Interview with Peli Beeri, CEO at Bidalgo

As the market grew, we recognized the growth challenges mobile app marketers were facing on other channels were very similar to the ones we solved on Facebook using our AI.

Know My Company

Tell us about your interaction with AI and other intelligent technologies in your daily life.

I’ve been an online marketer for more than 15 years and always had the passion to use technology to harness the exponentially growing data points, possibilities, and channels available for digital marketers to generate higher ROI.

In 2010, after years of buying media and managing campaigns for one of the largest online advertisers, I co-founded Bidalgo with the aim of automating Facebook advertising and helping digital marketers achieve quality at scale. Back then we didn’t call it AI, but we were one of the first companies to offer advanced models and algorithms to help advertisers scale their growth on Facebook (Hence the name: Bidalgo).

We were fortunate to work with some of the most sophisticated advertisers and partners in the world and over the past eight years have developed our technology to what it is today: an AI-powered marketing automation platform that applies AI across the entire spectrum of media buying (from creative optimization to ad creation, all the way up to revenue optimization) and across all premium channels (Facebook, Instagram, Google, Snapchat, Apple and others).

What galvanized you to start an AI-driven Martech company?

At the time, Facebook was just starting and we identified that Facebook, with its rich data, meant endless opportunities for advertisers and it was about to revolutionize digital marketing in a big way.

At one end, this is a great opportunity for advertisers, but it also brought complexity and challenges that didn’t exist before. There was a huge opportunity to offer advertisers a way to scale their growth on the platform.  We added value for advertisers by simplifying and automating their Facebook advertising for better ROI.

As the market grew, we recognized the growth challenges mobile app marketers were facing on other channels were very similar to the ones we solved on Facebook using our AI.

With the expertise we’ve built over the years, we knew we could tackle the challenges marketers are facing today on other channels as well. Issues such as: How should I invest my marketing budget across channels for maximum ROI? Which ad creatives actually perform? What makes my ad creative outperform or underperform? How does the industry perform and how am I doing versus others? We wanted to take the guesswork out of the equation and solve all these questions using data and technology.

We expanded our AI models to additional channels to offer mobile marketers a channel agnostic platform, where the AI helps advertisers develop the best creatives and invest their marketing budget intelligently to reach their revenue goals across channels.

Tell us how AI fits into a modern digital marketer’s tech stack?

AI helps with speed & efficiency. In today’s competitive market, to survive as a business CEO’s understand they need to be efficient, but also scale at a pace their competition cannot catch up to. They understand that in order to achieve that velocity they need technology. Especially in advertising (growth), which in part represents a significant portion of their annual budget.

In some cases, almost a third of annual revenue is reinvested back into the business in the form of CAC (customer acquisition cost). Speedy delivery is essential to meet the real-time expectations of today’s customers, but marketing messages must also be meaningful if they are to make an impact. AI meets both needs. Using sophisticated algorithms that efficiently access, combine, and filter multiple data sources, marketers can gain an instant, yet deep, understanding of what users intend to do, which products they want, and deliver them the right message at the right time.

Companies like Bidalgo that offer a solution democratizes AI-powered digital marketing for advertisers and allows small teams to deliver better ROI on their marketing than companies 10x bigger who are not using AI or try to build their own solutions.

The role of today’s marketer is not about the bits and bytes of media operation, changing bids and budgets. AI is there to automate it for them 24/7.

For example, with Bidalgo’s AI ad automation, an advertiser simply provides goals and available ad creative and the AI will launch new ads, optimize existing ad budgets and bids, and perform long-term revenue optimization to reach marketing objectives.

And now, with the launch of Bidalgo Creative AI, we see AI work its magic not only on the media buying side of the advertising equation but on the creative side as well.

While creative has traditionally been thought of as the “artistic” part of the advertising process, there’s a science behind good ad creative, and technology solutions that can help engineer better creative for better performance. This combination of human creativity and computer-powered analysis is ushering in the next generation of “smart” creative. It’s allowing advertisers to eliminate the guesswork around their ad creative design and taking an even bigger role in the digital marketers’ tech stack.

Finally, I would say that the best way to add AI to your marketing tech stack is to treat it as another team member working for you 24/7, achieving better ROI, providing you with insights and amplifying your work.

At Bidalgo, there are some marketing tasks which are completely automated such as changing bids, budgets and uploading ads. These are menial tasks that require calculating many data points and AI is perfect for automating those tasks.  For other tasks, we give marketers an interface that allows them to gain better control of the AI (like providing it with goals and strategy) and that delivers valuable insights and reporting.

As a mentor in tech industry, how should young marketers and professionals train themselves to work better with AI and virtual assistants?

Today’s media buyers are tasked with managing campaigns that involve greater scale and exponentially more data points than ever before. Given their ability to process data much faster than any human ever could, AI-enabled computers have replaced humans in managing many media buying functions — to great effect. Whereas in the past media buyers have used rules, excel spreadsheets and queries to get the job done, savvy media buyers are now relying on AI tools and algorithms to do those same tasks.

With AI taking over the optimization side, media buyers are instead tasked with more strategic initiatives, such as developing good creative, identifying new markets, targeting new customer bases, and more. Today’s media buying involves much more creative and strategic endeavors than previous generations of media buying.

As a growth marketer,   getting a competitive edge depends on a combination of things including Connecting to the right data sources,  Trusting AI to do menial day to day operations so you can focus on strategy, Defining the right goals, based on the right events with the right frequency, and building a team on a method and not basing media buying on specific people’s best practices. Talents come and go, but methodologies and AI-powered technology will help any team scale.

Would most businesses turn to AI eventually for better performance?

Absolutely, today’s market demands it. It nearly impossible to provide the level of service customers have come to expect and compete without AI. The main point here should be to use AI in the right way and balance between what needs to be done by machines and what must remain at the control of humans. We are continually working on that balance and combining AI power with the essential human touch.

Elaborate on your playbook for company-customer interaction. How much of AI do you use within Bidalgo?

Our own AI insights and methodologies play a major role in how we work with our customers.

Our AI-powered platform allows us to deliver better results for our customers and surface insights we would never have been able to bring to the forefront before. It helps our customers scale and amplifies our relationship with them.

Where do you see AI/Machine learning and other smart technologies heading beyond 2020?

On the broad level, I see them heading into every industry and every aspect of our lives, whether it is our connected lifestyle, self-driving cars and beyond.

IoT will be powered by AI.

When it comes to digital marketing, I see AI becoming much more dominant when it comes to creative.  Computer vision, image and video recognition, with the combination of strong machine learning, will allow AI to go deeper into cracking the most important elements today in marketing – effective creative design. Bidalgo is already applying AI to eliminate the guesswork around ad creative, allowing marketers to know which ad creative performs the best and what makes our ad creative outperform or underperform. On the personal level, one area where I think AI is going to make a very positive and impactful change in our life surrounds healthcare and medical.

Recommended: Enabling Brands And Agencies With Insights, Powered By AI

The Crystal Gaze

What AI start-ups and labs are you keenly following? 

I think computer vision is an area that can affect many industries. I see the effect it has on advertising and how we use it at Bidalgo but also how it will affect industries like healthcare, transportation, and others. Two interesting companies in that field are Clarifai and GumGum.

As a tech leader, what industries do you think would be fastest to adopting AI/ML with smooth efficiency? What are the new emerging markets for AI technology markets?

The next frontier is using AI to solve data privacy issues. AI needs as many data points as possible to be effective and yet there are challenges today around data privacy. I see the industry as a whole solving the privacy issue by using AI to attribute hashed information to the relevant audience, event, and media source in order to enjoy the abundance of data AI needs to operate without harming privacy.

Recommended: Activating Customer Data With AI-Based Technologies In Business

What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?

Hire the best people, and of course, use the best AI technology.

Tag the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read:

I’d like to know what Alexa has to say about this. It will probably be: Hmm, I’m not sure 🙂

How ‘bout Jeff Bezos!!!

Thank you, Peli! That was fun and hope to see you back on AiThority soon.