Some types of digital innovation are easier to prove than others, among them online travel agencies and streaming video giant Netflix. Then there is the not inconsiderable task of getting marketers to change their worldview about audience targeting.
Nine years ago, Innovid chose the latter path, providing an open platform approach to personalizing video targeting and integrating it with customer data and insights from other channels. Now, about one-third of all video served on the Internet is done so by Innovid.
It’s not been the easiest of paths, according to CTO and Co-Founder Tal Chalozin. “Clearly, it’s been an uphill battle fighting existing ways of doing businesses, existing processes and existing players,” Chalozin says in this interview conducted during the recent Beet.TV Leadership Summit titled Outcomes, presented by video marketing technology provider Eyeview.”
Chalozin puts early innovators in two buckets. First are those that can prove success in the easiest way, including online sellers and data-centric players like Netflix. “It’s way easier for them to dabble into better creative, personalized storytelling, one-to-one messaging. That’s the easiest ones,” he explains in response to a question from Matt Prohaska of Prohaska Consulting.
In the other bucket are innovators who seek to “cater to the vast side of the market,” for example packaged-goods companies that haven’t traditionally tried to figure out specific creative to promote a household product based on gender, geography, different times of day and so on. Helping these marketers through a maze of sources and suppliers “is a hard business to be in,” Chalozin says.
Having planted its flag early in the video space, Innovid believes it has succeeded in moving the industry forward by focusing on technology and solving complicated problems. “Someone needs to be the operating system that makes this all work,” he adds.
Chalozin has two messages for marketers: the investment in personalized targeting “is not that hard” and not all outcomes need to be measured by sales lift because “in many cases it’s close to impossible.”
Besides, “There are many other ways today to find your metrics of success”
This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership summit on video outcomes presented by Eyeview. For more videos from event, please visit this page.
