F.Y.I.

AI platform allows marketers to ‘predict the success’ of digital ads with 82.4% certainty

Junction AI has developed AI technology allowing marketers to predict the success of digital ads with 82.4% certainty, it says.

(L-R) Junction AI co-founders Vance Reavie and Robert Turner

The announcement:

Brisbane developers are using artificial intelligence (AI) to help marketers, agencies and business owners to predict the success of digital advertisements with a confidence interval of 82.4%.

Junction AI, a Brisbane, Australia and Austin, Texas based start-up, has developed a proprietary AI machine learning platform to take the guesswork out of selecting the right images, text and video for Google Ads, social media ads and posts, and web promotions.

The platform’s AI derives as many as 28,000 data points on an ad creative, then runs as many as 75 million tests to make predictions on the success of an ad within a fraction of a second.

Marketers drag and drop their images and text on to the dashboard to receive a percentage score on the probability that their promotion will to convert with a target audience.

They also get AI enhanced capability to help them improve their selections, insights on what works and data objectivity to back up their decisions.

The platform is currently in pre-release testing and proof trials with 12 agencies and brand marketers in the US and Canada, and soon Australia.

The Junction AI platform is the brainchild of entrepreneurs Vance Reavie and Robert Turner. They met in Brisbane in 2005 on a major Brisbane government IT project and have been colleagues ever since.

Vance founded the company in late 2015 as a local real time discovery app, pivoting to the data opportunity in marketing with cofounder Rob bringing AI and data engineering to the company in July 2017. As Junction AI’s CTO, Rob leads the Brisbane based development team and a remote team including members in Sweden and Toronto, Canada.

Vance is Junction AI’s CEO and a former Brisbane resident now based in Austin, Texas, where he leads business and product development from the company’s headquarters.

“Digital ads are $8.8 billion market in Australia – $300 billion in the US, yet only 2% or less of these are converting. Marketers and agencies only need to change that rate from 2% to 2.5% to increase their ROI by 25%” said Vance.

“There is a lot of scrutiny on digital ad budget growth at the moment, with clients demanding smarter spend, not simply more like in the past.

“Our solution eliminates the need for brands and agencies to spend money on A/B testing, focus groups or expensive live experimentation by understanding which creative content will succeed on which channel.

“We are seeing up to 90% reduction in time and cost of selecting the creative image and copy, and early testing is showing as much as three times better results on ads in B2C within a few days,”

“We’ve met with well over 100 marketers to determine the product-market fit and make sure we get it right. Before we even had a product to show we contracted over US$50,000 in sales,” Vance said.

Rob and his development team use a combination of AI techniques like image analysis, natural language processes, semantic reasoning and neural nets to understand how data is conceptualised by the customer audience.

“For example, in a digital ad for a travel company we don’t need AI to tell us that is a photo of a snow-capped mountain,” Rob said.

“But we do need it to analyse the thousands or millions of customers and how they react to or perceive the image, i.e. a great hiking or heli-skiing opportunity, to know if it will be a successfully engaging ad.

“Taking the business’s audience data, our AI machine learning platform creates a unique model and continually learns, providing marketers and agencies with insights that are unique to their audience and specific to the channel” said Rob.

Junction AI has received investment from a variety of angel investors, including a Brisbane based investor, and from Blue Startups plus founder funding.

Junction AI recently completed the 13-week Blue Startups Accelerator, an “East meets West” Hawaii based accelerator for highly scalable technology startups backed by Henk Rogers, best known for Tetris and his work in green tech and renewable energy. Junction AI was one of six companies chosen from over 500 for the program.

The final week of the Blue Startups Accelerator program saw Junction AI spend a week in San Francisco Bay Area with a VC attended Demo day for pitching and a week of meetings and sessions with sector leaders.

The company is now planning for the full product launch and are hiring additional team members both locally in Brisbane and in the US.

“We have incredible talent here in Brisbane, as good as anywhere,” Vance said. “And the excitement about what we are doing makes it attractive to local engineers to get involved; it’s cutting edge.

“Our goal is to make a product that makes AI immediate and useful, something marketers can sign up for and start using to drive better business results today,” he said.

Source: Junction AI media release

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