Where its competitors are focused on media buying and all the functions around campaign trafficking, RadiumOne goes a few steps further. Web and app analytics tools have traditionally occupied a completely separate product category from ad platforms like DSPs (demand-side platforms), forcing advertisers to go to one place to evaluate customer behaviour and then another to act on those insights. RadiumOne’s platform combines the buying power of a DSP with the intelligence layer of a DMP (data management platform) in one place. It gives clients the capability to run tight, sophisticated media campaigns by proactively identifying customers and their behaviour, applying analytics to predict future behaviour, and then synthesizing that information into packaged bidding strategies activated through its buying platform.
“Advertisers come to us to solve specific campaign strategy problems and advertising objectives, so getting some intuition or doing some research on the consumers you want to reach is really important,” says Bob Hall, SVP business development at RadiumOne. “We think that there needs to be more vertical integration in that core audience data research and data activation piece, so we’ve developed a number of analytics tools that help marketers understand their audience better.”
Bob Hall, SVP of business development at RadiumOne
One such tool is called ShareGraph. Embedded in RadiumOne’s DMP, it uses patented audience amplification algorithms to identify common connections between people and build bigger audiences out of a smaller seed data set.
Some of its tools are designed for publishers, web and app developers, who can use them to better understand their audiences — what they like, what kind of content they share, their behaviour on websites and apps — with free access in exchange for fully anonymized usage data. They’re fully integrated into RadiumOne’s ad platform. An example is Po.st, a real-time data acquisition platform that’s part of RadiumOne’s audience analytics suite. It tracks people’s sharing activity across websites to determine product and purchase interest.
“All the predictive analytics that we do actually help sift through that data and help package up those bidding strategies to deliver ads to the right people,” says Hall.
ShareGraph, for example, evaluates behaviours and the data generated by our Po.st sharing tools. Many of RadiumOne’s advertisers use tools like Po.st on their own websites and mobile apps to incorporate their own user data into their marketing campaigns.
“The magic comes in when a marketer who has a website or an app uses this for fundamental customer behavioural research and then ties that data to anonymized cookies or device IDs to then target people when they are on a third party site or app,” says Hall. “That’s where we are significantly different than a lot of other ad platforms, because that core audience research, you get to activate on that.”
RadiumOne recently helped make some magic happen for Iflix (the Netflix of Asia). It used its audience-targeting capabilities to help the company acquire one million subscribers for its platform in less than six months. RadiumOne found people sharing with each other about TV shows, movies and celebrities across the web and mobile, captured that data, built real-time interest segments from it, and then activated advertising that reached them when they were engaging with entertainment media.
All the predictive analytics that we do actually help sift through that data and help package up those bidding strategies to deliver ads to the right peopleBob Hall, SVP business development at RadiumOne
As the programmatic marketplace continues to evolve, RadiumOne isn’t standing pat. It’s evolving its capabilities to stay ahead of the curve. Its main focus, says Hall, is more tightly integrating its consumer data capture and predictive analytics with its media buying platform.
“That’s important because we think there’s still a lot of room to grow and innovate on that concept alone.”
The company’s also gearing up for a big product launch in early August after just having recently released a few new tool and capabilities, including: Smart Links, an evolution on deep linking, which allows advertisers and marketers to customize the path that uses can take into their content; Precog (see Minority Report for reference), a predictive analytics tool around in-app conversion for its mobile platform; and, one-click audience targeting, another addition to its mobile platform, that allows advertisers to easily target any group of users captures in RadiumOne’s mobile analytics tool.
Mobile is a big area of development for RadiumOne moving forward, says Hall. As for what else the future holds, he says its about productizing all the ad hoc trading strategies that have to be built for different brands, and turning them into push-button executions for different ad campaigns.
“That’s where the industry needs to go. That’s the cutting edge of this business.”
