• by Felicia Greiff , January 28, 2016

Mar-tech firm RevJet claims its "self-optimizing” CSP (creative side platform) can produce twice as many customers or double a brand's impact with no additional media cost. 

The CSP, which launched last year after testing with Microsoft, named four new sales executives to its team this week. 

Below is a chat about Revjet's CSP and how a campaign's creative executions can be optimized through "unlimited, simultaneous optimization experiments," according to CEO Mitchell Weisman. The following conversation was lightly edited and condensed. 

RTD: You said "perpetually testing creative can lead to continual improvements in performance and make better usage of budgets." Could you explain?

Mitchell Weisman: Lots of research suggests that digital creative is the biggest driver of campaign performance, but the thing is, most marketers don’t have a way to experiment at scale. Testing has always been really hard and incredibly time-consuming, so most marketers do it rarely, if at all. 

Microsoft’s U.S. Centralized Marketing Organization has really adopted the always-on experiment -- their internal mantra is now “test, don’t guess.” They run all their display ads through the CSP, so they’re constantly experimenting and driving performance lift, and on top of that, they finally have one system of record for all their display campaigns.

Another big issue is ad fatigue. Digital creative declines in performance over the course of a campaign -- it’s inevitable. With always-on experimentation, marketers can stave of ad fatigue and actually drive upward pressure on results. Now campaign performance is continually increasing (not decreasing) over time.

RTD: Do you think the ad tech wave over the past few years has overlooked creative? Why or why not?

Mitchell Weisman: Ad tech, or more accurately media tech, all but ignores creative in the relentless pursuit of transacting media. But here’s the thing: We often forget that the media is empty boxes, while ad creative is something different. Empty boxes don’t produce any value at all until they’re filled with a beautiful, brand-appropriate, high-performing creative.

RTD: What kind of data does the CSP use?

Weisman: From a media standpoint, the CSP is compatible with any DSPs and/or DMPs marketers or agencies are using to buy media or target their buys. Whatever first- or third-party segments you’re using, we can work with it.

When it comes to our optimization techniques, the CSP uses statistically significant performance data to optimize experiments automatically, with no effort required by marketers. All of our experiments are automatically designed to perfectly sample data, ensuring that every experiment relies only on apples-to-apples comparisons.

The RevJet CSP optimizes creative against any KPI, which makes optimizing branding or awareness campaigns as easy as optimizing direct-response campaigns. Optimization events include things like brand-focused ad engagement (hover, video views, quartile video views, ad expansion, clicks) and conversion-focused events (form complete, download, purchase).

RTD: How does the CSP find new audience segments?

Weisman: Here’s the simplest example: with our analytics engine, a marketer who runs an experiment may find that one ad performs really well for women, while another is better for men. The marketer could then segregate audiences to run new experiments delivering different creative based upon gender... Imagine continually optimizing ad creative of every format for micro-segments of your target audience -- all in one place, effortlessly.