Carving out a new category of in ad tech is hard enough to pull off. Add data metrics to the mix and you have a project worthy of a product leader. In this week’s Speaker Series, Vidmob Product VP Bethany Gostanian shares with the audience how to think about creative data and the challenges she faced when carving out a new category of ad tech.
On building a product around creative data
As it pertains to campaign performance, there are two levers that must be pulled; media and creative. While media is thrush with players, creative is an open frontier. According to Beth, though, 70% of campaign performance can be attributed to creative. This is what brought the question; what if you could measure the effectiveness of creative, and make creative decisions at scale?
“We needed a holistic unified product, so we used that same MVP mindset to find the the path of least resistance. As a result, we gave creative intelligence its own section within the legacy platform, and rewrote the existing functionality. Then we tweaked the UI to match the new flow. No new functionality, just mushing.”
“In a case study we did for a partner account, we looked back at two years of their creative and we found a couple of things. Visuals of locally sourced ingredients, the word “Brazil”, citrus fruit imagery, bottle shots, etc, all of these things we found positively impacted the KPIs that matter the most of them. So, we used this information to create a new set of ads. The result? We ended up with a 69% increase in click-through rates, 72% in view-through, and a 31% engagement rate. The data speaks for itself.”
On the challenges in finding product market fit in a new category
When carving out a new category, finding product market fit can be one of the most difficult tasks for product leaders. According to Beth, half the battle is the product itself, while the other half is in communication. She continues on by sharing a couple traps product leaders should avoid when navigating new waters in a crowded industry.
“In our journey to product market fit, we fell into two major traps. First, we didn’t get our story straight internally. We were trying to disrupt the mindset of an industry that was divided decades ago when creative and media were split into two different kinds of agencies. Everyone in this industry generally operates under the assumption that creative and data cannot play nicely in the sandbox together. Unfortunately, the same was true for our internal team.”
“Our internal creative team was super wary of any database directives coming in and cramping their style. On the other hand, our data team really just wanted to swim in the data and focus on pulling out insights from the tool. So ultimately, we had this existential question, but if the internal alignment isn’t there, there’s absolutely no way that you’re going to be able to convince anyone else that they should be thinking any differently about their current processes.”
“The second trap we fell into was the product selfie trap. We were very proud of ourselves for our new product that worked and our newfound internal alignment, so we started talking to the market. And we started talking to the market about how awesome creative data was, and how our product could be used to uncover all of these amazing insights, etc. The result was that we only talked about ourselves, so we ended up mostly confusing, overwhelming, and most importantly, not demonstrating how we could solve a problem, or reduce friction for our prospective clients.”
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About the speaker
Beth Gostanian is the Head of Product at VidMob where she is responsible for overseeing VidMob’s overall product strategy and roadmap. Prior to joining VidMob, she was VP of Research at Kantar Millward Brown where she worked with digital publishers, media agencies and brand direct clients to measure the effectiveness of their multi-media marketing efforts and develop best-in-class ad measurement products. Before that, Beth was a Director of Research at Kantar, applying her analytical mindset on behalf of her clients in brand and communications tracking, brand strategy, consumer segmentation and copy testing. With many years of experience in the marketing research industry and a background in social science, Beth is passionate about understanding the emotional connection between consumers and brands and building products to measure & facilitate that connection. She lives with her wife and spoiled cat Theodore in New York City.