AiThority Interview with Joshua Wilson, Commercial Director, JAPAC at Crimtan

Hi, Joshua, welcome to our Interview Series. Please tell us a little bit about your journey in the technology space. How did you start at Crimtan?

I s​tarted as a client service manager responsible for the Australia business in 2015. From there I moved into sales and focussed on building out the wider APAC business while based in Sydney. Then, in 2018, I was tasked to open the Japan office, where it now accounts as a large revenue driver for the JAPAC regoin. I was promoted to Commercial Director for JAPAC in 2020, and am now part of the leadership team.

What is Crimtan and what are your core features? Which industries are currently benefiting from your products and solutions?

Crimtan was founded in 2009 with the purpose of delivering maximum performance for our clients, with the reassurance of complete compliance. We aim to be the trusted omnichannel marketing partner to deliver the most relevant and consented programmatic advertising, driving exceptional performance across every stage of your customer lifecycle.

We pride ourselves as having a single tech stack, consisting of creative, investment and audience intelligence, underpinned by ActiveID which does not rely on third party cookies.

Our technology will benefit all industries, companies of any size. What we do notice is when brands see the value of lifecycle marketing, their partnership with Crimtan will bring them more new customers, more converters and grow their customers’ lifetime value.

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Brands are increasingly finding it hard to deliver ROI-centric programmatic advertising campaigns. Could you tell how you help brands identify weaknesses and loopholes in their digital advertising campaigns?

With every new client, we encourage them to run a listening campaign. This is where we implement a pixel on their website to do some analysis around their existing customer behaviour. From there, our team of traders will build audience buckets, and look at which audiences will drive the best ROI, as well as looking at the funnel to identify if more prospecting is needed, or if more prompt is needed to get customers to check out of their basket. We will present our suggestions and work with the brands to ensure that strategies are put in place to meet the brands’ objectives.

Next, we highly suggest clients to run a dynamic creative (DCO) campaign with us. DCO campaigns are highly scalable where you get more bang for your buck. With a single template, brands can easily sync product feed to the template to show real-time prices and stock availability on the banner ads. Not only can brands tie in with their trade calendar, but the insights they get out of it are tremendous.

How do programmatic advertising intelligence impact customer lifecycle value? What is the role of AI and machine algorithms in your audience intelligence platform?

Lifecycle marketing is nothing new – we’re finding the right customer at the right time, at the right place, with the right messaging.

Although the digital revolution has given us more choice than ever before, it can also be really difficult to decipher what is out there. I think retailers tend to work with lots of different technology partners. They would have one technology partner around data and analysing your first party data and grouping that data, creating lookalike audiences and just using your first party data to form any kind of paid media strategies. They might also work with a dynamic creative platform to create that personalisation for each particular audience segment. On top of that, they might also be working with a media partner to find those audiences online.

What Crimtan does is merge all of them. How? Crimtan uses proprietary technology that utilises first party data to find the highest value customers, put them into groups and find similar audiences to drive new customers. On top of that, we also utilise a dynamic creative platform to serve unlimited variations of creative messages to those separate groups through a single template.

We can also find those audiences while they are consuming relevant content. You’ll have your CRMs and your CDPs, but if people aren’t opening their emails, how can you find those customers, existing and new, while they’re consuming relevant content?

With all the kinds of changes to third party cookies, it’s important to have a persistent ID solution that doesn’t rely on third party cookies. This helps you find existing and new customers for your business, and retarget them more effectively without any customers dropping off due to timeframes or over-dependency on third party cookies data.

All in all, you would need to cover the bases of 1. identifying customers through first party data, 2. customising advertising strategies to customers, and 3. reaching customers in the most effective and efficient way, while making sure that all those elements work cohesively simultaneously, for an all-rounded and effective strategy.

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A classic example of Lifecycle advertising and how does it influence advertising outcomes for brands and publishers?

With Moss Bros, they never considered display advertising as a meaningful marketing channel. However, Q4 is a period that is crucial for retail and Moss Bros were looking for new ways to find customers and prospect them to purchase during this period.

Our team worked to align our creative planning to Moss Bros’ trade plan, which included updating the messaging on banners to suit key events such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The budget was initially split between new customers (65%) and prospecting to conversion (35%).

Using our lifecycle marketing display strategy, we found new customers, moved prospectors to conversion, and grew lifetime value. Our campaign was creative led, but data driven. We used first party, third party, ambient and performance overlays. The industry average new customer acquisition rate is 25-30%, but for this particular campaign, Crimtan achieved 43%.

ChatGPT conversations are everywhere. How do you see ChatGPT and other generative AI apps playing a larger role in your industry?

I think if we zoom out a bit further and look at AI as a concept, that is already quite deep rooted in our industry. AI is used to help advertisers put their content in front of consumers who are most likely to be interested. Regarding ChatGPT and other AI apps specifically, I see that they can be used in a variety of ways. AI apps like ChatGPT may be monetised in the same way search engines are monetized – showing relevant AI driven brand ads based on a consumer’s interactions. Drilling down into programmatic, I can see use cases where ChatGPT can be applied into DCO ads. For example, based on a particular consumer behaviour, ads can be dynamically delivered to show more relevant advertising via the creative itself. One thing we do know is that more relevant and personalised creative messaging increases engagement rates between consumers and the brand, which in turn will result in more sales and greater ROI.

How can advertisers adapt and create effective advertising through different stages of customer acquisition?

For brands that are running prospecting and retargeting campaigns separately, it will be difficult to view a customer’s purchasing journey as data is not fed into one system. Also, consumers are everywhere, watching TV, walking on the streets, and listening to various audio channels. Moreover, in some countries, the usage of Safari is high, which means that brands almost don’t have the ability to reach these audiences again.

In order to create effective advertising and to ensure that your brand is maximising your ad budget, it is key to have a strong connected media strategy. Connected Media is the ability to target people across multiple channels with an ID solution that works seamlessly across all of those channels.

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AI and machine learning algorithms are helping customer services teams meet global data privacy and compliance requirements. Could you highlight the role of AI ML and other emerging technologies in this specific domain vis a vis ConsenTAG?

Following the introduction of privacy regulations such as GDPR, it is now essential to gain consent for customer information to be gathered, stored and used. ConsenTAG was developed to help our clients ensure that consent. With ConsenTAG, when people visit your website, they are given options for providing their consent. This ensures that only trackers for the options users have given consent for are launched. ConsenTAG works with ActiveID to not just gather data, but to also check whether user consent has already been provided, so customers don’t need to be asked every time.

ActiveID is our fully compliant, consented identifier that uses a rich hybrid targeting system and multiple touchpoints to track users and target audiences across all devices and digital channels throughout the customer lifecycle. Having a long-lasting user ID allows us to know when someone has seen an ad before, so clients’ budgets aren’t wasted.

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