Sramana Mitra: Basically you work with the online budgets of these companies? There are obviously print, TV, and radio budgets that operate orthogonally from your budget. Those are areas that are still largely manual. Bill Simmons: That is true. SM: What about the big data problem in general? What other areas are you tracking that
Sramana Mitra: Is DataXu a 30 percent services and 70 percent products kind of company? Bill Simmons: Currently, the majority of our customers are managed service clients, but we continue to see an uptick in self-serve clients, and we expect that to continue in 2013. I think the reason our technology gets adopted is because
Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about the optimization bit. Once you have the data measurement and analytics infrastructure, what kind of optimization are you able to do? Give me some use cases, please. Bill Simmons: The typical use case for traditional media is called direct response advertising. If you want to place ads and drive people
Sramana Mitra: This obviously has to happen with great speed. How strong and how speedy are the APRs that you are offering to do all this? Bill Simmons: The real-time bidding in general – and there is some variation in this – is 100 milliseconds round-trip requirement for a response. Large exchanges like Google or
Sramana Mitra: It sounds like you need a series of ads to get people to even take a survey. Is that the right measure? Because some people will never take surveys, right? Bill Simmons: That is true. But we also work with other ways to measure awareness. This methodology works well in some cases, and
Sramana Mitra: Let’s take a couple of your customers, whomever you feel comfortable talking about, and please be granular in describing the use case. Our audience are high-end technical entrepreneurs, so they would both understand and appreciate a granular description of how this all works. Bill Simmons: We work with many large automobile manufacturers. One
Bill Simmons is a co-founder and currently the chief technology officer of DataXu, a digital marketing management firm that offers platforms and services for advertisers and agencies in order to increase their advertising efficiency and marketing ROI. Bill obtained a PhD in astronautics and aeronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Before working for