• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, October 19, 2020

Insight Stream, which recently launched in beta, allows brands to monitor every viewer’s interaction with each creative element in ads that run across channels, from social to programmatic to over-the-top (OTT) and connected television (CTV).

The platform surfaces a continual stream of insights from data that enables marketers to improve ad performance. It tells marketers why the creative works or does not work at any given time. It also provides the ability to do something with the information.

“All media formats have creative best practices,” says Alex Collmer, founder and CEO at VidMob. “Best practices are not static. They change as culture moves. This year alone there have been 10 or 15 cultural epics, each having a significant impact on even things like font choices.”

The platform can tell marketers the impact of a video when there are two versus three scene changes in the first three seconds, Collmer explains.

Food brands marketing on both Instagram feeds and in Facebook Stories, for example, can identify why showing a picture of the food within the first few seconds in the former produces better performance than in the latter.

The data enables marketers to take immediate action. By combining data and creativity, VidMob’s Insight Stream allows clients to move from optimizing media targeting -- which is responsible for between 10% and 20% of campaign performance, to optimizing creative -- which is responsible for between 50% and 70%.

Last year across hundreds of engagements for clients using data, the platform managed to increase the performance of the key performance indicators for campaigns by more than 75%.

VidMob is a product and research company. The majority of employees are analysts, engineers and data scientists who work closely with professors at MIT. The company is pioneering a new field of data: creative intelligence.

For these innovations and others, business consulting firm Frost & Sullivan recently granted VidMob the 2020 North American Technology Innovation Leadership Award.

"VidMob pioneered AI that can measure creative performance so marketers can optimize ad design," says Hiten Shah, senior analyst at Frost & Sullivan. He called it a meaningful improvement in campaign ROI that can change how the creative process works.

New VidMob products roll out every few weeks. Next on the agenda is the ability for advertisers to roll out custom labels. The models will learn the logos and bottle designs, differentiating between fall bottles versus spring bottles. Last year, VidMob’s platform processed more than one million ads.

VidMob, which also has a platform called Agile Creative Studio, works with many Fortune 500 brands, as well as upstarts and mid-size companies. Some examples include IHG, Ulta, Neutrogena, AB InBev, Adidas, Audi, Sony, and Turner Media. It works with digital platforms such as Google and YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, TikTok, and LinkedIn.

Through Agile Creative Studio, clients have access to the new type of first-party creative data, which enables analysis of the visuals that comprise ads. Powered by proprietary machine-learning tools, VidMob’s Creative Intelligence tools allow marketers to determine, with precision, the degree to which every visual element impacts campaign performance.