CANNES — WPP-owned data-driven audience-buying platform Xaxis is growing fast. Launched five years ago, the outfit is now going in to overdrive.
The company has grown from fewer than 100 to more than 1,500 employees, to more than 3,000 brand customers and more than $1bn in revenue, 15% of which comes from outside WPP and its Group M agency, according to Xaxis global CEO Brian Gleason.
Next up is considerable further investment in Xaxis’ underlying technology, with a big expansion of a campaign visualization tool.
“We’ll invest over $54m in our tech this year,” Gleason tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “We have over 260 engineers and scaling very quickly.”
Xaxis’ technology platforms revolve around the following, Gleason says:
- Turbine DMP: “Turbine is our proprietary advantage. That is at the centre of everything we do – regardless of platform, I need one point of truth for my audience.”
- Copilot: “The ability to bring intelligence to a DSP. The results we saw (were from) 40% and, in some cases, over 100% improvement on campaigns, which is massive.”
- Spotlight visualization tool: “Think about the ability to bring audiences in a boundaryless world. The next thing is to be able to measure them. CMOs and traders can log in. It shows you a complete view, in real-time, of your media. It took us four years to build. It was traditionally in three markets, we’ll roll it out to 56 by the end of the year.”
This video is part of a series titled “Exploring Data & Technology as Catalysts for Creativity.” This series was produced at Cannes Lions 2016 in cooperation the Xaxis. The series is sponsored by comScore. For more segments from the series, please visit this page.
