Sonia, thanks for joining us at the Future of Advertising panel.
You are the Chief Business Officer of Moloco. Tell us a
little bit about Moloco.
Thanks, Ernesto. Great to see you. Moloco actually stands for
Machine learning company and what we do is we help companies
bring ads that are engineered for outcomes. How do you do
that? We do it in two ways. One is around personalization where
we figure out which ad to put in front of which user that is that
will drive the conversion. And the second thing that we do is
because we use first party data off the advertiser, we know
exactly what the value of the
predict, the predicted value if the user is going to be and we
use it to price what the ad should be. What price should we
pay for the ad in a way that drives better outcomes for the
advertiser.
Interesting. What's the biggest challenge that you face in
working with the existing customers or finding new
customers?
You know, it's a,
as they say, a lot of the proof is in the pudding. When we go
say performance, I'll give you an analogy, right? You look
at two cars, they look exactly the same, but they may have very
different engines. One could be V8 or one could be V6. The only
way you know, if it works is if you drive it. So the biggest
challenge with new customers is like, hey, let us prove to you,
give us some data. Let's prove to you is that's one of our
biggest challenges. How do you articulate? Because nobody wants
to know the design of the engine,
they just want to know how fast it goes. So, so that's one
challenge with our new customers, with our existing
customers. One of the hardest things about performance
marketing or marketing is sustainability of your
performance, right? And this is where we work really hard
because our machine learning models are based on deep
learning, where we're constantly learning from every single ad
campaign that's running. And the key thing about machine learning
is because consumer habits are also changing, how do you keep
your models
updated, right? So that's the second challenge, which is how
do you keep sustainable performance happening when the
world around you continues to change? And like, for example,
even
we just went through COVID where a lot of people were sitting at
home doing things online. The LTV models were built on that
phase.
Now we're two years out of COVID. The LTE models are very
different, right? So you need to keep up with the models with the
real time data to make sure you're driving the optimal
outcomes. And tell us a little bit about how easy or difficult
it is to get the data from your customers also get third party
data privacy concerns. How do you deal with that? Yeah, it's a
great question. The good news is, for example, in the app
ecosystem, we have a pretty mature ecosystem of attribution
providers
which are privacy centric, which are safe. So the advertisers
give them the data and we work with those third party partners
to ingest that data and drive specific outcomes, right? So we
don't create custom integrations with every customer. We actually
work with the ecosystem that's privacy friendly and drive those
specific outcomes.
Great.
What brings you to Cannes?
You know, I've been in advertising on and off for about
10 years. I've always found there's a religious debate
between brand marketing and performance marketing. I think
we've reached an age where there is a way that both can coexist,
but with better measurement. And I just wanted to see, you know,
how is marketing kind of evolving over time? Are people
still using sample based techniques for measurement
versus
sensors based? And just wanted to see what where the wind is
blowing because typically the wind is like, ohh, brand is
moving to performance or people are sick and tired of last click
attribution and they're moving upper funnels. So I just came in
to say where is the wind blowing this time? But I feel like there
is a real question on fundamentals and how we can make
the brand marketing more effective as well as performance
marketing more effective. Yeah, it is a religious debate for
sure.
You just attended our panel and we had Disney, Coca-Cola, Known.
What did you take away from the panel? Sure. First of all, I
thought it was a great panel, A great topic and really good
frameworks explained by BCG too. Two things that struck me, one
was when the likes of Disney and Coca-Cola say that they are as
much of a technology company as they are a consumer products
company. Was refreshing to see and I think more people will
start adopting that mantra also being a technology company and
measuring everything. So one which is really good. The second
thing is when
Vijay from Coca-Cola talked about there's a difference between
size and scale, it was great to see. And to me, the parallels
that came to me was in brand marketing, you know, there's a
difference between reach and frequency versus what outcomes
is it driving. And I think a lot of people confuse the two. So it
was really refreshing to get that insight from Vijay as well.
Great. Sunil, thank you for stopping by the BCG Cabana here at Cannes.
Thank you.