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Redballoon parent, Big Red Group, to promote AI marketing platform Albert

Big Red Group, the holding company for gifting service Red Balloon, has restructured and will start reselling AI marketing platform Albert, the company announced last night.

Speaking to Mumbrella ahead of Albert’s official launch last night, co-founder Naomi Simson said driving down the soaring cost of customer acquisition is one of the ideas behind Big Red Group’s rollout of artificial intelligence marketing platform Albert.

As part of the group’s restructure, Simson’s co-founder David Anderson has become CEO of the overall BRG group, along with taking over management of RedBalloon following Nick Baker’s departure which emerged this week but actually occurred three months ago. Anderson also acquired 50% of the RedBalloon business at the beginning of June.

Baker, who previously spent seven years as CMO of Tourism Australia, was appointed this as CEO of Outdoria and Go See Australia this week.

Simson told Mumbrella that the Israeli founded Albert service aims to address the soaring costs of online customer acquisition, “I was one of the first users of Google Adwords and when I was mucking around with it way back in the day it cost us about five cents to get a customer. That same customer shot all the way up to fifty dollars, which was completely unsustainable.”

“Through some automated tools and really focused energy we got it down to 25 or something. Even in the first month of using Albert we’ve got it down by 25%.”

RedBalloon launched the technology at the beginning of June this year, and in the first day of deployment was able to identify and execute over 6,400 keywords to improve performance across the RedBalloon business. By way of comparison, they argue this would take a human SEM expert up to a year to achieve.

From her appearances on Ten’s Shark Tank, Simson identified how businesses struggle in getting products to market, particularly with the increasing speed of marketing.

“Literally as human beings we cannot react fast enough, especially in consumer brands, to how people are operating online. There’s been many tools in terms of automation for delivering ads and so forth but none that are adjusting editing or providing feedback on creative,” Simson says.

“When we think about scale, what is the cost of getting customers is the trick along with the lifetime value of that customer. Those two things alone make commercial success,” Simson continued. “If it’s costing you more to get a customer than the lifetime value then its not sustainable.”

Simson also sees Albert being deployed by agencies, “this is a tool that agencies can use because often businesses don’t have the inhouse resources to use it. We’ve had a bunch of agencies side to side with direct clients. Agencies will be able to offer clients greater transparency and return on time.”

The Albert platform will be available through the Big Red Group over coming months with the company reportedly sending staff to Tel Aviv for training on the platform.

The Redballoon-aligned Big Red Group is unrelated to creative operation Big Red owned by Ted Horton and responsible for current campaigns such as BHP’s “Think Big” and Coles’ Casey Donovan-led messages.

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