By Michael Bürgi • December 17, 2024 •
Ivy Liu
If you’ve worked in marketing or media in some capacity over the last 25 years, there’s a chance you’ve come across Kevin Wassong, who seemingly knows everyone in the business thanks to his long agency resumé.
Since January, Wassong has been working with Greg McConnell, a longtime friend and fellow industry colleague with experience overseeing the Rolex business at WPP, among other roles, to develop what the pair are calling “the Bloomberg terminal for marketers,” a SaaS product called mktg.ai.
The duo are just now rolling out mktg.ai, to the market, offering up a service that aims to be the be-all end-all service for marketers to track the vastly increased number of assets they use in their efforts — along with a simplified means of knowing what’s worked, when it worked and easy access to it all in one place.
Using the premise of a horizontally-applied AI-driven marketing model (horizontal in that it cuts across various AI platforms from the tech giants), mktg.ai wants to be the service that aligns everyone along the marketing path from conception to execution to results. It aggregates creative assets and data from all the major platforms into a single window that’s both digital and non-digital, then it uses various APIs and feeds to collate measurement and analytics of creative performance, matched to KPIs across channels to yield insights on how to adapt the marketing. Through it all, it uses AI to establish optimal benchmarks so people can ultimately understand what the KPI should be.
Wassong is founder and CEO of mktg.ai, while McConnell serves as vp of marketing and operations. They shared the interface with Digiday in a demo, and it uses a deceptively simple red-yellow-green color palette to convey success or lack of success with each creative asset. “It’s so people can understand what’s working and not working and that enables faster decision making,” said Wassong.
The ultimate goal, he added, is to get all of the disparate resources that a marketer has and is working with at any given time, and enable what he called team alignment. “We want everyone to have the same view at the same time, and that is really key. Make sure everyone is looking at the same thing, so that they can recognize something and they can react to it … to amplify and do more work that actually works, and less work that doesn’t.”
Isn’t that why marketers have their own departments? Wassong and McConnell insist no. “If you were to ask 10 marketers what they consider a good click through rate for digital advertising, I think you’d get 10 different answers, which is really kind of crazy,” said Wassong.
They have signed some initial clients to the service, including Sandy Hook Promise (on whose media advisory board Wassong serves), the International Center for Photography, and a financial services firm called Direxion Share in Boston. Wassong said he’s presently in negotiations with what he called a “global multi-brand consumer goods” firm. He declined to share pricing information for mktg.ai, except to say prospective customers are offered a free trial for a brief period.
Among the board of advisors are tech industry observer Shelly Palmer, veteran video sales exec Peter Naylor and analyst Brian Wieser.
“The general opportunity that they’re attacking is an important one, meaning hyper fragmentation, and a world where marketers have thousands, if not, eventually millions, of individual assets, and managing those assets is a real challenge that’s only going to get worse,” said Wieser. “But beyond that, the bigger point is it’s about the individuals and figuring out if they are going to be able to navigate, duck and weave to find the opportunity.”
Naylor, who’s seen a few SaaS products in his day, essentially agreed with Wieser. “A picture is worth a thousand words. It’s such a visual representation of what a marketer needs to know. That really sold me on it. Most sales leaders open up their salesforce.com revenue dashboard every day. What [Wassong and McConnell have] built is something that every marketing leader should want to open up and look at every day. It’s the health and vitality of their marketing efforts at a glance, and they get to see how they’re doing against all their KPIs.”
Wassong sees marketing as an evolutionary exercise rather than revolutionary — nothing should be thrown out or forgotten, as some current marketers are doing, he said.
“The poster child for the statement we’re making right now is happening as we speak, — Jaguar,” said Wassong, referring to Jaguar’s latest rebrand, which is seen as a risky 180-degree shift away from its heritage. “What Jaguar has just done to me is either going to prove me wrong or prove us right.”
https://digiday.com/?p=563685
