macro trends in social media have been dominated by privacy legislation, a greater need to protect free speech and the emerging reality that a “walled garden” may not be the dominant method to engage consumers. It is clear that the Twitter of Elon Musk will be very different to its previous incarnation but I believe that brands will return to this platform and advertising spend will stabilize and then increase here and on Tiktok. Reddit will also see increasing ad spend as the benefits of reaching very targeted audiences linked by a certain interest becomes clear.

With this backdrop, coupled with the fast paced legislation in the US directed at privacy, more and more tech companies and brands will be seeking to generate and control their customer data. This will lead to some consolidation in traditional ad tech providers as well as the launch of new, very agile players that address specific audiences, interests or devices and also utilize technologies such as AI and Blockchain.

At Adludio we will remain impartial and focus on bringing brilliant creative, engaging gamification and advanced AI together to drive attention, sales and ultimately sustainable customer retention.