• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, April 12, 2021

We Are Bionic, a Dublin-based company that works with some of the biggest advertising agencies in Europe, this week will formally announce the rebranding of the company to Optily, with a focus to enter the U.S. market as a software-as-a-service company.

“Nine months ago, we wrote the first line of code for the new self-service platform for in-house marketing teams,” said Optily CEO Brendan Hughes. “In particular, the direct-to-consumer brands that live in Google and Facebook ads.”

The new company, Optily, comes after a decade of providing media buying and workflow automation services to agencies such as GroupM, Havas, and OMD -- mostly around paid social and media buying in Facebook and Instagram.

Hughes said the team created a data bridge between Facebook and Google’s marketing platforms, integrating it into DoubleClick. The team used attribution data to change what happened in Facebook and Instagram, and quickly saw campaigns achieve higher return on ad spend.

The product also took privacy into consideration. “We are cookie proof,” he said. “As the third-party cookie dies and privacy becomes more of a concern, we allow advertisers to sidestep that.”

Optily takes the performance signals from the analytics platforms and uses the data points to optimize and analyze performance to make predictive model recommendations.

Brands connect their analytics account with Optily software, and consolidate campaign data from across those platforms, which returns recommendations that brands can take action on with one click.

Every data point about the performance gets used such as the number of money spent on the campaign during the past hour, the number of people who viewed the campaign, what products were sold, and many more attributes.

Customers point to much higher return on ad spend using this process. Charles Chy, director of ecommerce at Soltech Solutions, which offers indoor plant lighting, began working Optily seven months ago. His Facebook ads saw two-times return on ad spend in the beginning, and soon jumped to between 10-times and 11-times ROAS.

“It takes the routine work out of campaign management,” Chy said. “About 80% of your day is spent trying to determine how much and where to allocate your budget, and the keywords to target.”

Adam Ortiz, CMO at Image Wash Products, began working with Optily in January, and quickly began seeing 160% increase in return on advertising spend (ROAS).

“I didn’t have expertise on the Google side,” Ortiz said. “I’m more of a Facebook Ads expert.”

Image Wash Products had three campaigns with similar requirements for output, and put them in “Opti” groups to pull in all the data from Facebook Ads and Google Analytics.

Ortiz said the technology looks at the budgets across those campaigns, along with other metrics, and makes smart recommendations based on those metrics to shift budgets between campaigns.

“Other optimization tools will increase budgets and you end up spending more,” Ortiz said. “Sometimes it’s best to see the recommendations and act on it yourself, rather than a robot automatically doing it.”

As part of Optily’s commitment to support the growth of online stores operating in the U.S., the company opened its first international office in Austin, Texas.

Optily also joined the facility of Enterprise Ireland, a key financial and business strategy support of Irish-owned businesses expanding internationally. With support from SelectUSA research team located in the U.S. Department of Commerce in Washington D.C., Optily plans to hire employees across sales, marketing, and customer success during the next 12 months.