Hi Simon, thanks for your time today. Can you tell us about your professional background and your current role at Multilocal?

In terms of my background, I started my career in agency groups such as Omnicom, Publicis and Dentsu, covering a number of different media. This was really the first half of my career, but the second half has been about digital performance marketing, and I’ve worked at companies including Microsoft, AOL, Hearst and currently Multilocal.

I’m relatively new to my role as CRO here, having only started at the beginning of the year, and my job covers off the sales team, the marketing team and also the client service and analyst teams.

How does multilocal differentiate itself from other media companies?

What multilocal does is entirely unique. It is the only platform that has been built from the ground up with curation of the programmatic advertising in mind. Curation is, essentially, pulling all the best bits of the programmatic ecosystem together – whether that be data intelligence, inventory or supply path optimisation – and packaging them to deliver better campaign performance for brands and advertisers.

We have integrations with up to 40 SSPs, so a full view of the programmatic supply chain, and we also have 11 offices internationally, so far, with more to come. Finally, and most importantly, we implement ‘active curation’, which involves optimisation on the programmatic supply side which, to my knowledge, no one else is doing, or even close to being able to do.

What are your thoughts on the statement that “programmatic is a dodgy old motor with no logbook, but it could be a Ferrari”?

Well, I don’t actually agree with that sentiment. No one’s saying the programmatic ecosystem is perfect, and there are issues surrounding transparency, efficiency, and performance, but the majority of those operating in the space are continually looking to improve and enhance the world of programmatic advertising.

I think those who have valid concerns about the programmatic ecosystem, should look no further than curation if they want to experience programmatic at its absolute best. A lot of the major agency groups are beginning to test curation, and they are impressed by its results. These results are amplified significantly by multilocal’s active curation, where we optimise a campaign not only on the demand side, but also on the supply side – giving the campaign much more love.

Funnily enough, multilocal has on occasions been compared to a ‘Ferrari,’ so your question made me smile. I think it’s because we bring the best bits of the programmatic supply together and combine them to form something truly potent.

How can artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) be used to analyse customer behaviour and preferences, providing valuable insights to CROs for creating personalised marketing campaigns that drive revenue?

AI and ML are obviously both hot topics. They’ve both been around our industry for much longer than many people realise, but in recent years their complexity and performance has gone through the roof. ChatGPT has also succeeded in bringing AI fully into the public consciousness. Multilocal’s “active curation” approach is underpinned with AI/ML from helping us to categorise websites, ingesting daily DSP reports for all the campaigns we operate or driving the optimization and pipeline reporting. However, we also always use human intelligence (HI) to ratify, confirm and amend the data as necessary.e find the combination of AI and HI complement each other really well and help to improve and increase campaign KPIs.

Ultimately, we’re at the start of our AI/ML journey, and we have a targeting product we called Contextual+ -whereby we have graded all websites (over 1M+ using AI & HI) for numerous attributions – is proving highly effective for our clients. Here, we use a combination of first-party data, SSP data, DSP, client and search data, subject to the campaign’s requirements. The right ad, at the right time, in the right environment targeting the right people works better for all parties.

And finally, what are some best practices that you have implemented in your role as CRO?

Well, I’m one part of a talented team, and this year has been pretty busy for everyone. We’ve got a new story, new people, new structure, new engagement plans, new products, new CRM systems, new processes and new tech. So we’ve been busy building multilocal for the the future.

But personally, I hope to bring a philosophy that starts with the customer and works back, and a healthy dose of positive energy. I really want the whole market to test curation with us to see how much better their programmatic campaigns can be.

Also published in: Martech360