1. What made you start Cablato?

Having been involved in programmatic advertising since its early days, we were continually looking for ways in which we could use data and technology to improve both targeting and engagement. We knew ad creative could work harder and be a lot more effective. Many of the ads being served through programmatic channels had been very poor and off brand, especially within the DCO space (Dynamic Retargeting), where the ads tended to look more like something from a 1970’s second-hand car dealership, rather than the innovative, high-impact creative you’d expect from the cutting edge of the advertising industry.

We built Cablato to solve this problem, developing a platform that could serve high-impact interactive creatives that use data to personalise each ad to the specific needs and interests of each individual target consumer – something the current mix of data and ad technologies was failing to do.

2. What does Cablato's Programmatic Creative Platform enable clients to do?

Cablato is an innovative technology platform that significantly increases the effectiveness of digital advertising by enabling brands and agencies to personalise ad content to the specific needs and preferences of individual consumers.

By making every ad served directly relevant to each targeted individual, Cablato has boosted response rates by up to 10 times for a number of major global brands.

To date, advertisers have struggled to use all the data and insight at their disposal. Now thanks to Cablato’s platform, they can aggregate and analyse all available data – behavioural, third party, first party and CRM – and run one-to-one, hyper-personalised campaigns at scale. The results are breakthrough brand experiences, deeper consumer engagement and accelerated business results.

In a recent highly successful campaign for a global fashion brand, Cablato powered the delivery of 14 billion content combinations through a single digital ad across multiple channels, each targeting a different consumer in real time.

3. You service both Admedo's agencies and brand direct clients, in general do brands and agencies face similar challenges when it comes to marrying programmatic with creativity?

Both brands and agencies understand the benefits of interactive advertising and personalisation, but until now the process of setting up programmatic creative campaigns and being able to combine data with high-impact ad units has been prohibitively complex and expensive.

Cablato has set out to make the process of using data to build mass personalised campaigns as simple as possible.

Our hope is that by simplifying the process and making the technology available to both agencies and internal brand trading teams, we can improve the way digital advertising is planned and how both brands and agencies use data in order to drive stronger ad engagement and better consumer response.

4. Do you think there comes a point where the data behind the creative is too intelligent in understanding the consumer that it can actually verge on the point of being intrusive and creepy?

The technology is there and we can confidently predict user behaviour and interest, but this is not the role of advertising and we wouldn’t recommend any brand pushes the limits of personalisation too far.

GDPR is a big consideration for data-driven campaigns, and as a UK-based business, we’re fortunate that Europe has legal directives in place that prevent personal identifiable information being used for marketing purposes.

For the brands and agencies we work with, we continually look for new ways to use data to increase engagement and relevancy, make ads more memorable and fun, and give consumers the information they need to make better choices – but that’s where we stop.

5. Which industries have you seen the best use of data-driven creativity from?

To date, travel and retail have been two of our biggest sectors with both industries having a huge amount of data at their disposal.

By linking into travel advertisers’ CRM, behavioural, booking and reservation data, we can predict destination choices and flight cabin preferences, recommend destinations, and show real-time pricing, availability and offers in each ad. This improves relevancy while helping consumers make quicker, more informed decisions. As a result, on average, our travel clients are seeing engagement and bookings increase by five times.

For retail, we’re creating ads that respond precisely to each consumer’s intent and interest starting from contextually aligning products and category information within brand ads, to recommending products based on behaviour, brand interaction and intent. Our ads are built to dynamically react to each interaction along with consumer’s position in the purchase funnel. This ensures each individual is served the most relevant content based on their own needs, which is boosting conversion rates by up to 10 times.

6. In this hyper connected world, where consumers have a multitude of interactions with brands, it's increasingly important to be able to connect brand interactions and deliver a frictionless customer experience across channels, devices and formats. How do you work with clients to achieve this? Is there a specific way you approach a client brief?

All of our ads are device agnostic, meaning they can be served across any device without having to be rebuilt. The challenge with cross-device targeting has been identifying and linking the multiple devices each individual owns. Companies such as Screen6 are now providing solutions that address this issue, and by using their data at either the DSP or ad server side, we can deliver consistent advertising across each touch point.

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